Minecraft Languages

A fan-project dedicated to creating in-world languages for Minecraft! — Header and profile picture are pieces of official Minecraft art!

[project-mcsprache]

Intro Post:

Hello, and welcome to the Project MCSprache blog! This is where I catalogue my progress in creating languages for the game Minecraft!

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This project aims to create full, comprehensive dictionaries, character systems, grammar, linguistics, dialects, pronunciation guides, and relevant biology, history & culture guides/explanations by its completion. A large task, I know!

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Each language will have influences and inspiration taken from real life languages and linguistics, but the aim of this project is for them to be as realistic and minecraft-specific as possible.

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Asks, comments, reblogs, etc are welcome in any language. Languages are revered here in this project, and any chance to speak another language is welcomed and appreciated. Please put the name of the language at the start of the ask in English though, as I do not know every language, and may struggle to identify which one you’re speaking.

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Feedback is welcomed and encouraged. I want this to be as accurate and realistic as possible. So, if you’re a biologist, and I get some of the biology wrong, please correct me! If you’re a construction worker, and the architectural methods I describe are clunky, please point out the issues and offer a better way of doing it! If you’re a linguist and something I describe doesn’t seem realistic, please tell me why! I am not an expert at everything, so if you have some expertise you can share, it is greatly welcomed.

Current Languages (placeholder names):

Piglin

Overworld

Enderian

Draconian

+ Dialects & historical versions

Tags for sorting through different aspects of the project are tagged on this post, for ease of searching.

Information About The Mod:

Hi, you can call me Tally, and you can use any pronouns for me! I’m the person behind Project MCSprache!

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My native language is English, but I also speak German with relative confidence. German is my favourite language, and the language that I have been studying as a foreign tongue for the second (2nd) longest - the first being Spanish (but I’m rather rusty).

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Languages is one of my special interests, and a subject that I love dearly and am very enthusiastic about. I’ve studied over fifty (50) languages, not including sign, coding, dead or fictional, which I also study. However, I want to learn as much of as many languages as I possibly can!

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I’ve had this project on the backburner for years now, but I’ve finally had the time to properly start working on it recently. I originally just planned on doing it just in my own documents and not publicly, because I didn’t think it was something that anyone else would be interested in, but I’ve realised that there might be people who are as interested in this as I am! So, I decided to make a blog for people to look at, if they wish!

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This fan-project is very exciting for me. I love Minecraft, and I became so curious about how languages would work in-game, that this project came about! I love to share my passion for languages, so I hope you enjoy what I’m doing, and maybe even find it as interesting as I do!

Thank you!

[project-mcsprache]

I've not forgotten this! I've just been very busy - unusual for me - and have not really gotten round to getting more work done on this. But it is not forgotten. Just slow going.

[cfrog]

I'm imagining a language developed entirely within the universe of Minecraft. Like treating minecraft and its game mechanics as a world yknow. So there'd be no gendered pronouns, right? Because there is no biological sex within species, any two of the same mob can breed, all chickens lay eggs, there is no identifiable males or females in any way. I like to think that there would still be grammatical "gender" in the language, it'd just be based on a different wide grouping of characteristics that conveys important information. For example:

Grammatical genders of passive, neutral, and hostile. Like how they sort the mobs in-game. Cows, fish, villagers, all referred to with the passive pronoun. Zombies and stuff with hostile. Mobs like endermen and golems, you refer to with neutral by default, or if you're encountering a being you're not sure about the aggression levels of. Obviously, pigmen would have an entirely different language, being isolated in the nether, which would just make it more difficult to land on a pronoun for them, given their aggression levels vary so much. Like, what, you only refer to them with neutral pronouns if you're wearing gold? The cultural clashing there would be a lot.

And then, like languages in the real world that apply grammatical gender to EVERY noun, this categorization could be applied to objects as well. Fire is hostile. Trees are passive. You stub your toe on a block of cobble so you yell at the inanimate object with hostile pronouns, it attacked you! Refer to your friends with passive pronouns as a show of affection. Refer to yourself with hostile pronouns to convey you're gonna beat someone up. Options are limitless.

[project-mcsprache]

Not specifically an update post, but just a general languages/linguistics tidbit:

Sometimes I'll have a very late realisation about the etymology of a word that was very much obvious, but took me years to notice. Such as "Adiós" being "A dios", or "Madame" being "Ma dame". Not a big deal, but I certainly feel a bit silly.

[project-mcsprache]

First post, yay!

So, for the start of this blog and project, most posts are going to be updates on the plan/how things are going to go. This is a big project, so there’s going to be a lot of planning needed first.

With that being said, I am currently working on organising all of the available information we have from the game that I can work with.

So, for example: piglins are one of the main creatures of the Nether, and presumably the most sentient ones, so the language spoken in the Nether is probably their language. They’ll most likely have words and terminology centred around their environment and experiences living there.

This gives me a basis for the language and its etymology, as well as its structure and linguistic priorities.

Another example: the texture of endstone resembles that of cobblestone. The End has very limited resources in terms of variation; its pretty much just endstone, obsidian, purpur and chorus plant. So, it would be likely that any writing would have originally been done on the endstone on the ground. Obsidian is too hard and glass-like to write on, presuming they used carving, and too dark to make out purple ink, presuming they used chorus fruit ink to paint. Endstone is presumably softer, and thus easier to carve into, and lighter in colour, meaning that purple ink would be more easily legible. It’s likely that purpur blocks didn’t come until later in the evolution of the culture, in the same way we didn’t have plastic a thousand years ago. The shape of endstone cobbles is round, and looks like it has dips inbetween cobbles. Therefore, it would make sense if the character system used was similar to that of Chinese, in that they would use singular characters to represent whole words, rather than individual letters to spell out each individual word. It would be inconvenient to try to fit a handful of characters onto one cobble, let alone multiple words’ worth of characters, so it would be easier to do a character per cobble, and just add extra detail to specify the meaning. Because each word would have to go on a separate cobble, and the naturally formed endstone cobbles would be unlikely to be uniform in pattern, there would likely also be a directional element to the characters, to show which cobble is intended to be read next. As a result of this, when purpur comes around later, those characters would continue to be used, but there’s a good chance that they would have changed and evolved with use on a different medium. Trying to hold a shard if obsidian with your bare hands is risky, because obsidian is volcanic glass, which is just as sharp as regular glass, and in order to carve something into stone, you would have to grip it rather tight, which would cut you and hurt a lot, so it would make more sense to use ink to paint the words on instead. However, purpur is presumably a lot softer and relatively easy to carve into, because we can find chiselled purpur blocks. I would imagine that the process of making these purpur blocks would be by using the chorus fruit - maybe combined with endstone dust - to create a mixture that they can mould the blocks out of, to then let dry and harden over time, before using for construction. It would be reasonable to assume that any carving done would be easier whilst the mixture is still soft, so it would be likely that obsidian shards were carefully used to carve into the purpur blocks before they hardened.

I realise I’ve written a pretty chunky paragraph. I’ll try to keep these updates/posts a bit more nicely spaced out and easier to read in future haha!

Anyway, I hope this made some sense! This is still very much in the prototype stage, so it’s subject to change if there’s a different way that makes more sense. Any and all input, corrections or suggestions are welcome!