I am working on developing a fictitious language, and was wondering if there exists a commonly accepted set of phonemes which could be used.
I specifically don't want it to be similar to Indo-European languages, but do want it to be manageable for most readers ("speakers").
Indo-European languages... have a common origin and common grammatical concepts; but they don't really have much of a common inventory of phonemes. A linguist, or an amateur who knows their basic linguistics, would understand the phrase "not similar to Indo-European languages" as referring to grammar, not phonology.
So what are the grammatical commonalities of Indo-European languages? (Note that English is typologically quite unlike other Indo-European languages. The history of the English language made it into a weakly inflected analytical, almost isolating, language.) Morphologically, they are fusional synthetic languages; most of them have grammatical gender; most have two or three numbers; most have at least a present tense and a past tense. Syntactically, they are nominative-accusative languages; most have articles; most exhibit grammatical agreement between nouns and adjectives and between subject and verb. Modern I-E languages vary between requiring strict word order (for example, English) and allowing almost completely free word order.
Follow the links to the categories listed in the previous paragraph to find non-Indo-European alternative options; for example, an agglutinative (like Turkic languages) ergative-absolutive (like Basque or Georgian) language with no grammatical gender, number, or tense would be very much unlike any I-E language.
You are absolutely free to invent any phonological system you want. But...
You cannot go wrong with the cardinal vowels /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/, the semivowels /j/ and /w/, one series of occlusives or stops (pick one series of /p/ /t/ /k/ and /b/ /d/ /g/), one rhotic consonant or one lateral (there are languages with lateral(s) and no rhotic(s) or vice-versa), the nazals /m/ and /n/ and the fricatives /s/ and /f/. Most people would be able to pronounce this set of phonemens or at least produce credible approximations.
For added variety you may introduce rounded vowels such as /ø/ and /y/ (most people can easily make them, even if they are not present in their language), diphthongs, a second series of occlusives (but beware that there is little universal agreement between languages with respect what exactly is the contrasting factor between the series of occlusives) and use both a rhotic and a lateral. Some languages allow both "simple" and "double" consonants (long or emphatic, depending on consonant type). Does yours?
Finally, consider the phonotactics of your language. Are consonant clusters allowed? Or maybe only some consonant clusters? How long can they be? Are they allowed in all positions? Is vocalic hiatus allowed? Can a word end in a consonant? Or in a cluster? Or in a vowel?
Have a great time developing your conlang!
The UCLA Phonetics Lab has a public database of how sounds are used in different languages. There is also a nice website UI for the database, hosted by the University of Frankfurt. This contains a browser that can look up which sounds are used in which classes of languages.
For example, you can see that languages classified as Indo-European are:
ALBANIAN, ARMENIAN, BENGALI, BRETON, BULGARIAN, FARSI, FRENCH, GERMAN, GREEK, HINDI-URDU, IRISH, KASHMIRI, KONKANI, KURDISH, LITHUANIAN, NEPALI, NORWEGIAN, ORMURI, PASHTO, ROMANIAN, RUSSIAN, SINHALESE, SPANISH
You can then go see which sounds these languages use. For example, German uses these sounds:
p b k g pf f v s z S Z x m N l R h i: y: e: o/: E: a: u: o: I Y E "@ 4 U O j E) ai Oi au d ts n t
All of which have a special phonetic name associated with them. You could use this information to differentiate your new language in many ways. Here are a couple I thought of:
1. Use completely different sounds
This is the obvious way, but may be rather difficult as the Indo-European language class covers a very wide variety of sounds. You could look through and see which sounds are not used and make them the cornerstone of your new language. A potential downside to this is that written language often can sound many different ways. Even if you use different sounds, they may look similar on paper.
2. Use a smaller set of sounds
You might notice that Indo-European languages contain a very broad set of sounds. One way you could differentiate your language is to limit the amount of sounds. For example, Hawaiian uses a much smaller set:
p k ? m "n h "l w i E a "o u
Hawaiian's repetitive vowel sounds and consonants make it feel very different from German, even though they share much of the same phonemes. You could make your language feel unique by choosing a novel subset of sounds. This has the added benefit of allowing your language to be accessible to a Indo-European reader.
