Introduction

Since we are students of Linguistics, it is our job to learn and discuss the nature of languages

and to understand their purpose in a certain culture and society, as well as to differentiate them

from one another. Most languages will behave differently and, because of this, understanding

how a language works in its grammatical, phonological and semantic terms is of high

importance. But, how are languages created? Throughout the ages, many linguistics tried to

understand the creation of language, from the beginning of history towards today. Ferdinand

Saussure, for example, introduced a structural theory (structuralism); Noam Chomsky (2014)

brings up an evolutionary theory, thinking that “evolutionary considerations could be used to

explain the mechanisms of human language.”

However, some languages are not subject to evolution, or are inherent in our mind. Some

languages are created artificially to achieve a certain and specific purpose. This is what is called

in linguistics Constructed Languages.

In the following monograph, we will be discussing what are Constructed Languages (also

called conlangs), how they are created and what their intentions are. We will be discussing the

constitution of conlangs in general, not only in our society but also in the discourse of books, tv,

cinema, and games. To fully develop this topic, we will be exemplifying some aspects by

focusing on an already existing conlang: “Simlish”, a language created by video game designer

Will Wright for the series of video games “The Sims”, first developed by Maxis. In order to do

so, we will be considering its intention, the languages that it was inspired by, how it works

semantically and phonologically, how it relates with the general language properties and how it

developed over time.

What is a conlang?
 Most of the answer to that question relies on the term itself: conlangs, also called “artificial” or

“invented languages” are languages that were constructed or created by a single person or a group

of people. They come from the mind of those that created it, which is one of the main differences

with natural languages: languages like English, Spanish, Russian, Latin have no single person that

can be called its “creator”, or don’t even have a “beginning” in history. Conlangs regularly share

aspects with natural languages: they mostly have a certain phonology, lexicon, morphology,

syntax, pragmatics, etc. This means that, by understanding how a conlang works, we would be

able to understand how languages in general are executed.

Before we continue, now that we stated what a conlang is, it’s important to mention what a

conlang isn’t. A conlang is not devising a code, where you change the vocabulary of an already

existing language; it isn’t a jargon, where you create new words for a specific topic inside a

language (technical terminology). In a paper called “Conlanging 101”, Sai Emrys (2009) writes

the following: “Conlanging is to linguistics what painting is to art history, or hacking to computer

science. It’s a way of directly playing with language— sometimes just for fun, and sometimes to

test out a new theory about how language works with the mind.”

Regarding history, the first known conlang was made in 12th century (it still wasn’t called a

conlang). Created by St. Hildegard of Bingen, “Lingua Ignota” (latin for “unknown language”)

was apparently created for mystic purposes and it derived itself from Latin and German. One of

the most known conlangs in history is Esperanto, created in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof. Its purpose

was to unite people with a common, neutral language in a world of social tension between

countries. It’s still talked today, as it has more than 1 million speakers worldwide and 1 thousand

native speakers. Nowadays, we have a great variety of conlangs in books, tv, movies and video

games that influenced our society. “Newspeak” from the book “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by George
Orwell, “Klingon” from the franchise “Star Trek”, and “Na’vi” from the 2009 movie “Avatar” are

some of the examples that can be found today.

Conlangs, like “Simlish” (which we’ll be discussing later), have a specific purpose for their

creation: author and linguist Akira Okrent (2010) states that a language may be created “to expose

the truth of the universe, to bring humanity together, to avoid the pitfalls of natural languages.”

But in today’s internet era, a new wave of “conlangers” have risen. This new group creates new

languages for the sole purpose of aesthetic fulfillment. Reddit, a website dedicated to the

discussion and sharing of content, houses one of the

largest group of conlangers on the internet. Inside the

dedicated subreddit “r/conlangers”, people discuss and

share conlangs created by themselves. One example of

these is called “Carisitt”, created by users u/lasper and

u/Darkgamma, which derives itself from the extinct Proto-

Indo-European language; in the thread dedicated to this

conlang, “Redefining IE-langs: Introducing Carisitt”, both

users dedicate some time to explain its fictional history,

phonology, grammar, and even some example sentences.

