Fantasy author: build your own original language

1. Intro: Welcome to my class Fantasy offer, build your own original fantasy language. My name is Unique Ster. I've spent a decade writing on my own fantasy language called nahuna. I am a language lover and nerd. I studied a lot of languages and I went to university to study Chinese as a language nerd. I love languages, but I also say that more often than not, languages in fantasy I learned rather poorly. And I think we can do better. But it requires some serious delving into grammar. And I'm sure right now you might not feel up for that and I get it. But I will hope to convince you to see that this is a great tool for your fantasy language. This class is meant for all authors within the fantasy genre who wants to either build or improve on their fantasy language. For a manuscript, you will learn how to lay a solid foundation for consistent and convincing fantasy language. That means we'll look for inspiration, do some market research, delve into grammar, and then go on to play with words, and sentences and phrases. At the end of this class, you'll flaunt with your list of grammar and vocabulary accompanied by your vision for the use of the language for you as an author and for your manuscript. Hope to see you soon on the other side, let's slay the dragon together. 2. Project video: Hi there, Welcome to this project video. In this class, you will be working on your project of showing your original fantasy language. At the end of this class, I want you to have your actual fantasy language ready for use in your manuscript. There are free deliverables to be uploaded in the project gallery of this class. The first map out the direction of your use of your fantasy language before you actually start to build on your language. It's useful to think about the framework beforehand. Base this deliverable partly on the reviews of your genre that you find online. Upload the concept of your use for your fantasy language. Consider including the following parts. How many languages do you want to appear in your book? Who speaks them and how frequently? Think about what you want to use it for. Is it for cultural background names, spell casting, and are there any things you want to avoid, like really long names? And I think the second deliverable is deliver a grammatical overview of your language. You'll be working on the basis of a language in order to create consistency and believability. Make it as comprehensive as you can. It is perfectly fine to take some time to think this through. It can be delivered in either a Word or an Excel document as long as there is a clear distinction between several tenses and nouns. Three, make a glossary list. Once you have the framework of your language ready, you can think of words and sentences. Think about letters and suffixes that distinguishes nouns from verbs and adjectives, and so on to make them easily recognizable. Upload an overview of the vocabulary and phrases that exist in your language include a minimum of 25 words, including five common verbs, and a complete set of pronouns. If you intend to use this language for a magic system, include at least file spells. Based on this, I can give you personalized feedback to angel on this magical journey. I would encourage you to share it rather more than less these three deliverables are required. But it might also be useful to receive feedback on your market research and additional appendixes. Hop onto the next video to get started. Here we'll talk about originality and inspiration, an exciting way to start thinking about your fantasy. 3. 1. Inspiration & originality: Hi and welcome to your very first lesson, Inspiration and Originality. I will give you some examples of my own work for you to draw inspiration from. First of all, inspiration, you probably already have a lot of inspiration from other fantasy languages. Maybe from books that you've read or movies that you've seen, games that you played or heard of. I do think that you need to know a bit about fantasy language that already exists in order to create your own originality. Only happens when you have a large set of data which you know how to draw from. Maybe there are things that you see that you really like and there are things that you don't like. Take a moment and think about that. Let's look at a few of those languages. You have quenya from token Klingon, zu, navi, Utiz, Elvish. And you might notice from these examples that I took, they're very diverse languages. Because the first one is from a book, Klingon from Star Trek is from a TV series, from Avatar, is from movies. Z from Skyrim is from a game. You probably are watching this class to create a fantasy language for a manuscript to be published. Eventually, it is not wrong to draw from other sources like games and movies. One of the things that you can draw inspiration from other languages is the use of an alphabet. Personally, I really liked ancient Greek at school, so I was like, I want to use another alphabet if you want that. Here's a few that you can be inspired by. The first one left on top is Jen, that is Chinese. Chinese uses characters in its language. There you have on the right top, Ancient Greek. I will not try to pronounce that, I can only read it. On the bottom left corner, we have Arabic. They have a completely different alphabet, but it is similar to what We have a set number of letters to combine, but the way it's written is different from languages like my mother tongue, Dutch or English, which may be yours. On the right corner, we have Japanese. Japanese uses some Chinese characters, which are