Submitted 3 days ago by DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
You know how in fantasy worlds, its all english? Kinda breaks the immersion a bit. I wanna find something where they make it as realistic as possible, and make everything in a fictional language, basically using subtitles as the main way to understand the plot.
Some of the DVD/Blu-ray versions of “GalaxyQuest” have the entire movie dubbed into the weird screeching alien language as a quirky bonus feature.
Thermian. One of the all time greatest gags we lose in the streaming era.
There are plenty of things in “Dutch”, a fictional language based on the Netherlands.
It’s a real language, it’s just German spoken by a person with a head injury /s
Chants of Sannaar is a puzzle game where all of the text is written in a new language
I. Love. This. Game. SO MUCH.
Devastated when it was over.
Would recommend Case of the Golden Idol for a similar detective vibe.
Far Cry Primal is completely in the fictional We ja language.
Some of the best language-based games:
The writing in the game is actually an alternate way to write English phonetically/phonemically. So the game technically is in English but you can’t understand it. There are guides on how to read it, but it always seemed like too much effort for me so I never did.
Star Trek will occasionally throw out the full speech Klingon, but they are usually subtitled…
You haven’t experienced Shakespeare properly, until you’ve heard it in its original Klingon! /s
Some people stuggle to learn a second language their entire lives. These badasses did it for a gig!
Sigur Ros is a band that sings in a fictional language, I’m pretty sure. Not totally what you’re asking for but certainly in the spirit
Just watch a foreign movie mate. Smth in a language you do not know.
PS. Otherwise look at English ones in the way Tolkien intended. Its translated for you from a fictional language.
Lord of the Rings purports to be a translation of the fictitious Red Book of Westmarch, with the English language in the translation representing the Westron of the original, translators need to imitate the complex interplay between English and non-English (Elvish) nomenclature in the book. An additional difficulty is
ICO and Shadow of the Colossus don’t have a lot of dialogue, but what they have is in a fantasy language with subtitles for you to understand
First thing that comes to mind is the video game Tunic, where the objective of the game is to decipher the language.
Secondly, Stargate (the movie) while not entirely or majorly in a fictional language, the alien characters speak their own language consistently, and part of the plot involves how they communicate. In the TV show they forego of that because it would be a pain to have new languages every episode, so you do have to suspend your disbelief for that, but the movie is golden in that regard.
Then there’s other stuff like Sims or Shadow of the Colossus where everything is in made up languages but it has no impact in the plot or mechanics.
The Gollum game has a paid DLC for Sindarin (Elvish), though the game is pretty horrible.
Öxxö Xööx makes all of his stuff in his own language
The movie Incubus is entirely in a constructed language.
The game Chants of Senaar is built around languages you slowly translate/‘learn.’
Watched a good ten minutes of Incubus. I speak a couple Latin and Germanic languages, and it sounded like a weird mix of European languages. Could definitively understand some of it.
It’s in Esperanto!
You covered all kinds of media but music, but Enya sings in a made-up language, but not exclusively. Just five songs are in Loxian, a language her songwriter made up for her after she did the song from Lord of the Rings (with some lyrics in Elvish or whatever the Tolkien language is). So she wanted a language that would suit her style and her songwriter made one for her.
The cool thing is, they wrote this whole sci-fi backstory for it about how the Irish go to space, to the moon, and they jump to a faraway galaxy. Also, Enya only sings the water dialect of Loxian — they have a dialect for each of the four natural elements.
The Enya songs in Loxian are:
The first three are on the album Amarantine; the last two are on Dark Sky Island. IMO Loxian Gate is the best of the lot, followed by The River Sings. If you listen on Apple Music or something that, you can watch the lyrics go by as she sings them, but it will not translate them. There are translations online, though.
Not video, but many Asterix comics get released in Latin and regional dialects.
Also, I liked how in Enemy Mine they both learn each others language instead of the Alien just learning English.
The original Stargate movie did that, though I don’t think it’s a majority of the dialogue.
WallE?
There is a language In Final Fantasy X you d9ny understand at first, but you learn new words as you talk to the people who speak it and then understand them more and more.
Technically it’s a cipher, BUT it’s also perfectly constructed to work as a language (by making the cipher easier - vowels only get replaced with vowels, consonants with consonants).
Stray uses its own language. Your robot friend just translates it for you.
It’s not fully the type of answer you want, but there is an Italian book called “the revolution of the moon” that is 90% written in dialect. The first pages are mostly Italian with some words in Sicilian dialect, then the dialect part gets more and more prevalent until it’s only dialect.
It’s not exactly what you mean in the sense that the Sicilian dialect really exists and that the book clearly exploits the similarities between the dialect and Italian for the reader to understand.
To stray even further from OP’s question (because books), I loved the dialect in Riddley Walker and the slang in A Clockwork Orange.
As far as video games go, an obvious answer is the Sims.
Perhaps only slightly less prominent is Shadow of the Colossus. Insofar as I know all of the spoken dialog is a nonsense fictional dialect that definitely isn’t Japanese, except possibly when calling your horse’s name. The language is based off of syllables and random bits from both Japanese and Latin with some of the syllables being spoken backwards, and with a kinda-sorta Japanese style cadence. But it’s utter gibberish, and only the subtitles make it intelligible.
I think Ico and Last Guardian from the same company use the same language
Star Trek and Game of Thrones have some lines in their fictional languages (Vulcan and Klingon for Star Trek, High Valyerian for Game of Thrones).
The games Out There and No Man’s Sky feature a mechanic where aliens talk in a completely unknown language, but as you gradually learn the language, the subtitles gradually become more and more English.
If you count text boxes, not having anybody speaking the language, and having to piece together the language based off of context clues and guessing if need be, Chants of Sennaar might work.
Other than something like that, I personally cannot think of any other work that does what you describe.
NiGHTS into Dreams has its dialogue written entirely in a made up “dream language”, and that’s when it has dialogue at all. The sequel ditched this angle entirely though.
The Expression Amrilato is a VN that’s mostly in Juliamo (i.e. Esperanto with some modifications like a custom alphabet). It’s mostly an Esperanto tutorial though with an isekai yuri plot.
Disney’s Atlantis had a custom conlang specifically made for it, but IIRC the dialogue was mostly in English still.
That’s the most espirantist thing I’ve ever heard
Poor entry here, but star wars knights of the old Republic did this for the aliens to save disk space on dialogue. The subtitles come up fine, because your character can speak all the languages, but the aliens have like 4 voice lines each they just repeat.
Netflix booba, but there are no subtitles.
For music, you should listen to Sigur Ros. All their lyrics are in a made up language.
Many of their songs are in Icelandic actually, and a couple in English.
Oh shit, really?? My life has been a lie! Thanks for correcting me!
EverQuest 2 has languages that you can learn and also use in chat.
garbagebagel@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Lol the sims, which also is a completely learnable language.
But no, probably other better ones listed here.