“I made languages for [Dragon Age: Origins] – Elves, Dwarves, Qunari, and one other that I can’t remember,” a linguist by the name of Wolf Wikeley tells me. “Elven was whispery and had Welsh and Irish Gaelic influences and Dwarven was secretly modelled on the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show. Seriously – the word for ‘cave’ was 'Borq.' The order was rough and guttural.”
Fantasy is ripe with fictional languages designed to make worlds more immersive. The most iconic example of this is JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, for which he developed multiple Elvish languages like Sindarin and Quenya. Game of Thrones, meanwhile, features Dothraki and Valyrian, the former of which was based on a mixture of real-life languages from Eastern Europe and Russia.
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As a massive fantasy series, it’s relatively unsurprising to learn that Dragon Age: Origins nearly had a few additional fictional languages that were created by an external linguist who had been contracted to BioWare. However, lead writer David Gaider eventually decided not to pursue the idea. “Our use of a linguist was an experiment that just didn’t work out like we’d hoped, I’m afraid,” he said in 2010. It’s worth noting that the fictional languages that did make it into Origins were invented by the game’s official writers – Gaider was responsible for the majority of the Elvish dialect, for example, whereas Qunari can be attributed to Mary Kirby.
Still, discovering this ditched set of languages was a fun rabbit hole to stumble upon. After reading through forums about a man called ‘BeeseChurger’ and their work I did some 2am sleuthing – as you do – and found out that his real name was ‘Wolf.’ I eventually discovered a news report from 2005 about a man called Wolf Wikeley who had developed a few conlangs for BioWare. With his full name, it didn’t take long to find an IMDb page where he has one credit – Jade Empire.
With that, I knew I had my man. I figured out how to get in touch with Wikeley and dropped him a message.
“In the job interview, David Gaider was tickled by the fact that I remembered some Klingon,” Wikeley tells me. “I had read Marc Okrand’s dictionary and had most of the movie lines memorised. I talked with them about developing languages and writing phonetically. The latter – as I learned later – I should have explained better.
“People think that phonetic writing means something easily read by a monolingual English speaker. It actually means written with a principled regular relationship between graphemes and phonemes, like IPA or Hangul or Pinyin.”
Wikeley’s interview was a success – he got in with BioWare for its experiment while simultaneously juggling his academic career, in which he also managed to win awards for teaching and a federal grant for his research. Amidst all this, BioWare tasked him with writing five different dictionaries for Jade Empire and Dragon Age. While it would be fascinating to peruse these, they are under lock and key at BioWare – even Wikeley doesn’t have access to them.
The studio wanted Jade Empire to sound authentic relative to the pastiche of ancient China it was based on, while Dragon Age was supposed to have expansive lexicons for its non-human races. This was to avoid any non-English dialogue sounding like “gibberish.”
“Fake languages have unpredictable effects on audiences,” Wikeley says. “Fan consensus seems to be that Star Trek 4 hit a good balance with Klingon, but that the premiere of Star Trek Discovery had too much mumbling with marbles in the mouth. The latter was more realistic and took a lot of effort, but was it worth it?”
As well as ensuring the languages actually sounded good in-game, Wikeley needed to take the English-speaking voice actors’ ability to actually enunciate the words into account.. That’s why he avoided anything that would be too much of a “tongue twister.”
“The process is brief,” Wikeley says. “First, I listen to the needs of the producers. What are the people like who speak the language? What is their culture? What is their role in the story? These things don’t affect the sound of language in real life, but we tend to think that they do so it can make the storytelling more effective.There’s no reason pretty Elves can’t have voices that sound like belching, but it is aesthetically pleasing and somehow ‘right’ to have them sound pretty. Next, I decide the basic syntax branching direction. For example, Japanese is Subject Object Verb; English is Subject Verb Object. Other orders are possible.
“I decide whether the language is active-passive or ergative-absolutive. I decide how much syntactic marking is implemented, whether case is used. For example, Mandarin has very little syntactic marking and no case marking. Words like ‘the’ don’t occur, and ‘he/him’ is one word regardless of subject or object. German on the other hand has lots of words and marks. The ideas of sound and grammar form the basis on which I create dictionaries containing around 2,500 words that may be commonly used. I write lots of example sentences, too. The idea is to have a language that could be used to write any lines the producers want. But actually, they tend to randomly assign the lines I wrote to totally different contexts.”
Unfortunately, it’s up to EA whether those dictionaries ever get released. Nonetheless, Wikeley does remember the odd word here and there, like the Elven ‘Llinthy’ which means ‘beautiful’ and is a reference to Wonder Woman’s Lynda Carter. He said that he also slipped plenty of Easter eggs into the languages, but the details are hazy . It was a project he took on 17 years ago and a lot has happened in his life since. Hell, he’s not a linguist anymore, he’s a musician.
In fact, Wikeley wasn’t even aware that the language had been cut: “I finished my contract in December 2004, and I have never played them,” he says, “I didn’t know how the languages were used or not used. If the Dragon Age languages were dropped, I defer to the greater wisdom of the producers.
Next: Inside The Dragon Age: Origins Multiplayer Game That Never Was