called Anti in Japanese, but they also use two different alphabets called Hiragana and Katakana. But those are existing languages from the real world. And I gave you some examples of existing languages in fantasy genres and here I'll give you one of my book series. So my fantasy language is called Maruna, and I've spent more than a decade working on it. All the way into the left we see the map that is used in the hardcover books. In the top right corner of that picture, you see a dragon and on that is written per Bonaki, which means like the half round world. A little bit beneath that you can see Chez, that's number nine. Number two, you can see Shenna and that is the name of the country which my main character travels to. In the middle, you can see a written example of Mauna. On top, you can see Mauna, which is spelled that way in the other alphabet on the bottom. See, it's not complete, but I know it's which is a verb. All the way on the right side, you can see a small piece of the cover of the first book in my series, Mauna appears here as well. My main character finds a little note at the beginning of the series on it is written something that is also written on the watch that he finds. He can see the note which is written in Mauna, also on the cover of the series, because this is actually written on the watch in the story. Then there are some other things you can think about when it comes to languages. The first thing I did, I was about 13 years old and I had a mask class. During one of the breaks, I went to the restroom and there was a mirror there, and I just started to make some fun sounds. Eventually, I landed on through and I will go back now to the camera, because I will show you how I did that. So I was in front of the mirror and I did something with my tongue. I went from left to right, like behind my teeth. So making this out and that sounds a bit weird, but I do it with my mouth close, this would be like to disappear. I had real fun doing that in front of a mirror. I encourage you to do the same thing, just make a few fun sounds. Maybe one or two will stick. And you think like, yeah, that will represent a bit of my language. Another thing that I noticed in my workshop is that somebody asked me about numbers and I got to say I didn't know what to answer because I didn't think of numbers in my fantasy language. But maybe you use it last but not least, the frequency of use. I usually think about freak gradations when it comes to this. So I hope you got a little bit of inspiration and a framework to think within in order to create your fantasy language. I hope when I was talking you were thinking along with me with your own concept of originality and inspiration for a fantasy language. I hope you got inspired by the examples that you gave of other languages, things that you can think about, and of my own existing fantasy language called mana. I'm assuming that you will want to use this language for a book, and maybe you want a book to sell before you create anything. Let's be strategic about it. Hop onto the next video to get started. 4. 2. Know your future readers: Hello and welcome to the second class, Know your future readers. In the last video, I mentioned that I want you to be strategic about it, but why should you? Well, because it might impact your reviews. If someone likes your fantasy language, that's good. If they don't like it, it might put off future readers. That's why I have a few exercises within this class and I will show you how I do them. I'll go through the exercises step by step. The first is to define the drama you're writing in. Once you have done that, find five books which fall into the same category as the one you're writing in and has one or more fantasy language. Take five positive and five negative points from reviews from each of those books on the topic of its fantasy language. I prepared two books to research and show you what I mean. We have Lord of the Rings here at the first book. And we'll scroll down to search, review text, and I'll type in language with its history comes the language of the people. This isn't some random phrases which you may see in other fantasy novels, but actually fully developed languages. They have their own grammatical forms, syntax styles, and sound qualities that reflect the speaker. The languages are real. Now let's delve into another. Tolkien was obviously more interested in history and language and mapmaking than the art of storytelling. Let me give you another one. We'll search for Dune. Here we have June. And I'm scrolling once more to the part where I can select one star. In this one star review, there's actually something positive about the language. Let's read it. The only thing I thought was neat was the transliterated Arabic languages. There are some examples. I'm sure there were other languages used in adding dimension to this world. But I was unable to identify them off hand. Okay, let's do one more. Let's go for free stars and language again. Here you have a criticism of the language. Another of the criticisms I read was that Herbert was appropriating Arabic cultures. And that criticism became more apparent as you work your way through the novel. The language, The societal and cultural norms as well as religious beliefs, seemed like they were taken from typical stereotypes of Arabic cultures which really felt off to me. This is a whole other element to consider. Now in this class, we are trying to build it off the ground with your own grammatical rules. But if you are considering to be inspired by some languages which you already have in mind, be mindful about the fact that this is a pitfall. I have given you a few examples of what to search for when it comes to this exercise. This isn't only limited to good reason, but you can also go on Youtube or book talk and see some video reviews. Let's get back to the last exercise of this lesson. Write down which of those you want to consider when creating your own language. Not everything you've read might be useful for you. So keep that in mind when you're creating your language, and go to the next lesson. 