Most of the colangs that we’ve talked about were created based on already existing languages;

this is what is called inside the world of lingüistics a “posteriori language”. On the other end, we

have a “priori language”. These languages are created from scratch; that is, a language that is not

based on natural languages and creates its own sets of grammar, phonology, syntactical rules.

These last ones are the most difficult to create, since it requires a deep understanding of how
languages work in general and specifically. Conlangers of priori languages need to avoid

unwittingly producing something that resembles a natural language in some way.

With everything that we’ve discussed, we are able to categorize conlangs, as well as add new

classifications (some languages will fall under more than one category):

❏ Priori Language

❏ Posteriori Language

❏ International Auxiliary Language (Auxlang): these languages aspire to facilitate cross-

linguistic communication, often through a system which is claimed to be easy to learn by

anyone. Esperanto is the most known language inside this category.

❏ Engineered Language (Englang): enlangs reflect the attempt to integrate some ideal

(philosophical, logical or linguistic) into a language; they are designed to prove some

hypothesis about how languages work or might work. One example is “Loglan”, designed

by James Cooke Brown, whose main purpose is to make grammar free from ambiguity.

❏ Fictional/Alternative Language (Fictlang/Altlang): these languages are created for fictional

settings (mostly science fiction or fantasy). This includes Toklien’s “Elvish” Languages,

“Dothakri” from HBO’s series Games of Thrones, etc.

❏ Play/Private Language (Playlang/Privlang): these languages are those who only a selected

number of people could understand, and entirely individual languages intended for self-

communication.
 What is Simlish?

Simlish is a fictional language from a video game franchise known as “The Sims”. Initially,

The Sims was thought as a satire of the American culture of consumerism. It is a life simulation

game that allows the player to create people (called sims) with their houses and the main aim is

to satisfy their needs (Hunger, Fun, Comfort, Social, Bladder, Hygiene, Energy and

Environment) taking into account their moods. Since the year 2000, the year in which this game

was created, there has been a widespread popularity. There are five series and twelve spin-offs of

The Sims.

Simlish’s creation is attributed to Will Wright, who decided to develop a new language, as a

natural language would have been repetitive and in order to reduce the costs of translation; the

result was Simlish.

Is Simlish a Conlang?

Simlish was not intended to be a language, but rather to turn normal English into gibberish

that could be reused throughout the game. There are a limited set of syllables and phrases which

could be linked in several ways to form a seemingly full-fledged language. The reason behind

this assumption is that both English and Simlish have the same phonotactics, that is to say, they

share the same rules governing the possible phoneme sequences in a language. When we first

hear Simlish we can perceive it as English, but the truth is we don’t hear real words but

combinations of sounds that can be found in the English language. Simlish is indeed a

combination of Navajo, Ukrainian, Finnish and Tagalog. This makes it, according to the

categorization we discussed earlier, a “posteriori language”.

 On the other hand, the game also features text, such as on signs and TV, with a fictitious

script. Language experts created a new alphabet that uses characters from English, French,

Finnish, Latin, Ukrainian, Cebuano, Fijian and Tagalog. The combination of these ended up in

the following alphabet:

Figure 2. Simlish alphabet in capital and small letters

In order to make sure Simlish is undoubtedly a language, we need to take into consideration

the properties of languages in general, according to Linguistics. One of them is duality as,

according to Widdowson (1996), human language has two levels, a first level, which carries no

meaning; and a second level, constituted by the combination of elements from the first level that

do carry meaning. As explained earlier, Simlish is constituted by phonemes (first level) which, in

relationship, form words with a distinct social meaning (second level.).

Table 1
Translations from Simlish to English

Simlish English

Sul Sul Hello

Dag Dag Goodbye

Badeesh Thanks

Jowlenin Interesting

One of the main features of the game is that we are able to form relationships with other non-

playable characters (NPCs)1, either being a friendship or a love relationship. Ir order to do so, the

1
A non-playable character is any character in a game (video game or physical game) which is not controlled by the
player. In video games, this refers to those characters controlled by the computer.
players are given an option to start a conversation, and then chose a topic: some examples found

in the game are “tell engaging story,” “discuss interests,” and even more specific options such as

“complain about local youths” and “chat about property values.” As a consequence, sims are

then engaged in insightful conversations ranging from a huge variety of topics.

