Fantasy Names

How to Build a Naming Language

A naming language is the smallest useful piece of a conlang: enough structure to make a hundred names sound related, and nothing you will not use.

By Luca Urti · 11 min read · updated

What a naming language is, and why it is enough

A full constructed language needs grammar, syntax, a lexicon and a sound-change history. It is a hobby, and a wonderful one, and almost nobody finishes it. A naming language needs a sound inventory, a syllable rule and a stock of meaning-elements. It takes an evening and it delivers most of the benefit.

The benefit is specific: your readers or players will believe that a culture has a language, because the names behave consistently. They will not be able to say why. That is the entire trick, and it is why Tolkien's names work on people who have never read a word about Sindarin.

Everything below is the minimum. If you enjoy it, keep going. If you do not, stop at the end and you will still have something better than a random syllable generator.

Step one: choose what your language does not have

Beginners build a sound inventory by listing sounds they like. This produces mush, because a language is characterised more by its absences than its presences. Hawaiian sounds like Hawaiian largely because of what is missing: no consonant clusters, only eight consonants, every syllable ends in a vowel.

So write your exclusions first. Pick three or four things your language does not do. No consonant clusters at the start of a word. No voiced stops. No f or v. No syllables ending in a consonant except n. Nothing longer than three syllables.

Then build inside those limits. You will find the names start sounding related immediately, because they are constrained in the same direction, and constraint is what a language feels like from the outside.

A useful sanity check: write down five names and then try to write a sixth that obviously does not belong. If you cannot easily produce a violation, your rules are too loose.

Step two: pick a syllable shape and stick to it

Every language has permitted syllable structures, usually written as patterns of C (consonant) and V (vowel). Japanese is close to strict CV — consonant then vowel, with n as the only permitted final consonant, which is why borrowed words swell so dramatically. English permits monsters like CCCVCCC, which is how we get "strengths".

Choose one or two patterns and enforce them. CV and CVC will carry you a very long way and produce something that sounds natural in most registers. CVC plus permitted final clusters gives you a harder, more Germanic feel. Pure CV gives you something open and flowing.

This single decision does more for coherence than any amount of vocabulary. Two names built from completely unrelated sounds will still feel like siblings if they share a syllable shape.

Step three: write twenty meaning-elements, not two hundred

Real dithematic naming traditions — Old Norse, Old English, Slavic, Greek — work from a surprisingly small stock of elements recombined endlessly. Norse names draw on a pool of a few dozen: gods, weapons, animals, qualities. That small pool is exactly why the names sound like a family.

Write twenty elements. Cover the things your culture actually cares about, which is a decision about the culture as much as the language: if they are seafarers, you need words for wind, tide, depth, rope and landfall, and you do not need one for wheat. Give each element a meaning and a fixed form.

Then combine them freely, including in combinations that do not quite make literal sense. This is important and counterintuitive: real dithematic names are frequently nonsense read literally — Old Norse Gudrun is "god" plus "secret" — and nobody minded. Over-polishing your compounds into tidy logical phrases is the fastest way to make them sound invented.

Twenty elements combined in pairs gives you four hundred names. You will never need more.

Step four: decide how names attach to people

The sound is half the work. The other half is the social rule, and it is the half most people skip.

Pick one. Patronymics that change every generation, as in Old Norse and modern Icelandic, which means no inheritable surnames and therefore no dynastic houses. Clan names that never change, as in the Roman gens system, which means a name is a political affiliation. No family name at all, as in Tibetan practice, which means identity attaches to a teacher or a place. Earned names, as with Mongol titles, which means a name can be won and denied.

Each of these rules out and rules in whole categories of plot. The Norse option quietly makes House-based intrigue impossible. The Roman option makes it inevitable. Choose deliberately, because you are choosing what your stories can be about.

Step five: break your own rules on purpose, once

A perfectly consistent naming system reads as artificial, because real languages are full of fossils: borrowed words, archaic forms, names that survived a sound change everything else went through.

Introduce exactly one irregularity and give it a reason. One family whose name violates the syllable rule, because they came from somewhere else four hundred years ago and everyone still knows it. One place name in a language nobody speaks. One archaic element that only appears in the names of the very old.

That single exception does more for verisimilitude than another fifty regular names, and it hands you a piece of history that your audience can discover. Mountains and rivers are the traditional place to hide it, because in the real world their names are routinely the oldest surviving words in a region.

Step six: give the neighbours a different language

A naming language only reads as a language when there is something to contrast it against. If every name in your world obeys the same rules, the rules become invisible.

Build a second, cruder set for the culture next door — five elements and a different syllable shape is enough. Now the boundary between them is audible, border towns can have mixed names, and a character with a name from the wrong side of the line is carrying a history.

This is also the cheapest way to make a map feel real. Cluster the names geographically, let one register bleed into the other at the edges, and your world acquires the thing invented worlds most often lack: the sense that its cultures existed before your story started.

What to do with the generator once you have rules

The element sets on this site are usable as raw material for exactly this process. Pick a cultural origin whose sound is close to what you want, generate thirty names, and then filter them through your own rules — discard the ones that violate your syllable shape, keep the ones that fit, and note which elements keep appearing in the keepers.

Those recurring elements are your twenty. You will have reverse-engineered a naming language out of a filtered list in about fifteen minutes, and it will be more internally consistent than most published settings.

The meanings matter here as much as the sounds. A list of keepers whose meanings cluster around water and loss describes a culture; a list that clusters around nothing describes a mood board.

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