Darrell J. Pursiful

I know enough about linguistics to know that time devoted to building a constructed language is time I might better spend on other, more satisfying aspects of worldbuilding…or, you know, writing.

But people, places, and things need names, and I have a strong preference for those names sounding like they fit. So I usually end up doing at least a little bit of work fleshing out the languages my characters speak. Call me a reluctant conlanger.

In Shadow of the King, some of the conceits of my premise shaped the direction my languages took. For one thing, the contours of my protagonist’s Otherworld home arose from the myths and legends of real-world cultures. And those real-world cultures had languages from which to draw.

But not only is Rune’s world inspired by real-world cultures, the world itself is a close analog to our own. It is an alternate earth where magic is real and humans share the world with elves, merfolk, water panthers, and other fantastical creatures. You can think of Saynim as our world but in a different key. The continents and landmasses are similar—a mountain might be taller or shorter, a river might run a few miles to the east or to the west of where it would be on our maps, but everything is mostly where readers would expect to find it.

In this world, European settlement began quite a bit earlier than in ours but proceeded more slowly and, for the most part, more peaceably. The mound-building cultures of the Lower Mississippi remained intact, and the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Southeast continue their traditional ways of life. Though there has been much warfare and conquest, the newcomers from the east (“Easterlings”) have largely been forced to live alongside the Indigenous population as equals, and largely only east of the Mother of Rivers (i.e., the Mississippi) and north of the Southern Lowlands (i.e., the Deep South).

In Rune’s part of the world, there are three important languages.

Miskoese, Rune’s native language, is Germanic. It is mainly Scandinavian but with a fair bit of Old English influence as well as a fair number of loanwords not only from Gaelic but from Algonquian and Iroquoian languages. The word Miskoese itself comes from the Ojibwe word misko’o, “he wears red,” a reference to the “Redcloaks,” the earliest Easterling settlers.

Teilic is derived from Medieval Welsh with loanwords from the Indigenous languages of the lower Mississippi, mainly Choctaw.

Aavish, commonly called Trade Jargon, is an English creole with borrowings from a host of languages both European and Indigenous. Of all the languages of this part of Saynim, Aavish is so far the only one to appear in print.

All this, plus some cursory investigations into personal names in a few of the Indigenous languages of the region, helped me name people and things in ways that fit the setting without stressing overmuch about, say, noun declensions and subject-verb agreement. Which is good, because I’d still be writing the book if I’d stopped to do that!

The shadow falls on October 1.