Ways of speaking

Today we will discuss the final stage in building your own unique language for your world. We will cover patterns of speech, common sayings, and also look at forms of address you may wish to use in your world.
 
Firstly patterns of speech now what I mean by this is how do people arrange their sentences or phrase certain questions or statements and do certain people use specific colloquialisms and contractions.  Arrangement of sentences and phrasing can be informed by the base language that you chose in so far as the way that they manipulate sentence structure still makes relative sense in English. For example in English you may say Amy is a skilled carpenter but according to the conventions of your base language you may wish to make a character say Amy carpenter is skilled, which is unique and still is still understandable in English, however note that this will not work in all cases.
 
You can also come up with your own rules and you can do so in several ways. By way of ellipse, He was the only person I saw vs. He was the only person who I saw. Transposition, Happy is he who is simple vs. He who is simple is happy. Subordinate clauses, When I got home, I ate dinner vs. I ate dinner when I got home. And finally you can place the verb second, This book I read yesterday vs. Yesterday I read this book.
 
If you have different social hierarchies you may want to assign certain ways of speaking to each of those groups by way of conjunctions. For example often I will assign the use of contractions to common people while the nobility or those who are highly educated will talk in full words.
“I can’t see why we’re made to do that.” Vs. “I cannot see why we are made to do that.”
I will also typically use older forms of words for nobility and more modern forms for commoners.
“I shall not.” Vs “I will not.”
 
To add a sense of culture to your people you can also come up with some common sayings which they use, influenced of course by the way they phrase their sentences. For example they may say I thank you not rather than no thank you, my thanks rather than thank you. You can even come up with more specific sayings such as, lucky are some as a way of saying someone has good fortune. Basically the choices are limitless you can construct expressions for exclamations of shock, disbelief, or relief. You can construct people specific swearing, and even religious sayings.  
 
Finally you will need to decide on what titles certain groups of people will hold and how they will be addressed. For example a king when being introduced may be introduced as such, His/Her Majesty Full Name of Kingdom, and thereafter be referred to as Your Majesty or some variation of Sire. You may also wish nobles to be introduced as such First Name of the House Last Name followed by whatever position they may hold, member of the Privy Council, House of Lords, etc.
 
All of the above will help to enrich your language and the cultural identity of those who speak it. Well that’s all for language stay tuned for next week when we move on to constructing the world beginning with mapping.

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