Exclusive Reveal: The Language of our Parafolks (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Andrei here ready to deliver you some big news! 📣

As you all know, we’ve been working a lot lately on how Paras will communicate with each other. Well, after much anticipation from your end, we are very pleased to present to you the spoken language of the Parafolks: Parli. 

🎥⬆️ Please watch the above video before reading further!

About the Video

🗣 The Language

In Paralives, building relationships and interacting with other characters will be an important aspect of the live mode. Parli, pronounced par-lee, is the spoken language that we have created for our Parafolks and that you will be hearing when your characters chat together and express themselves.

💬 Discussion Animations

Alice created many discussion interactions and reaction animations that we are first showcasing today. This allows our Parafolks to have conversations, ask questions, argue, tell jokes, flirt and more. We will be adding more and more discussion and group interactions so that your characters can live their social lives to the fullest.

📝 Additional Notes

• The animations and voice recordings are still a work in progress.
• For the video, we’ve created a “Talk with” interaction to showcase different discussion animations but it is just for the purpose of the video. Conversation interactions will work differently
• You will be able to select the voice of your character in the Paramaker.
• The current voice recordings are only demos. The final voice overs will be recorded by professional voice actors later in development.
• Unlike the spoken language, the written language will not be gibberish, as we have shown previously here and here.

Development Diary: How We Created Parli

In the following paragraphs, you’ll find out how this language came to be from our goals to the many tests we did and how we got to choose our favorite!

🎯 Our Goals

Coming up with a whole new language is a daunting task, especially for us, who had never done such a thing before! To get started, we decided that the language should be:

1. Incomprehensible gibberish so to give the player freedom of storytelling
2. Different from the made-up languages of other franchises
3. Minimalistic without long and exaggerated sentences (“less is more”)
4. Distinct from English gibberish, while still sounding familiar enough
5. Realistic enough as if it could exist in real life
6. Not too goofy but also not too serious with a good balance that would give a cozy effect!

With all of that in mind, we were ready to start coming up with ideas!

🔉 Our Research & Tests

At first we came up with simple ideas such as altering existing words (ex: French Verlan, anagrams, inverting words), using theater improvisation exercises (ex: limiting letters, using only onomatopoeia) or other things like simply using universal languages such as Esperanto and Interlingua. As we progressed, we came up with more and more complex ideas and got to study how actual linguists create their own conlangs (made-up languages) by first choosing a specific palette of sounds and then making all sorts of rules to combine them. So we used these same approaches for some of our ideas and the results were pretty cool! In total we came up with over 20 different approaches and recorded more than 2000 instances of words and expressions. We also got the whole team to give their own opinion on our ideas through a survey. We got a lot of good feedback which helped us decide which approach was our favorite. We could’ve gone on brainstorming and testing things forever…but it was time to make a decision.

🏆 Our Pick

Outside of my work life, one of the things that I enjoy doing to make my partner laugh is to sing any existing song in a made-up gibberish that I improvise to hide the fact that I forgot the lyrics. It always works. So I thought that it’d be nice to incorporate it as one of our approaches. I brainstormed a bunch of made-up words through improv and created a phonetic alphabet with the recurrent material of those words.

Here’s the current phonetic alphabet of our language.

You guessed it—this approach was a team favorite and the one that best met all of the goals we had mentioned before. So we decided to pick it as our language! Later on, we added more rules such as limiting the amount of vowels to 2 per word or put 2 consonants one after the other in order to make the language more identifiable.

And there you have it! It was a real adventure for me personally to jump in all this brainstorming with no linguistics background whatsoever. It was especially really fun to voice-act all the voice overs with my partner and see them come to life in the game. Do you believe this language sounds right for Paralives? We’d love to hear what you think about it. On that note, I hope you enjoyed today’s post and thank you so much for your support!

Buh byyyeee!!! 🎸✨

Andrei

Edit - April 20th, 2023: This post is now public, feel free to share it!