Conlangs

Tolkien invented an invented language for his stories, the ‘Black Speech’ that Sauron created for his followers in Mordor. That’s the language in which the inscription on the One Ring is written. So Sauron essentially invented a conlang (a ‘constructed language’), just as Tolkien himself did for his elves.

I did something similar for the sorcerer Hurasu, who created a language for those he ruled in the valley of the Tez, aka the Valley of Visions. Hurasu is, to be sure, a much more benevolent fellow than Sauron and primarily wanted a logical language with no historical baggage. Or he may just have been bored and was filling his time with one more project. The language he created, Zikem, has its own unique structure and grammar but most of the words are borrowed from Etruscan, which Hurasu had learned when he spent a couple centuries in our world. He preferred not to use the language of his home world, Atlantis, as he felt that might attract undesirable attention.

The people over whom he ruled were, for the most part, of Austronesian ancestry and had their own dialects coming from Melanesian and Australian roots. Some of the words from their older languages did survive and pop up here and there in my narratives.