Last month, I launched this series with a post entitled Creating an Alien Language: Your Language, Your Rules. By now, you should have answered the basics of what you want out of your new alien language. If not, here are some quick questions to ask yourself about the alien race you’re designing it for.

• How advanced is their society?
• What is the alien’s basic biological structure?
• How do these aliens laugh? Cry? Show they’re in pain?
• Are there different subsets of their society?
• Why do they need to communicate?

Before I get into my process for creating an alien language based on symbols or glyphs, I’d like to mention something very important. I am not Tolkien. In many respects, Tolkien was a genius. Even though this is a science fiction blog, I wanted to point out that this series is not in homage to him. Rather, it’s my take on language from my experiences and I hope this series serves as an idea generator for your own work. So let’s have fun!

Creating a Symbolic Language

One of the concepts I mentioned last time was the idea that you need to have some sort of language key to use as your foundation. Before we get any further, I’d like to remind you that your aliens need to be able to create the symbols in the first place.

My basic requirements for a symbolic alien language are:

• The biological ability to create a symbol
• The proper instrument(s) to represent a symbol
• The ability to understand what it means

Mind you, some writers have employed the use of an invisible symbolic language that can be seen either on the astral place or by manipulating subatomic matter. Whether or not your symbolic language appears to humans or other aliens is not something that you need to decide right now, because that could develop as a plot element for your story. However, you still need to know how your aliens will use your language.

The questions that you’ve answered will help you form a basic template for your new language. At this point, you’ll want to develop your symbolic language’s key. You can do this in a few ways:

Conceptual (or Abstract) – A conceptual or abstract key would be based on thoughts, feelings or emotions.

For example, you might have an alien race that lives on an ice planet. Let’s say that their society is comprised of nomadic tribes that have to wander around their planet to get food. The biology of these aliens is comprised of a heavily insulated exoskeleton; the bodies of these aliens are actually very soft and sensitive to the cold. The reason why they communicate is for the basic survival of their race.

The key that I would develop for this race would be primarily based on three, specific concepts: hunger, love, cold. Now that I have those concepts figured out, I’d then assign symbols to each distinct idea. Let’s say that hunger is a square, love a circle, and cold a triangle.

With that basic key in mind, I can then develop other symbols related to those core concepts. Love of family might be two, overlapping circles. An ice storm could be a triangle with a jagged line through it. The symbol for food might be a filled square instead of an empty one.

The other symbols that I just created (familial love, ice storm, food) were inspired by my primary key (love, cold, hunger). In this way, I’m organically creating a vocabulary that fits with those core concepts. Here, the complexity of your language not only depends upon the size of your key (e.g. How many words can you assign a core symbol to?) but also how many secondary symbols you can assign as well.

As you might expect, this sort of language creation is less structured than an alphabet-based one. In my opinion, this method can help your language evolve naturally because you are forcing yourself to focus on the visual aspects of the symbols to represent what they mean as opposed to ensuring that everything ties neatly to a set of letters, numbers or other marks. Remember, that highly-constructed languages often have a very mechanical appearance. A symbolic language created the way that I just described may not be well-engineered, because you might end up building your vocabulary as you further develop whatever you’re using it for.

Also, another exciting thing I’d like to point out about symbolic languages is that a simple glyph or symbol can relay more information in a shorter period of time, than a written sentence. Depending upon how complex the glyphs are, you might discover that the language itself could be the basis for a neat plot about the clues an alien race has left behind.

Tonally-Based – A tonally-based symbolic language would be one where you assign symbols to specific sounds. In my mind, music is its own language.

When I think about why I might want to employ a tonally-based symbolic language, I think about its potential to reach more people (or aliens) than an alphabet-based or a conceptually-based one. For example, look at how sheet music for an etude created by a Russian composer can be played by musicians that hail from distant parts of the world.

If your desired language is based on sound, I feel that you would need to design your language key by assigning symbols according to a unique identifier of that sound.

Say I wanted to create a dissonant-sounding symbolic language. I might use arrows to denote the individual sounds for my key. Then, I might add flags for the length of the sound and color for the pitch. Color can be an interesting technique to employ when you design your language; it might also help define your alien’s culture, too, since they’ll need to create the ink to represent it.

Alphabet-Based – Arguably, every alphabet does have its own set of symbols e.g. letters or brush strokes, etc. that come together to form a series of more complex conceptse.g. words, glyphs, sentences, etc. An alphabet provides you with more permutations of symbols and can often highlight a more highly-evolved alien species or society. If you’re interested in creating a symbolic language based on an alphabet, be sure to read next month’s installment.

Have you created a symbolic language for an alien race before? What sort of tips do you have to share? How does your process differ from mine?

MONICA VALENTINELLI is a professional author and game designer. Described as a “force of nature” by her peers, Monica is best known for her work in the horror, dark fantasy and dark science fiction genres and has been published through Abstract Nova Press, Eden Studios, White Wolf Publishing, Apex Magazine and others. Her credits include: a short story entitled “Pie” in the award-winning BURIED TALES OF PINEBOX, TEXAS anthology through 12 to Midnight. Her new release, entitled THE QUEEN OF CROWS, is the number one best-selling title at DriveThruHorror.com. Be sure to watch the book trailer on YouTube!

For more information about Monica, her work and her contact information, visit MLVWrites.com.