5. 3. Foundation 1 - Verb conjugation: Welcome to the third lesson, built of foundation one for conjugation. We have finally arrived at the grammatical part. But don't worry, I have divided it in little pieces which can easily be digested. If at any point there is a term which I use which you are unfamiliar with, you are welcome to leave a comment for clarification. From here on, we are building the grammatical part of your language, which can be daunting, but actually is really exciting. For now, we are focusing only on one language. But if you have different magical rases, I can imagine you would want languages for each of them. What you will learn in this class, you can apply later for other languages as well. Specifically, in this lesson, we will focus on tenses and the imperative. I will show you some examples of how I do it in Maruna. We'll first begin with the present tense with regular verbs and irregular verbs. Then we'll move on to some past tenses. And then finally, the imperative. Why are we starting with the tenses and the imperative? I think for tenses it's quite obvious because you need it for basic conversation, the imperative, because we are building a fantasy language. If you are using spell casting, it is absolutely necessary. Here you can see the suffixes of a verb in the present tense. In Maruna, from top to bottom, it is u has u, the. So you have the stem of a verb and then this comes behind it. I will give you an example and a small warning. This will be the Dutch. No, I'm not sick. It's how I speak. Ws, are you crazy? Let's move on to an example of an irregular verb in the present tense of Maruna. Here for clarification, I wrote down the whole words. I provided two other examples of an irregular verb. This is the infinitive, so it's not conjugated. So you would have sense to be and near to freeze. You don't have to differentiate between regular verbs and irregular verbs. It's just something I like to do. In this class, you will notice that I might give a lot of information to you. You don't have to use everything, but I do want to give you enough information and inspiration so that you can build your original fantasy language. Let's move on to some past tenses. When creating this lesson, I have divided the past tensus in mauna into past tenses in general and the past participle. Now I've done this because I'm teaching this in English. But for example in Dutch, this won't have mattered. So actually, this past tensus in general, conjugation in mauna is inspired by Chinese. Because you don't really have any conjugation in Chinese. You can choose to do that for your language, but be careful that you're doing it with the right motivation and not an easy way out. The idea behind it, from the inspiration I drew from Chinese, is that the time is not specific for these past tenses. There is the suffix, then desert, dan deter. And then the example skimydv. He has protected me. When it comes to the past participle in Maaruna is actually quite easy. You use plus the infinitive example. Fries den I disappeared. Now let's move on to a small exercise. Let's do it yourself. Make at least one conjugation for a verb in present tense and one in past tense. It's important to note that this is one of the things that you need to do in the deliverable. Take your time with it, pulse a video, and work diligently. Now that you have a conjugation for a verb in the present tense and one in the past tense, we can move on to something that's really cool. The imperative, a short introduction of what the imperative is basically is like, you must do something, go do the dishes. What I have done in Maaruna is a suffix for the imperative without the tea. It means just the imperative with the. You are more specific in the spell, but you need to be clear in your head when you are casting the spell that you're using the imperative and not the third person singular. In order to avoid confusion, people in my world would not use the T so much. But it will create a more powerful spell if it does end on again, this level of detail is not required, but it is really fun to play with these things. An example of maunaiAV, which means a, protect me. And there's one more exercise to go build your imperative form. If you haven't finished all the previous exercises yet. Here I put them all again for this lesson so you can get started. All in all, in this lesson, you will have decided on one conjucation for the present tense, one conjucation for the past tense, and your imperative form. Congrats. You have the basics of your language. I imagine you might want to take a small break from this. You have worked really hard. If you are up for more grammar, go on to the next lesson in which we'll talk about more important grammar. Hope to see you there soon. 6. 4. Foundation 2 - Important grammar: Build the foundation Two important grammar. In this lesson, we'll focus on pronouns and articles. Because where would we be without words for I and you or them? I think I need hardly explain that these words are very useful, so let's delve into them. I included this list just to give you an oversight, but we will focus on the personal pronouns and the possessive. If you want to expound on this later on, I suggest you will continue with the relative pronouns and the demonstrative pronouns. I think those are particularly useful. So, what is the personal pronoun? It's just a word such as I, she, it, we. And they. What is a possessive pronoun? It's like you possess something. So it is of me off I, So that becomes mine. Please consider that I am not teaching in my native tongue. And for a fantasy language, you can go wild. As you might have noticed, I have put the Maruna words for these personal and possessive powernouns here. I will read them out loud for you. Ath, I shug, ardi, she, it, ecdor, we sudor plural. Or you might have discovered a pattern in these pronouns when it comes to the singular personal pronouns. And singular is she, it, they all end on and all the plural personal pronouns end with these kind of patterns, I will create some consistency in this language and hopefully also believability for my readers. Based on these personal pronouns, I have made up the possessive pronouns. They are basically the same as the personal pronouns, but Na is added at the end of it. Akina, sugina, arda, cora soda, and arda. After you have seen the examples of how I did this with personal pronouns and possessive pronouns, I would encourage you to take a look at your language. How would you do this? How would you create this consistency and a pattern? Next on the schedule are articles. An article is very simple as A or L, at least that's how it is in English. That is why I'm giving you some options to think about. These are some of the choices that you can make for making up articles in your language. None at all. For example, in Latin and Chinese, there is no, there is no a only definite like in Arabic, they use all only indefinite ones, which I have not found any examples of. But you could do it for your language. Definite and indefinite, like in my mother tongue, Dutch, we have head and un. And head are the definite ones, and un is an indefinite one. If you use both, you can also conjugate them. Like in German, you can have einen or ins. It means the same, but it has a different ending. And of course, you can make it as complex as you want. Take a moment to just decide on what you want to use. Do you want to use the definite one? Do you want to use the indefinite one as well? What would that look like? Or do you want none at all? And be completely context dependent? I have shown you how I formed the possessive and the personal pronouns in Mauna. I also gave you a few choices to think about when it comes to definite and indefinite articles in Mara. I don't use any, so I can't give you an example of that. But I do hope it helps you decide what to use for young language when it comes to the articles and the pronouns. Once again, don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions regarding this topic. With this lesson finished, you have already made a great foundation. In the next lesson, we will talk about consistency, which will be a little bit more theoretical than what we have just done. Are you ready then? Hold on to the next lesson. 7. 5. Foundation 3 - Consistency: Welcome to the fifth lesson, Build the foundation free consistency. Did you notice we're already halfway through this class? This might be the best moment to take a little break from deep diving into grammar and come back to a little theory. Earlier, I mentioned that consistency is one of the great concepts when it comes to creating a fantasy language. Why do I devote a whole other video to consistency? It makes it easier to follow for the reader. Just imagine if you are a reader and you see a word that you don't understand, you will look up and your concentration will be broken. This is a part of the reader's experience and you want to be as positive as you can. How do you make it positive? By making it flow. And to take out anything that can disrupt the reading flow. There are readers who will look at this very consciously, and if they don't like it, leave a negative review. That's a very good reason to apply consistency, but also to the readers who consume it subconsciously. They may feel like, oh, I don't get it, it doesn't make sense, and therefore will dislike it. They don't quite know why they dislike it, but they do. Take a moment to reflect on this. Put yourself in the shoes of a reader and see what could disrupt the flow when it comes to your fantasy language. What can you do? Concretely, you can make the words recognizable based on the grammatical function. You can make this as elaborate as you want, but for now, I will use two examples, verbs and nouns. Earlier I showed you the suffixes for verbs in mauna. They can end on a few suffixes like R and S, I. If you see that you know that is a verb apart from recognizable letters that the word starts or ends with, you can also put several letters which are recognizable for your language as a whole. For example, in Marna, you will often see letter in combination with FTR. At the beginning of a word, you will often see the S or S I. And you will get a feeling of what a language is like. For example, for dwarfish you might want to use harsher sounds more often. While with El Fish you might want to use softer sounds more often. You might want to sit down for a few moments and think about letters which you want to use often for your language and make it recognizable. Or you just may want to keep it in mind when following the next lessons. Are you inspired and ready to go on to the next lesson? Think, Click next. 8. 