ArticleLanguage and speech2024
Does Orkish Sound Evil? Perception of Fantasy Languages and Their Phonetic and Phonological Characteristics.
Article in Language and speech, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Tuned to language: the influence of musicality on phonaesthetic judgments.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- The phoenix of phonaesthetics: the rise of an old-new research paradigm on the beauty of language sound.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- PHONETIC UNDERPINNINGS OF SOUND SYMBOLISM ACROSS MULTIPLE DOMAINS OF MEANING.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Constructed languages, frequently invented to support world-building in fantasy and science fiction genres, are often intended to sound similar to the characteristics of the people who speak them. The aims of this study are (1) to investigate whether some fictional languages, such as Orkish whose speakers are portrayed as villainous, are rated more negatively by listeners than, for example, the Elvish languages, even when they are all produced without emotional involvement in the voice; and (2) to investigate whether the rating results can be related to the sound structure of the languages under investigation. An online rating experiment with three 7-point semantic differential scales was conducted, in which three sentences from each of 12 fictional languages (Neo-Orkish, Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdul, Adûnaic, Klingon, Vulcan, Atlantean, Dothraki, Na'vi, Kesh, ʕuiʕuid) were rated, spoken by a female and a male speaker. The results from 129 participants indicate that Klingon and Dothraki do indeed sound more unpleasant, evil, and aggressive than the Elvish languages Sindarin and Quenya. Furthermore, this difference in rating is predicted by certain characteristics of the sound structure, such as the percentage of non-German sounds and the percentage of voicing. The implications of these results are discussed in relation to theories of language attitude.
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