Alien Language Generator

How the Alien Language / Word Generator works

How the alien language generator works

A few alien words go a long way, since a story needs the alien to say something untranslated before the translator catches up, and the generator gives words with glosses so they can be used at once. The five sounds match the four of the alien name, alien species and alien planet pages with a fifth for machines. The soft sound is open vowels and liquid consonants, elarune, sharivani, ovenea, mirasela, isethi, the language of a graceful or telepathic people, and its glosses lean to the sky and the sea. The harsh sound is hard stops and gutturals, kethrash, vorok, zhalek-zhalruk, gorvugh, kraggar, the language of the warlike or armoured people, and reads well as a curse or a war-cry. The clicking sound is x, q, tz and k with the apostrophe for a glottal stop, xa'tk'q, tze'ix, ixi'oq'kx, qk'ka, the language of the hive, best for the insectoid people whose speech the human ear hears as a rattle. The long sound is three and four syllables with long vowels, ombravaani, nyrosithra, vaaluune, quelorath, ulmearion, the language of an ancient or elder race, and suits inscriptions and names of things too old to have short names. The machine-tongue is short syllables and numbers joined with hyphens, vx-kor-ten, zed-null, sev-ohm-prime, the language of a synthetic people, a drone swarm or a signal, and its glosses lean to the received, the answered and the locked. The glosses are the words a first-contact story needs, the home star, a kin-group, the cold beyond the air, a debt between hives, the thing that thinks, a queen or mother-of-all, the word for yes, the word for no, the hour of hatching, and the two-word patterns take a longer gloss, the star we came from, the oath the nest does not forget, the machine that learned to answer.

The Sound of the language select fixes one of the five, or on Any mixes them, and the count sets how many words, up to a hundred, so a whole glossary can be made in one click.

There is no gender option, since a word has none.

The lists are original. The syllables and glosses are coined for this page and belong to no published language, constructed or natural, and no word of any franchise's alien tongue appears in them; a match would be chance, and a word intended for commercial use should be searched first.

For the people who speak the language, the alien species page; for one of them by name, the alien name page; for the fantasy equivalent of this page, the fantasy language page; and for the machine that speaks the fifth sound, the AI name page.

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