6. Foundation 4 - Sentence structure: Welcome to the sixth lesson, Build the foundation four sentence structure. In this lesson, we will take a look at how a sentence is structured. We'll also add one more important thing, the possessive. First, we'll start with syntax. What is the definition of syntax? The arrangement of words and phrases to create well formed sentences in a language. The origin comes from ancient Greek syntaxes. One of the things that is important when it comes to syntax is word order. There are certain words that can form a group. A group can be a subject, it can be a set of verbs, and it can be an object and a whole set of other things. It is also the relationship between words. Ultimately, there are phrases in the sentence. One phrase isn't always the same as one sentence. There can be several phrases in a sentence. For example, as I was walking by one phrase, I saw a cat another phrase. And ultimately, with the words and the phrases, you have a sentence. When it comes to syntax, there's so many ways to go about it, but I will start with a simple form. An SVO language. English is an SVO language. What does it mean? Svo stands for subject, verb, and object. An example, I a subject, eat verb, soup an object. Then you can add all things like adjectives and add verbs and so on. But this is a basic set you can decide for your language if you want to use the same language set up or something different. For example, you can have a topic common structure. In this case, you have the object first, which can be a topic. Then you have a subject plus the verb. Example, that object I like subject and verb. One famous example of playing with sentence structure is the way Yoda speaks in Star Wars. You can also add inversion to your language. In that case, the verb comes for the subject. For example, French often uses this study. You must see, we can't ignore yoda. These are three different options for word order in a sentence. Now, as I said in French, they use inversion, but not all of the time. The example I used of topic comment comes from Chinese, but they also don't use it all of the time. Take this as inspiration, Decide on a basic sentence structure and then you can play with more options like inversion or topic comment. The funniest part of this would be if you could actually make a sentence with the words you have. Now let's move on to another important part of grammar, the possessive. It comes from something you possess. Someone is a possessor. Even if you don't know the term, you probably know the words mine, yours, his. It is also known as the genitive or the genitive case. The genitive is actually still structurally used in some languages, for example, in German. Here, of course, you have a few examples of how I do it. In my language. It's very easy for possessor plus nap. You have seen agi means I and then aga means mine. We have seen sugi as you, and suga will become yours and so on. Apart from this, you also have names and nouns which can be a possessor, emuna. The same rule is followed. The possessor of Jonas becomes Asa. As always, there's different options for you to consider. You can make individual words such as mine, yours, his. You can combine it with the possessor. You can use in English words of like of mine, or you can add an S or totally different letter in combination with the possessor, such as I's or your or he's. That doesn't work in English because then you have he has. You can also look at the linguistic relationship. You can put a word in front of the possessor or always behind the possessor. And then linguistically, the relationship would point to that being the possessor. You can also think about the place in the sentence. For example, if you want to use it always in the middle or always at the end, this really ties into the linguistic relationship as well. Do you always want to put the word that indicates a possessive with the possessor? Do you always want to put a letter or a word in front of the possessor, behind the possessor, or another place in the sentence? Of course, there's an exercise tied to this. Decide on a basic sentence structure and the possessive form. The grammar is real, but don't worry, there's only one lesson left in which you have to build on the foundation. It's actually the most fun part. Do you want to see for yourself if it's actually the most fun part, then hop on to the next lesson. 9. 7. Foundation 5 - Vocabulary: Welcome to the seventh lesson, built the foundation five vocabulary. You have made it to the last part of building the foundation for your fantasy language. From here on out, it is trade fun. Now you know what kind of elements are typical for announce and verbs. You have decided on your sentence structure. So the basics are there. The only thing you still have left to do is fill it in. If you're still looking for inspiration, now is the time to play with your mouth. To play with the sounds that you want in your language, what you want to be represented. But here it really comes down to the T's, and the s, and the s, and the s and whichever vowels and consonants you want to use in your language that make it feel like your language. So the last thing that's left to do is fill it in like a coloring plate. When you're in the process of creating all these words, be mindful of patterns that you see happening in your words. For example, does every word start with a? Does it always end on an? Then try to revisit it and find alternatives for it. Gradually you come to discover that there's probably five to ten letters that you use often while you're at it. Also, be mindful of letters that you would not use