The Invented Language in COPPER PENNIES

My second novel, Copper Pennies, is book 1 in The Red Twins Series. This is my first series and I’m very excited about its possibilities. You should be too.

It still has witches and kick-ass women but this story also has demons. <insert evil laugh here>

Not your everyday christian demons, but otherworldly creatures who look upon the mortal world and salivate. Not with a mind to eat them, but something far more sinister.

I came up with the idea of creating a language early in the writing process. I started out wanting just a few words to use in spells and incantations to give the story a little extra zing, and it grew from there. I’d never done anything like this, but it’s always been easy for me to come up with fantasy names. This took my imagination to a whole new level, making me think in ways I never had before.

For starters, I sought advice from folks in a Facebook writing group and I did some Googling on how to create a language.

Then I sat down and thought about who was doing the speaking. I needed to take into consideration the creatures’ physiology (very important!), their class/station, their purpose/goals in life, and their gender. That meant I had to define them more. This exercise helped me flesh out exactly who these creatures were and what role they had in the novel and the series. (The overarching story evolved wonderfully as a result of this. What a fantastic backstory these creatures have!)

With all that in mind, I came to the following conclusions:

• They are simple-minded.
  • This means they don’t have a complex language; no prepositions or other parts of speech aside from a few pronouns, nouns, and verbs.
  • One word can stand for many. Their world is desolate; their choice of words is limited due to their limited surroundings.
• They are genderless; they do not breed.
  • Their words have no gender.
• Their mouths are wide and thin, no lips, all teeth, with short, slithering tongues.
  • This means that any letter needing lips to help it sound out couldn’t be used, like B, P, M, etc.
  • Their tongue and mouth formation force sounds consisting of S, X, Z, and Ks. (Plus, those are all pretty evil sounding with the proper inflection so that was a bonus.)
• I also didn’t see the need for tense. These creatures simply are. There is no past, present, or future in the realm they reside.

I sounded out each letter of the alphabet to see how much my lips and mouth helped fashion the sound and that left me with 12 letters: A, D, E, H, I, K, R, S, U, X, Y, Z. I omitted C because K or S could substitute. U didn’t initially make the cut but if you pronounce it more with an ‘uh’ push of air from the back of the throat rather than a formation of the lips, it works.

When I sounded the new words out, it had the effect I wanted. These words sound evil. I’d walk around the house spewing demon so I’m really glad my boyfriend was away on business during that time. He’s glad too.

Here’s an excerpt from the novel:

I’m hopeful that by the end of the story, the reader will have figured out what many of these words mean. I’ve been toying with creating a glossary of the demon’s language. Would you be interested in that? Let me know in the comments.