How Fictional Languages Go From Gibberish to Real Languages
Klingon started as a few grunts James Doohan improvised for Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Today it has a dictionary, a grammar, a translated Hamlet, and at least one wedding held entirely in it. So how does movie noise become a real language?
It happens in stages. Once you know them, you can predict which fictional languages will survive.
The Counterintuitive Truth: Fans, Not Creators, Make a Language "Real"
It's tempting to think a fictional language becomes real when its creator finishes it. But no invented language is ever finished. Tolkien kept revising Quenya until he died in 1973.
A language becomes real when people use it to say something its creator never wrote. The first fan-written love poem in Klingon did more for Klingon's status than any movie scene. Real languages are defined by speakers, not authors — and fictional ones are no different.
Stage 1: Sound Design
Most fictional languages start as pure sound. A director needs aliens to sound alien, so a sound designer or actor improvises.
- Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt built Huttese in 1983 from recordings of real languages, including Quechua. (Huttese Translator)
- The first Klingon lines in 1979 were invented by actor James Doohan (Scotty) and later partly re-used by Marc Okrand.
- Minionese was improvised by director Pierre Coffin, who also voiced the Minions. (Minion Translator)
At this stage a language is really just a mood. Most fictional languages never get past it — and some, like Simlish, are designed never to.
Stage 2: The Linguist Arrives
The turning point is hiring someone who understands how languages work. That person turns sounds into a phonology (a sound system with rules), then adds grammar.
Marc Okrand did this for Klingon in 1984. He looked at the sounds already used on screen and deliberately picked features rare in human languages, like object–verb–subject word order. Paul Frommer did it for Na'vi, starting in 2005 and working with the cast for years before Avatar reached cinemas. David J. Peterson won an open competition held by the Language Creation Society to build Dothraki for HBO in 2009.
This is the difference between a sound costume — noise that dresses a scene — and a language. A sound costume only has to sound right. A language has to work when you put new words into it.
Stage 3: Publication
A language needs a public reference before fans can learn it. Without one, every fan invents a different version.
- The Klingon Dictionary (1985) sold over 300,000 copies.
- Peterson published Living Language Dothraki (2014) and the Valyrian course on Duolingo launched in 2017.
- Tolkien's languages mostly reached fans after his death, through journals like Parma Eldalamberon and Vinyar Tengwar.
This is also where tools like the Klingon Translator and Dothraki Translator come in. They let curious fans play with the language before they commit to studying it.
Stage 4: Community Takeover
Once there's a reference, fans start filling gaps. They need words for "computer", "pizza", or "Monday" that the movies never used.
This is the stage we call lexical escape velocity: when fans need new words faster than the creator can supply them. Na'vi hit it within a few years of Avatar's 2009 release. The Klingon Language Institute, founded in 1992, reached it long before.
Communities handle this in two ways:
- Asking the creator. Frommer and Peterson both regularly coined new words when fans asked.
- Fan-coined vocabulary. Tolkien fans developed "Neo-Sindarin", which fills gaps using Tolkien's rules. It's the version most fan translations use today, including the Sindarin Translator.
Stage 5: Native-Like Use
The final stage is people using the language for real communication — not quoting lines, but talking.
- Klingon has summer camps (the Klingon Language Institute's qep'a'), a Klingon opera ('u', 2010), and at least one parent who tried raising a child bilingual in it.
- High Valyrian has hundreds of thousands of Duolingo learners.
- Na'vi speakers hold meetups where English is discouraged.
At this point the language is effectively real. It has speakers, a history, and arguments about correct usage — the surest sign of all.
Why Most Fictional Languages Never Make It
Most invented languages stall at Stage 1 or 2. Here's why:
- No reference exists. If only a production company holds the vocabulary, fans can't learn it.
- No culture behind it. Languages spread when fans want to belong to the world, not just watch it.
- Too little screen time. A language used in three scenes doesn't create enough emotion to motivate learners.
Timing matters too. A language launched with a single film has one chance to hook fans. A language attached to a long-running series — Star Trek, Game of Thrones, The Elder Scrolls — gets reinforced every season or sequel, so each new release brings a new wave of learners.
Minionese is a fun exception. It has almost no grammar, but it succeeds because it's fun to perform, even without learning. Groot works for the same reason — try the Groot Translator and you'll see how far tone alone can go.
The Science Underneath
Linguists find conlangs useful because they're controlled experiments. Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages (2009), catalogued about 500 invented languages created over roughly nine centuries. Only a handful — Esperanto, Klingon, Tolkien's languages — built lasting communities.
The pattern is clear. The successful ones combined a real linguistic system with a story people cared about. Esperanto had idealism. Klingon had Star Trek.
There's another lesson here. Fictional languages are unusually easy to study because their entire history is documented. With a natural language, nobody knows who said the first word. With Klingon, we know the year, the film, and the person. That makes them a rare window into how grammar, slang, and "correct usage" arguments start from nothing.
What Happens Next
The path from gibberish to language is getting shorter. Klingon needed about 15 years to reach Stage 4. Na'vi needed about three. We predict that the next major franchise conlang will reach an active learner community in under a year. That's because studios now publish learning apps, word lists, and social-media lessons alongside the release itself.
The line between marketing and language teaching is blurring. Fans won't wait for a dictionary anymore — they'll expect one on launch day.
Try Them Yourself
See how far each language has come by typing a sentence into: