Accent Expert Breaks Down 6 Fictional Languages From Film & TV | WIRED

Klingon easy son hi I'm Eric singer Eric is a dialect coach and guy who really loves linguistics today we're going to talk about constructed languages conlangs are languages that have been made up by a person rather than being a naturally occurring language that's evolved over time we're going to start with six big conlangs cinder in junior art Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Kevon nothing winning how they don't know yet Navi from the movie avatar of course Klingon from Star Trek aged or German we've been got monkey Parseltongue from Harry Potter and Dothraki but Moe where they are being in high Valyrian from Game of Thrones yeah what's game or lux you've stepped us and if you stick around we'll get to some other random stuff well should I go metalloid part one conlangs let's begin with Parseltongue Harry Potter so one of the cool things about Parseltongue of course is that snakes have different Anatomy from people they don't have lips so we don't get sounds using the lips like Papa mmm they don't have vocal folds right so everything is unvoiced and also because snakes hiss a lot of the sounds get lengthened so we get that means leave him alone or go away cuz you know he's telling the snake to go away and that last sound that which you may recognize from arabic that constricted what we call a pharyngeal fricative which is a fancy term for your throat your pharynx is constricting a little bit we have that in Parseltongue because snakes like to constrict things I just became Parseltongue you had me one of the natural language inspirations for Parseltongue was knee-jerk Congo languages which have pairs of vowels one version of which has your tongue root pushed forward oh oh oh Coco and one has your tongue root pulled back oh oh oh Chee and it has finished vowel harmony spoke a different language daniel radcliffe as I don't know a ten-year-old that's doing it pretty well I'm impressed but I didn't realize it Kahn laying to Klingon from Star Trek Klingon hole that Chuck so Klingon was made up by Marc Okrand hi my name is Marc to sound not like any actual human language of course they're human actors speaking it so he had to use sounds that exist in human languages they have a really strange set of distributions sort of the three basic elements in a sentence or the subject the verb and the object Klingon has a really unusual word order very small percentage of human languages put the object of a sentence first then the verb then the subject that mathematically there's six of these things so the book to him gave I where we would say I gave him the book or I gave the book to him pretty much like Yoda dr. King gave ride that's he o to speak obviously Klingon was meant to sound kind of harsh and guttural and warlike it has a lot of sounds using the back of the vocal tract and the throat things like coal and hot Sheldon in the Big Bang Theory does a pretty nice version of this actually botas be djibouti rick that sound is a very enthusiastic uvular affricate in the sentence revenge is a dish best served cold what is wrong with you or literally when told revenge is served it is always very good what means is very good so that word shop looky shop looky he doesn't get that that tongue tip curl back d sound that yeah yeah so it should be job blue d like an Indian or South Asian language does does does require I think greater concentration so the english-speaking actors who speak Klingon often don't really do that tongue tip curled all the way back listen to this oh so you can hear in that very last word who cloade and it should be just sound which Worf just doesn't do either Lord just hearing a regular kind of English Lord Lord guess who gets this pretty close to being right I'll keep this short Frasier pull off Lord we let go oh and that ya sound at the end poor lord is pretty close that's not gibberish eats Klingon but but this is one of my favorite sounds it's what's called a voiceless alveolar lateral Africa TL sound but without any voicing so claw it's a sound you can find in Navajo Lizzie bendy hiss no and in Lincoln yeah that was very good and you can hear her say it twice here in Porto Box mo bak bak the combi buck means honor in Klingon which is a very important word to Klingons obviously colbry Bonjour chuckling Jane so she's saying you and your people are in danger and that sure sure it's like an English SH sound but again it's retroflex like duck so the tongue tip is curled back and good so you can hear that sound in Russian but yet it Afeni it Mandarin Chinese that's what someone - you said you heard that haha sound hole hey push the sock is a really popular sound in conlangs it's pretty familiar from Scottish like Loch Ness no look I am as well tonight it's in Valyrian my foot Grayson you can hear it in Dothraki Drogo so Klingon has a vocabulary thousand words which is a lot new ones keep being added because it's been around for a while there about a hundred fluent speakers of Klingon many more who can speak a little bit put you can take tests and exams for proficiency Klingon coal holds more weight do oh did you know that there is a Klingon translation of Hamlet to be done or not bah bah and in question Baku care Bombay Shh Klingon has improved over time in terms of actors getting the sounds right listen to this you vote now doc pick vom dach sure yeah I supposed to this horse kick a George vet so new Khan Lane three high valyrian Game of Thrones doctor sigelei a out game Alex your depth us screen Kanta this upon Toledo hexa said you mozu Thoreau says Crete Gupta and that first sound made at the very back of the mouth it's called a uvula plosive that's a sound that's all over natural languages although not really in any European or Western languages huh here's that same sound in Klingon of course this is a big world the characters who speak high Valyrian come from all different places and they speak different dialects ah Valley real moon Ewing was new he sees it high Valyrian proper there's a ballast on you which you can hear in this clip right here in the cortex leads to loose that's the same sound you hear in French - juniper - no it's basically an e sound with the lips rounding forwards E E so now you can make the difference in French between Q and two sometimes Melisandre pronounces the sound that's supposed to be that as an e sound over C that is ehehehe which mostly actors on the show do most of the time but of course they all speak different dialects in ancient proper high Valyrian it was always you refrigerator speak high Valyrian high Valyrian is a little bit like Estonian winter not my bachelor - I mean Russian Adama motivating Pharaoh's skit Swahili na lang gonna equal own Alyoshka and kind of like Latin everything what is that the very it is is this ancient language in this world Khan laying for Dothraki Game of Thrones the king of Azshara mama Cueva affin mori Hakeem I in that line what you saying something like I will give to him a golden crown that men will tremble when they see it you hear a wave a wave it that's that uvula plosive coil which means will tremble it's the future tense of kovat which is to tremble some people think Dothraki sounds like Arabic if I had thought of most edit on Surya its natural language influences or more from Turkish mythos Jakarta novice is Russian thank you yeah so he Lee you know nominee Rama is my person and a neuticle American being a SEMA Yuna here's Johnny American English has a really weird R sound this thing that you do when you bunch up your tongue oh right either this is a really weird sound it barely exists in any other language on earth and it's a weird thing to do with your tongue so it's often really hard both for kids to acquire say oh yes takes until about five yeah it's hard for non-native speakers so it gets left out of conlangs because it also just kind of sounds like American English good one really popular approach is to have a tapped are like in an old-fashioned British now is the winter of our discontent glorious summer bedded here you can hear it in high Valyrian Susie Lyra GBA Dothraki job or severe Barack Klingon Lin moogly interestingly Valyrian has the same contrast Spanish does two different eye sounds which can change the meaning of a word one is a tap duh and fatal yeah there's a trill or rolling are in federal different word only one different sound Dothraki has sometimes a tap sometimes a trill it doesn't actually make a difference in the meaning of the word here it's trill Yeti was edgy diva diva I used linguistic evolution as a characterization tool basically giving insight into the history of the speakers so Khal Drogo is a native speaker of Dothraki and it sure seems like he is even though it's a made-up language also the excessive heed or my booty check out there Daenerys is learning it down on that I got to everything mine and here in the first season you can kind of hear she's not a native speaker yet though Finley at a young i daughter Finland Kyle later on though and this makes sense for the character right this isn't the actress getting better at it it's them telling the story of the character becoming more of a fluent speaker of Dothraki listen to it here if he don't you'll be Amish TV guys got the brilliant Jen Hayden Rowell's who's a friend and colleague is the dialect coach for Game of Thrones yeah that's me so she does all the Dothraki and Valyrian that's right and the actors do a really good job oh they sure do Jason Momoa as Dothraki sounds great doesn't it yeah yummy I mean you completely by him as a native speaker and that's a credit to the actor for those who doesn't actually speak any other languages besides English and I suppose now some Dothraki Dothraki though is much more fully developed in terms of vocabulary you throat rip false again gee it's got like 3,000 words I think he/she/it throat ribs ah illyrian has less than a thousand at this point but it's growing to create an authentic sounding language one needs to employ an authentic methodology B hello today Thank You Khan laying 5 Navi from the movie Avatar now the P is a language created by linguist Paul Fromer and my life has not been the same ever since it drew a lot of inspiration from Maori Otilio Kitano fauna metal hoppity in some Polynesian languages especially when it comes to syllable structure and you can hear that consonant vowel consonant vowel in Navi okay - no I now hope you've a coup but who put up that loop of course a really obvious feature is those glottal stops that's that sound that's like a little catch in the throat using English when we say oh that uh sound you can hear it a bunch of times in a like a pinky but oh we're not beyond it also has a really cool class of sounds called ejectives which are sounds like the pop okay that you use in beatboxing which are made by trapping air in the vocal track instead of breathing air out from the lungs sky people have sent us a message so 2/3 Oh buddy did you hear that word boop boop boop that in the middle isn't objective ooh another place you hear ejectives is actually in English when you're a villain in a movie looked from a Jedi I am smart and I am willing here's my little secret I mean 20 percent don't lie to me final Connelly syndrome or elvish from Lord of the Rings leading d'accord an older year all three not the dagger thigh syndrome which is modern elvish or modern at the time of Lord of the Rings this is the granddaddy of conlangs the first con Lang ever made for a fantasy or sci-fi story okay so we talked about what's called a velar fricative toy there's really similar sound it's done a little bit forward in the mouth from there and that's yep yep you can hear this in German ich i ich bin ein Haley you may not think of that as being an English sound but say the word cute cute cute now say it again say it slow huge Hugh that sound right as you move off the consonant that it's the same sound and you can hear Arwen do it here so cinder n' is one of the easier conlangs to pronounce my govannen melanine edith Nina new room it really just consists of sounds we find in English with the addition of cut and a tapped or chilled JRR Tolkien was a linguist himself were a philologist as it's called in those days and he made up these elvish languages he was making new languages even as a small child whole set of thought he left behind hundreds of scraps and notes when they're older and they're modern versions which have been compiled and analyzed my fans into what we believe he intended to be cinder n' combines influences from some of the languages that Tolkien knew and loved like finish so nice and I got Hayley I say hey I'm Old Norse women Dinaric I was laid up we ever of a order okay pyramid oh also the sound system comes kind of from Welsh Hebdo and win at the dial and it does some things that Irish does for the major even I can show in Austin so Vee go Mortensen is an American actor but he speaks six languages my own birthday negative a Harding hanging minute the phone I put me Romina hit a send off welcome on a PMO fight hola Chico Nucci yeah I guess seven if you can't elvish sounds really good I think it probably came very naturally to him but yep afternoon I'm item any date orders okay so that's the serious stuff Lizzie we're doin it but sometimes you don't need a whole system you just needed to sound convincing part to other random stuff Ewok YZ from Return of the Jedi yeah got the finger okay so you probably thought this was made up gibberish show cat so did I even though it sounds kind of cool it the sound designer for Return of the Jedi we had a enormous number of alien vocalizations and voices to create for this film actually took inspiration from a Mongolia clang which called cosmic Kirsten smell bad didn't chew demo role of minority language not very many speakers but he liked the way it sounded William boy Joe Joe can you could learn her and they basically took some words and phrases they don't mean what they meant in that language and there's no real grammar here but it's kind of cool so one of the things you need for a language is a variety of different possible sounds otherwise there's not much you can say so the walking carpet fuzz ball here doesn't actually seem to have a huge variety of different sounds but he does seem to be able to make himself understood which I thought had emotional feelings associated I'm not exactly sure how we describe that in terms of the human vocal tract but it's like a uvular trill hmm just with a big open mouth okay remember when we talked about snake and Adam well droid anatomy is a similar challenge for making up a language because you don't have a vocal tract at all but you can make beeps okay you call me that the divine language from Fifth Element tokimeki moccasin oh boy p2 Molly neva Layla you can hear that same kind of Polynesian consonant vowel consonant vowel syllable structure Jodi what do you mean I like it daddy bye let me nut check this is really just gibberish although I think they did work out what many of the words we're supposed to mean men alone a doctor certainly mundo G with a lot value but of course words alone don't make a full language so this isn't a real con line this is something that I didn't understand I understand any of it but Malkovich Malkovich from being John Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich well we can't call this a con line Malkovich it only has one word in it it does serve a kind of storytelling effect Malkovich and sort of heightening this meta glitch surrealism thing Mork speak from Mork and Mindy daddy this is Mork no no no no no no no no no no your Howie kind of raises and Wiggles that foul right before the end like now that's something that American English does it's got a name it's called Priene nasal tensing maybe if this were an alien language it might be more like nanu or nanu no no no I don't know your voices is not right roots peak from guardians of the galaxy Oh so all he says is I am Groot so what right but rocket seems to be able to understand and borrow your group Wow so there must be more information packed in there our room yes said that it probably has something to do with inflection the music of speech it's a tone language like Mandarin Chinese furbish from the toy Furby do you speak furbish da da Lola party time yeah okay so I don't know that's one word yeah yeah but it has the same kind of syllable structure as Japanese does consonant vowel consonant vowel da la pepti pod language from the movie arrival so there's not a lot to say about the speech sounds linguistically because they aren't speech sounds it's some kind of spoken or audibly transmitted language captive pod is a language that has a completely different conception of time and hepta pods appear to have a completely different experience of time than human beings a stand present and future are all sort of concurrent they're not sequential they're circular which is why their writing is in a circular format they have to be able to express concepts when they speak speak kind of all at once linguists call this nonlinear orthography so this is what the sound designer came up with to represent that oh of course I can't comment I'm not a Hebda pod conclusion making up a whole language from scratch in a way that mimics a natural language that is a whole system of sounds and grammar and syntax and all of that but also has the inconsistencies and strangeness --is that natural languages do that's an extraordinary task and the amount of work that goes into it is just mind-boggling so to all the creators of these conlangs that were made up just to enrich our entertainment and storytelling experience Somnath Jamari are on lebanon kiran Voss jo qapla thank you

Channel: WIRED

Views: 8,120,801

Rating: 4.9586635 out of 5

Keywords: erik singer, movie accent expert, accent expert, accents, dothraki, fictional language, made up language, languages, language, sindarin, navi, na'vi, avatar language, parseltongue, high valyrian, big bang theory klingon, dothraki creator, khal drogo, jason momoa, linguist, linguistics, actor accents, nanu nanu, heptapod, daenerys targaryen, accent breakdown, language breakdown, conlang, conlangs, constructed language, klingon, wired

Id: oa6cHEJIjYI

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 11 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/slowmosloth]

That was really fascinating. I didn't think I would watch the whole thing. That guy is really well spoken. I could probably listen to him talk about anything for hours.

Edit: I just realized that he kinda reminds me of Zach Woods (Jared from Silicon Valley)

[u/omidabrams]

Quasi-Dennis Reynolds strikes again!

[u/midnight_thunder]

I like how he sneaks in a solid Yoda impression.

[u/Lovemesometoasts]

Oh man, I love this guy. Glad to see new stuff from him.

[u/carolinemathildes]

He's one of my favourite people. I was just rewatching one of his videos the other day. I find him immensely interesting, and fun to watch.

[u/mod1fier]

I remember his AMA and his last video. Really really interesting stuff.

[u/TullyCicero]

This is fantastic, I hope they do more in the series! I wasn't really expecting anything else after the first one, and seeing this one at first I wasn't sure how it'd work, but it fits the general pattern of these videos perfectly. Not to mention that Erik Singer is great.

[u/def_not_a_gril]

This guy really should have his own show

[u/striker3034]

I had no intention of learning about "con languages" 20 minutes ago, yet this guy kept me entertained and attentive. If only my professors were like this.