On August 12, 2011, Caitlyn wrote, ….My story is set in modern times, but it has a group of major characters who have been around for a few thousand years, and English is not their first language. Though they speak English around the MC, in stressful or emotional situations they revert to their native tongue. Many of those lines of dialogue are left uninterpreted, at least for a while.
    I feel like the language needs to be included for authenticity’s sake, so I was wondering: what is the best way to include another language in a story? Is it necessary to interpret every single thing they say immediately? And is it better for the author to say something like “He spoke to his companion in German,” or to include the actual German dialogue?

I’m with you, Caitlyn. I think your impulse to have your characters lapse into their home tongue is good, very likely what they’d do.

Naturally, as in most things writing, how to handle a language other than English (or the native language of the writer) is up to you. My only certainty is that if the other language exists and you decide to include it, everything needs to be correct, not only grammar and spelling but also expression. If the language is German it has to read as if a German-speaker had written it. (Kudos to you if you’re fluent in another language!)

Of course if you include more than a few words at a time in the other language most readers will skip the passage. Some will read through even without comprehension, especially if the sounds are pleasing or interesting. When I read and reread The Lord of the Rings trilogy I used to say the language of the orcs out loud because I loved the sound. The more euphonious elves’ tongue didn’t appeal to me as much.

It’s fun to use languages in books, in my opinion. There’s French in A Tale of Two Castles, anglicized French, meaning that I gave French words an English spelling. One of the streets is Roo Street. In French, as you may know, rue means street. Fun! The ogre’s name is Count Jonty Um, which comes from the French gentil homme, and the meaning of his name has significance for the story, although it’s okay if the reader doesn’t get it.

I think it’s fine to write out the foreign bits sometimes and at other times to say merely that Karl switched to German to better express his feeling of elation, for example. You want to be kind to your readers and not use so many unknown words that they get frustrated. I don’t think you need to translate everything, but you don’t want readers to feel lost – except when you do want them to. You could heighten suspense by putting in a few critical words in an unknown tongue. The judge pronounces Milo rewnee and sentences him to seven ubils in yokto. The reader cares about Milo and zips on to the next chapter desperate to find out if rewnee and ubils and yokto are good or awful. You can write a romantic moment in which all the terms of endearment are incomprehensible. Or you can have Milo ream out his assistant Kristen entirely in the language of Xic, and Kristen can blush and babble an apology.

It’s cool to teach your reader a new word in an existing language or in a made-up one. A former student of mine is now in the Peace Corps in Moldova where Romanian is spoken. I read her fascinating blog about her experiences, and she uses the word frumos so often that I’ve picked it up. Means beautiful but, as far as I can tell, as relates only to a person; I don’t think you’d call a sunset frumos.

I’ve made up fragments of several languages, and there are some decisions to be made:

∙    How will the language look? Gnomic in Ella Enchanted, for example, is punctuated backwards and the capitals appear at the end of a name and at the end of the sentence. When the reader sees these features he knows that he’s looking at the language of the gnomes. You have punctuation marks, capitals, and repeat letters or omitted letters to work with. If you come up with exotic signs that require calligraphy, you’ll be creating a problem for your publisher, so I’d suggest staying away from them.

∙    How will the language sound? Each of the languages in Ella Enchanted has a particular sound. Abdegi, the language of the giants, for example, is accompanied by emotive noises, like whoops and howls. Every word in Ayorthaian begins with a vowel and ends with the same vowel.

∙    Will there be consistent meaning? When a word repeats in one of the languages in Ella Enchanted, it’s the same each time. For example, the Gnomic word brzzay always means digging. By contrast, in Ever the word for digging might be ioopll the first time it shows up and eressc the next. I just hit keys on my keyboard at random. My thinking was that Wadir where the language is spoken is a dreamlike place with shifting meaning.

∙    Are you going to deal with grammar, tenses, plurals, etc.? I never have. I did a little with plurals and past tense in Ella Enchanted but not much and I wasn’t consistent. However, more power to you if you go all out.

At the beginning of Fairy Haven and the Quest for the Wand there’s a sad song in Mermish, the language of the mermaids, which has no consonants, only vowels, because I decided that consonants would be hard to form underwater. I performed the song once for some friends. Afterward, one of them asked me why I had to read, why I couldn’t simply sing any vowels that came to mind. I just looked at him in astonishment.

When we fool around with other languages we’re exploring language itself, a worthy endeavor for a writer. Here are some prompts to prime your language pump:

∙    Above I wrote, You can write a romantic moment in which all the terms of endearment are incomprehensible. Try doing exactly that, you adorable quayth. It’s up to you whether or not both people in the romance speak this strange tongue.

∙    And I wrote, Or you can have Milo ream out his assistant Kristen entirely in the language of Xic, and Kristen can blush and babble an apology. Now write the tirade in Xic, maybe along with thoughts in English. Make decisions about the kind of language you want, how it should sound and look on the page.

∙    I like invented sayings as well as invented languages. In A Tale of Two Castles, Elodie spouts expressions from her home, the island of Lahnt. Here’s one with a creepy medieval feel: Love your lice.  Only skeletons have none. Here’s a moralistic one: He who gambles his worth has already lost his worth. Go to a story you’re working on or one you’ve finished. Make up three proverbs that would go with the culture of your world or the personality of one of your characters. For example, I would expect the aphorisms of ancient Sparta to be warlike.

Have fun and save what you write!