very often. You can't use every letter as frequent as the other one because then there's no real feel to your language. What I mean with feel of the language, there is some thought process behind it, as I just said earlier. Basically the letters which you use, they all have a certain feeling. And for you, it's going to be different than for your readers. But the idea is that there's the idea behind it. And maybe you don't really feel something when it comes to language. But I do want to give you a little insight into how I do it, especially when it comes to names. Because names are attached to a character in your book. When I create a name, I say it out loud so that I'm like, does this correspond with the type of person I have in mind or not? And to me, that is a feeling. When I feel it is a bit off. I will change the letters, the order of some consonants until I decide on the name eventually. And then I speak it out loud again. And then I'm like, yeah, this character should have that name. I've joked about it before, but I'll say once again in this lesson, specifically, don't use too long names and words. As you know, I'm Dutch and we are famous for long words. We like to put words together into a very long word. And I know Finnish also tends to do that. But when it comes to fantasy languages, bear in mind that there will be readers who have to digest everything and they generally don't like too long words. I wouldn't necessarily say there is a set amount of letters for every word. If you want a guideline for this, I would say 12 or less is optimal, but it really comes down to the amount of consonants. Personally, I would say that anything of four consonants or more is a long word, so that immediately is another fun part to play with the foca. Do you want words with consonants of just 12 or three? Mix it up. For example, I have the word shin, which means book one consonant. I have the word frac, which means to disappear two consonants. And I have a curse word that is free consonants. The word is imestin and it roughly translates to unicorn cup, which means nerd. I've been talking too long already. It is up to you now. Play with the words, talk out loud, write things down, shuffle them, and come up with the words. When it comes to the deliverable, there's three requirements. The total list should consist of at least 25 words. Five of them should be common verbs and ten of them should be nouns. You should also include a complete set of pronouns. If you want to use a magic system, you should include at least five spells. I can imagine if you have a different set of alphabet that you will want to use a pencil or a pen and to write it down physically. In that case, you can also upload pictures. You're also welcome to include phrases so that I can assist you on your syntax format in which you delivered in can be either Word or Excel, as long as there's a clear oversight. Have you completed this deliverable, then you have done all three deliverables. There's only one lesson left in which I will show you some tips and tricks which I use personally. Are you ready for the last video about my personal tips and tricks? Then go on to the last lesson. 10. 8. Tips & tricks : Welcome to the eighth lesson, Tips and Tricks. We have arrived at the last lesson of this class. I will go through a few elements which I think still needs considering. For example, how can you save everything that you've created? In the case of having created a whole different alphabet, you probably write something by hand. You can't keep it that way, or you can scan it and digitalize it. If you use the common alphabet to transcribe it, you can save it in Word or Excel. The way I've done it in word is like this. I have an alphabetical order, so from A to Z, and then in front of it I put a number. The number indicates in which volume it appears. If it's two, it's in the second installment of the series, but I also put a zero in front of it sometimes because it's a word I created but doesn't appear. Yes, miss series. But it might sometimes. I think it is necessary to have that work for my own oath. In Excel, you can do a similar thing, you can put in all your words and phrases in alphabetical order. Or you might want to add some tabs for specific things. Like these are my magical spells, these are the things that are used in dialogue. Another thing I would like to draw your attention to is to think of your language as if it's alive, as if it's a language just like English, or French, or Dutch, or any other language. How can you do that? I will go over a few things. One of the first things that makes sure fantasy language alive is pronunciation. It is where I started with the Th sound. It is so fun to say these things out loud. And therefore, I would like to encourage you once again to play with the pronunciation, play with the words, play with the letters. Another really fun thing to consider is Latin. I don't use a lot of slang, but I have told you before about min, which means unicorn cup, which would be slang for nerd. Especially if you write middle grade fantasy like me, this is a great element to add to your fantasy language. Another thing is cultural influence. As I said, we're working on one language, but you can use this format for multiple languages. If you have multiple languages in your world, then you can add some cultural influences. That brings me to the next point, synonyms. I have two words for Earth, one is Oran and the other is A. The first one comes from dwarfish, and the other one comes from Elvish. Actually, Elvish was the foundation for the current language that is spoken