Because of this, we think that Simlish has both the properties of displacement and

cooperation. The first property, according to Van Oostendorp (2015), is the ability that only

human beings have to talk about things that are far away in time or in space. We can also talk

about abstract notions that we didn´t and we will never see. While cooperation, also called

cooperative principle, involves the idea that conversation proceeds according to a principle,

known and applied by all human beings. Thanks to this principle, combined with general

knowledge of the world, the receiver can reason from the literal, semantic meaning of what is

said to the pragmatic meaning, and induce what the sender is intending to do with his or her

words (G. Cook, 1989).

During the years, the game has been upgraded and with every new expansion or game, new

words and even new dialects have been included in Simlish and, therefore, in the games. Two

events are worth noting in its history.

In 2001, Maxis released a spin-off game, “The Sims Medieval,” where sims are situated in the

Middle Age. Because of this, the creators of the game have commented that the characters inside

this world talk in a dialect called “Old Simlish” which closely derives itself from French,

although not many translations have been made from this dialect. The creators described it by

comparing how the English used in English-speaking countries differs itself from Middle

English. So in this case, we could make a primitive diachronic research about how phonology

and some lexical items developed through time.

 When “The Sims 2” was released, in order to get new fans, the people behind the game

decided to invite popular singers to sing their original songs not in their original language, but in

Simlish. Inside the game’s own radio station, we are able to hear new versions of popular songs

such as “Smile” by Lily Allen, “Suffer Still” by Depeche Mode and “Hot n’ Cold” by Katy

Perry. Rapping (like in the song “Fresh I Stay” by Flo Rida featuring Jovi) proved the most

interesting to see recorded, as the urban artists really got into creating simlish slang for the

tracks. Nonetheless, it has been stated that the translation is never literal, since “most Simlish is

abstract concepts or emotional driven expressions.”

That is why translating Simlish is not an easy task, and only translations made from fans exist

on the internet. One has to be able to understand the words but also look at the context, reactions,

and occasionally bubbles of dialogue to catch the whole meaning of the utterance.

Figure 3. Sims engaging in conversations, with bubbles of dialogue and thought.

We have seen that there are many properties that Simlish and many Conlangs share with the

human language but there is one property in particular that could never be achieved by an

artificial language. We are talking about the pragmatics field, as it includes the meaning of an

utterance beyond its semantic interpretation. As presented by Yule (1996), pragmatics is

concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker and interpreted by a listener.
This type of study involves the interpretation of what people mean in a particular context and

how the context influences what is said. The reason why no Constructed Language can be

studied from a pragmatic point of view is because there is not a group of people that consider

these languages as their native language. No one learnt how to speak Simlish as an infant and

even if someone did, there would be no one to speak to. Even though there are many forums and

group chats where Simlish is used to communicate with each other, it is only used in a fictional

way, as no one would use it in their everyday life.

Conclusion

Taking into account the definition of Conlang, how it is created and its purpose, we based our

investigation on linguistic theories by Saussure, Chomsky, Widowson, Yule, among others and

further research on this particular Constructed Language. We found out that Simlish has the

properties of duality, displacement and cooperation, as well as being a posteriori language. After

analysing the properties, we can say with complete certainty that Simlish is a language in itself,

even though it is not to be compared with other Constructed Languages, like Klingon or

Dothraki. These Conlangs are way more complex and include a wider vocabulary. But we must

not forget that many of these started where Simlish is today, as some words that fulfilled a

specific function in an specific occasion. In most cases, it’s the people's fanaticism for this

languages that makes it possible for them to grow and develop. Indeed, most of Simlish

development owes to their players, they were the reason behind the creators of the videogame

decision to expand this Conlang. We believe that, when new games are released, Simlish will

evolve and add new meanings, words and phrases. But it is also worth noticing that it is just a

simple one which isn't meant to be understood because we would then know full well how
repetitive and primitive the conversations in the game actually are, when the whole purpose of

The Sims is not to engage conversation but it is almost entirely focused on the actions of these

particular characters.

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