There aren't any commonly accepted sets of phonemes for constructed languages.
The cool thing about creating your own language is that the only rules you need to follow are your own. Often times people creating conlangs will take hints from existing language if they want to make a language that fits a particular purpose or mood. If you're wanting a language that is pronounceable for a particular audience then using phonemes they are already familiar with is probably best.
Lots of great answers here! Let me throw in a few thoughts...
Don't stress the alphabet. It can be jarring for if you start inserting deep-unicode symbols. Most readers can handle umlauts, accents, and possibly cedillas. ;D
Look at patterns of sounds. Here's a decent description of English phonology (sound inventory): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology Not sure I like their use of more abstract fortis/lenis instead of voiced/unvoiced for English, but okay. To make your language exotic, play with the inventory; add some phonemes where English has gaps, and take some away. And add rules ... maybe in your language voiceless consonants become voiced between vowels (ie "happy" is not a valid word, but "habby" is). This is one of the reasons your speakers have funny accents. ;D
Look for consonant clusters which are "illegal" in English. Words don't start with (pronounced) "PT" or "KS", but Greek allows it.
Above all, be consistent. Languages have rules for syllable and word construction. If you make (or find) a set of rules, your language will sound a lot more realistic. Go here: https://www.vulgarlang.com/ to see an instant conlang generator!
Then think about how you are going to use the language. Is it a key plot point? A way to generate cool place/person names? Do place names mean something? You could have a local introduce characters to the magnificent cerulean city of Agorá-Prováton. "Wow," gasp the foreign travellers, "What does its name mean?" Then the guide could look down, and mumble "sheep market".
There is the IPA if you are looking into a way to denote the sounds human use in their languages.
Below, I interpret your question as "How to generate a few words in a distinctly alien/fictitious language?" There are two major possibilities.
I have read a few "backstage" interviews of and secondary literature about successful established writers who had a similar problem in their novel. The solution was: take an existing rare language.
Examples I know include:
A more typical examples include magic spells in
It takes a lot of knowledge and work to design a proper conlang for your fiction. Tolkien is a prime example, another one would be Hiroyuki Morioka. The latter created a language that would be Japanese "purified from outside influences" and then developed independently for thousands of years. According to the lore, the actual speakers of this conlang had escaped the nazis who developed the language (hence the purity) and had to develop everything including written language themselves. So, it is sort of the French to Latin where Latin is the "purified" Japanese. But I digress.
Such complete language design is hard and requires some special knowledge. I have a far simpler idea that might work. In fact, I was so outraged that an absolute alien was called Samara in ME – Samara is a city name in Russia – that I came up with this idea some time ago.
You would need to program a small script or at least throw a dice quite a few times. Discern all the syllables you would like to have in a language, i.e. all that sound nice. Tear up some words from a dictionary in part or use a Katakana "alphabet". Pepper in some fricative/flap/nasal/affricate consonants or whatever should be characteristic sound of your local orcs. Then randomly put the syllables together to obtain words. Eventually, cut the "interim" vowels and alternate the spelling (bo-wu-ru -> bowel).
You would get words that are alien enough. Assign them a meaning freely.
Please still check if your freshly generated words not happen to mean something obscene or anything at all in any language. Google would help. (Occasionally even larger corporations fail to do so, but that's another story.)
To answer the questions asked if there exists a commonly accepted set of phonemes which could be used: There is indeed kind of Standard fantasy phonology (SFP) that is very popular among fantasy writers. It can be roughly described as consisting of Spanish vowels and English consonants with the ach-Laut (IPA /x/ as in Scottish Loch, German Bach, Spanish junta, Esperanto ĥ) added. SFP also has typical phonotactic features such as frequent use of the vowel sequences ae and ie, only simplified allowed consonant clusters at all positions (initially, medially, and finally).
The Al Bhed from Final Fantasy X were given an amazingly unique sounding language with a simple alphabetic replacement code. Vowels were replaced by other vowels, and consonants for consonants, so the words remained pronounceable.
The word "important" translates as esbundyhd, pronounced: "eay-see-baeoon-deae-ha-de"
Here's an online translator: http://stefangagne.com/albhed.html
And amazingly, they did the same thing in Japanese and it worked just as well.