in my world by dragons, humans and unicorns alike. Mauna and dwarfish is not. But there is a city in the Northeast that has a close relationship with the dwarfs, and there they picked up this word ortum for a. Both can be used in my language. Apart from cultural influences, you can choose to have synonyms. Either way, it is a really great way to make it alive because we have synonyms for things and we use it in different instances. Every synonym slightly has another connotation to it, and it is used in another phrase. Another way to make your language more alive is to add some history. How does this word develop from the early form to the current form? The reason I say this is because this happens in actual languages, and why does it happen? Because we collectively think that's too hard to pronounce. So we put them together and then it evolves. If you can add this element to it, it makes it a full fledged language for sure. It can also be really found to make a difference between written and spoken language. This is hard to incorporate in a book, but you can't do it. For example, my main character travels from the world as we know it, to a magical land. There he learns a language from zero. And you can add something like in a dialogue that he doesn't understand what they're saying. But once he sees it on paper, he's like, oh, is that what you meant? Or you can make a remark on it. And then he'd be like, ah, that's how you say it. Why does that sound different? Or why isn't it the same as how it's written? All in all these are a few examples of how you can make it alive. I really would encourage you to take it to another level using these examples, because this makes it alive and convincing. The more convincing the better. If you have chosen another alphabet, how do you bring that to life? That can be a bit tricky. I'm actually looking at how I could transform my written language to a font. I still haven't found out how to do that in a technical way, but it would be a really fun thing to explore if you can make the alphabet you created into another font. I've also shared how I incorporated a few examples, such as to include it on the cover or the fantasy map in my book. And whether or not you use transcription or the real alphabet in your book, how do you incorporate it in the book? Eventually? One of the best ways, of course, is to include the glossary either in front or the back of the book. A fantasy map is always a good idea. You can also incorporate it in between the text, for example, in dialogue, or when someone's reading something. Don't make it too long, but you can do a little bit as long as it is distinguishable from the other text or language that you're using in. And lastly, a few things to avoid. I've already mentioned the long or complex words. You don't have to strictly use words with 12 letters or less. It's just a way of saying like that's probably a long word. What also makes a word kind of complex is when you put letters together that traditionally don't go very well together. And I've got to say I'm a bit guilty with my. It is unusual, but it is not as bad as you would think because it's free letters together. If it's four or five, then it becomes really hard for a reader. I would also advise you to avoid any rip offs or anything that might look like a rip off. A frequently used example is the word aragon from the inherent cycle by Christopher Paolini. A lot of people associated with the word Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. Here, it might be useful to search any name you've created in Google and just see if there's anything similar that comes up. These were some of my personal tips and tricks. If you have any questions left, feel free to comment below and I will help and guide you. Only one video left. The wrap up here, we'll look back on what you've learned in the class and what you still need to deliver in order to complete the project. Ready to wrap it up. Then hop onto the last video. 11. Wrap up: Welcome to the wrap up video. You have learned to do some market research, to conceptualize your language and to use it in a strategic way for your manuscript. You've also delved into grammar in order to lay a solid foundation for your language. You've done it Congress. This, in turn, enabled you to make words and phrases, and I hope you really had some fun with that. Behind all of that, I also hope that you've been able to think about the strategy behind it when it comes to creating the language and make it believable. And how to use it in your manuscript, and maybe for your branding as an author as well. I would like to remind you for the deliverables for this class project. The first is to map out a direction for the use of your language. This is the strategic part. The second is a grammatical overview of the grammar that you've created. The third is a glossary list, the words and the phrases that you're going to use in your fantasy language. I would especially like to take this moment to thank you for your time and effort. There's lots of time, effort, passion, and love that I put into creating this class for you. So I really hope it met your expectations and maybe even went beyond. If this class has been valuable to you, I would really appreciate a recommendation or a review. Maybe even share it with others. If there's any unanswered questions or you would like some additional feedback, please feel free to reach out to me. But for now, we have ended this journey together. Feel free to come back any time when you want to expand on your language or to ask any more feedback. I wish you a magical writing journey.