Step 1 - Phonology
Description
Now we'll get to the phonology of the language, that is the way it's pronounced, the way it sounds. But before actually making it we have to go over a few things first.
- Something that is done in art generally is borrowing things from real life in order to give a certain impression to the audience. When not done carefully this can be problematic as we can end up accidentally reinforcing stereotypes and caricatures.
So question what makes you think a language sounds "harsh" or "regal" or "delicate". It often comes down to cultural stereotyping and I think it's good to try to build the identity of your language yourself rather than relying on parodying natural languages.
At the end of the day if you try to make the language of a powerful empire sound like Latin and the language of a people who live in the desert sound like Arabic not only does that have problematic implications but it's also just uninteresting and dare I say lazy.
The way your fictional culture and language are perceived will depend on how you present them. So even if the language sounds completely different to Latin or Arabic or whatever it will be able to make an impression and have a certain vibe of its own if you're able to present it right. Basically don't be afraid of challenging expectations of how any given language might sound.
- Ultimately the sound of a language doesn't really reflect its speakers so it's more or less down to personal preference. Of course you can use symbolism so a character wearing blue can reflect them being sad, so when a language has longer words that can be symbolic in some way, just be thoughtful about it so as to not parody any natural languages.
I think a good example of this is one time famous conlanger David Peterson was working on a show with a bunch of alien species and two of them in particular were meant to sound very different from each other. So one language was designed to be spoken slower and the other one faster. The phonologies of the languages supported this as certain features can slightly alter the rate of speech. I'll look up later the exact names of these languages so I can write them here.
- Delivery also affects how the language is perceived so you can play with that to make things sound a certain way. Try to read lines in a certain voice when showcasing your work. Any language can sound aggressive when growled for example.
Especially in cases where your language is going to be voice acted this is something to take into account. If your language is supposed to be perceived as soft and gentle then have soft and gentle characters speak it. Of course as always do keep in mind not to stereotype and whatnot, no culture is a monolith so there's bound to always be some variation among your speakers, even people speaking a "soft" sounding language can get angry and aggressive sometimes and vice-versa.
Also I have a thing I want to add that is very important (even though it's been a couple days since I initially posted this): in order to write down and discuss the pronunciation of various languages conlangers (and linguists) use what is known as the IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet). I don't believe you necessarily have to know how to read and write IPA in order to conlang but not knowing it will make it a lot harder.
I have a page explaining how to learn IPA here: IPA deep dive Plus a Wikipedia page with audio clips showcasing what each IPA symbol is meant to sound like: Help:IPA. There is also this Biblaridion video on Phonology which will hopefully help you come up with a phonology for your language.
This will hopefully give you a good starting point, and I'm sorry I'm not spending more time trying to explain how to actually put together your phonology. As I mentioned before since this is mostly just showcasing my personal process it might be harder to follow along if you're a beginner, nonetheless I hope it's still helpful and illustrative. If you're new to all of this I recommend taking it slowly and being patient, this is a lot of information to take in so don't blame yourself if you struggle a bit with this.
How I'm approaching it
In my case I won't think about the way it'd be spoken in terms of like how it's delivered as I never really post clips of me reading any of my conlangs anyway. I imagine there'd be a lot of variety in the speakers so despite being demons not all of them might be aggressive or scary necessarily.
So now for the actual phonology: of course it's subjective and there's different types of beauty but I want to go for something that sounds beautiful to me. I think something rhythmic and soft could work for what I have in mind specifically, something that feels like it flows smoothly.
So how do I approach that? Well I'm adding things like long vowels, geminates, and mora-timing to make it feel a bit more rhythmic. And I'm using lenition and palatalization to make it sound softer. Plus I'm picking sounds I find pleasant.
To elaborate on my choices: geminates are just long consonants, in some languages the length of time you pronounce a sound matters, like in Italian. Mora-timing is complicated to explain but think of the rhythm and flow Japanese has when spoken, yet another way to put emphasis on timing.
Lenition is when some sounds are pronounced in a "weaker" way in some contexts, think of the way Spanish "b" "d" and "g" are pronounced when they're between vowels. Palatalization shows up everywhere, think of the slender consonants in Irish, or the soft consonants in Slavic languages.
Figuring out the phonology doesn't just mean picking consonants and vowels but also the rules for putting them together. You can make two languages that have the same set of consonants and vowels sound completely different just based off what shapes syllables are allowed to take.
In this case since I have a lot of sounds I'm going for something simple: I'm aiming for a (C)V(C) syllable structure (C stands for consonant and V for vowel). The consonants are in parenthesis because they're optional. This means there won't be lots of consonant clusters.
I will decide the rules for it later but I'm thinking it'll have pitch accent, so the way syllables are emphasized is going to be more dependent on pitch rather than the volume or length of them. The system will be fairly simple as I don't feel like working on something more complex.
As I work on my phonology (and sometimes before I start) I tend to make a bunch of random words to get a feel for the sound I'd like the language to have. So here's some I came up with for this. The rough romanization is to give people who don't know IPA a vague idea of what these words sound like.
That romanization is temporary, I'll make a proper one later.
I will say I'm not fully satisfied with this phonology. Often when making any kind of art it takes some fine tuning before I'm happy, so I might make adjustments later. But I wanted to share the authentic process and this is part of it.
(I was actually a bit hesitant to post this, but again, it's part of the process. It's not that rare for me to dislike how my conlangs sound at first so it's important for me to acknowledge that when sharing how I make these).
And lastly I want to point out that the way I tend to make languages is that I evolve them from a more ancient form. I'll tackle that in the next thread I post but it's important to mention it because sometimes in the process of evolving the language I end up changing a bit of the phonology.
Evolving a language can be complicated and so sometimes to make things easier I end up removing some features or I unexpectedly add things because they seem like they fit. I treat this phonology as a first draft that can be refined later if necessary rather than something set in stone.