The Actual News:
Ok so its been a while since I’ve talked about the Galarian language… however most of what I want to say is being saved for the upcoming video about it. Y’know, the video I’ve been saying that I’ve been working on for the last five months… …
….ANYways, recently two savvy members of the Galarian Language Institute—Lugiadri1 and Scott—left a couple of comments about their observations of Galarian. But in writing my reply to them, my ideas just kept pouring out, and it got way too long to be a mere comment, so I decided to turn it into a proper post. So here it is!
As mentioned, Lugiadri1 and Scott both noticed that the Galarian language was both consistent and inconsistent, which was the conclusion I reached as well. Like, its clear that a lot is just random gibberish, but there are examples of actual syntax. Some of this syntax include:
- use of the same latters within the same word (ie the R in YARROW is represented by the same Galarian letter)
- how the Galarian words for every Pokémon type have the same number of characters as their Romaji forms (Electric = JEMXL = Denki = 5 characters)
- the appearance of Galarian words in situations which make sense (such as the Galarian words for “Electric” and “Water”, as well as Chairman Rose’s name, all appearing in his presentation about using water to produce electricity for the region)
- This is also considering that random junk text DOES exist and is used frequently, but weren’t used in those situations.
So yeah, there is definitely some consistency in the text. As for why it’s not ALL consistent, or why it’s not all INconsistent… I have a few theories.
- If I recall correctly, there were other scripts used in previous games, but they were all deciphered quickly, revealing them to be just Japanese words. So perhaps the developers wanted to make the script slightly undecipherable (apart from things they wanted people to make a connection with) in order to keep a sense of mystery with the Galarian language.
- This is considering that the Galarian alphabet takes elements from a lot of dissimilar language scripts… I’ve seen letters which came from scripts like Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Katakana, Hangul, Runic… I think they wanted Galarian to be more “international”. But in doing so, maybe they didn’t think they could make up actual WORDS that came from different languages, so they threw in only a few Japanese and English words which could be recognized, and then turned the rest into indecipherable gibberish; the gibberish would be to ensure they didn’t accidentally make the Galarian language TOO much like Japanese again, if that makes sense.
- A similar idea to that is that the devs wanted to keep things recognizable enough but ultimately indecipherable… not because they wanted to avoid it being recognized as Japanese-y, but just for its own sake of being “recognizable but indecipherable”.
- One example of this is how the Galarian name for Motostoke is CQKMQ8, which looks like the word ENGINE based on its Japanese name (エンジン Enjin)… if it weren’t for the fact that the Galarian word ends in 8 instead of C. But given that both characters look similar, maybe it WAS supposed to be “ENGINE”, but they changed it slightly just to throw off anyone trying to decipher the language. So who knows what other Galarian words are actual legit words, but have one or two letters changed just to make it less recognizable?
- There wasn’t a single “head of Galarian words” within the development team, so each artist just made up words to suit their own needs. Or if they couldn’t even do that, they would instead copy-and-paste Galarian text that someone else wrote in their own graphic element.
- This would explain why some Galarian text seems to make sense in a certain context, while use of that very same text in another graphic seems awkward or out of place… or even cut up. Like, I’ve seen text which is written in full in a few places—perhaps say the words 3+QD7S and WAELBRSKTY—only for that text to appear somewhere else looking like 3+QD7WAELBR… as if someone copied-and-pasted words from a list of junk text just to have something in it.
- In other words, it’s almost as if it’s the Galarian version of Lorem Ipsum!
- Maybe there WAS a “head of Galarian words” and the plan was to actually make it a consistent language, and they started work on a small list of words… but then maybe someone else didn’t get the memo and started work on their own set of Galarian words. Or maybe there was a lazy CG modeller who just used the same graphic element all over the place, even though they were intended to be different for each town. Either way, because they were stuck with Galarian text which don’t match up properly, they both just gave up and decided to keep things indecipherable.
- Although I feel this is the least likely scenario, I do feel like there is some examples of this… namely in the use of Gym and Stadium signs, which all seem to use the same text, or those green “town” signs (such as the one by the Day Care Center) are all exactly the same, even though they are supposed to be different. Then there’s also the Hotel Ionia in Chirchester, which has its hotel name (E6!^2) written properly on the building on the left, but if flipped on the building on the right.
- Basically, they started to write proper Galarian words, but they couldn’t get any of it to gel properly, so they gave up.
There are maybe other reasons for this “consistently inconsistent” form of Galarian, or maybe it’s just some mix of the above. Either way, I think these make the most sense.
Ok, that’s all I got for now… hopefully it gives you a few new things to think about!
Side note: I’ve been busy with a bunch of other stuff lately, so I’ve been a little behind on my Galarian language research… but the one last thing I want to test is see if there is SOME commonality between words using the same letters. Like of all the Galarian words which use a certain character to represent the English/Romaji character “R”… do THOSE share a common set of letters? It probably doesn’t, but I’d like to know for sure.
4 Comments
Hey nick15!
I really appreciate that you are already working on the languages in the recent Pokemon games.
One thing that I noticed is that early on you were thinking that it was a simple cypher with some language underneath it. What if we are now dealing with Conlangs?
I remember when, as a kid, I realized that Game Freak was diligent in doing localization of the names (I didn’t use those big words, I just thought it was really cool that Pokemon had clever names that lined up with English words). I have to wonder, when you have multiple language geeks working together on translating for people across the planet for two and a half decades, if the translators decided to follow in similar footsteps as Conlang geek extraordinaire JRR Tolkien. I mean, Pokemon is the most valuable franchise on Earth so my hunch is that the professional translators Game Freak hires want to go above and beyond simple cyphers. (Also, with a global reach, choosing any one language to be the base of the cypher could be seen negatively by potential customers. Conlangs might have similar words to real languages, but when there is something that must be translated rather than deciphered that problem becomes smaller.)
In my hypothesis the translators started working on developing a Conlang for Galar but it took a while to disseminate to the whole development team or was only partially completed before the development crunch hit.
But Legends Arceus uses pictographs and language as a central part of the story. Arceus was in development for quite a while and the languages seem to be more robust and consistent.
By now, with Paldea, the idea the translators want to do should be pretty well known by the whole team. As you have noted there are many similarities yet striking differences between Galarian and Paldean (the words for “gym” in Galarian and Paldean show this with the same first letter/symbol, but then it diverges). What if the translators wanted to have the languages parallel English and Spanish? There are, of course, many cognates between English and Spanish, but there are some equivalent concepts that have very different words and etymologies.
I could see the translators started making Conlangs so they all can stay on track with harmonizing the localization of Pokemon names. I doubt this is what happened, but with the depth of lore Pokemon has, I wouldn’t be surprised either.
Pokemon have been playing around with language and letters since the beginning (Ruins of Aleph, using Braille for the cave of the Regis, naming Pokemon, etc). My thought is that next step would be to start building languages. Star Trek did it with Klingon and Game of Thrones with High Valyrian. I agree that the translators probably make Loren Ipsums because they don’t have the time to do everything, but I don’t think that precludes the possibility that there are Conlangs working in the background.
I am curious to know what you think of this idea.
Also, I found your website because I wanted to do some investigating into Pokemon languages after I watched a video by Takh0 on YouTube about the lore of Legends Arceus where he talked about how Pokemon uses language in its visual storytelling. He also felt certain that the pictographic sentences weren’t some gibberish but had an actual translation. It is close to a 90 minute video, but from what I have seen of your site I think it is up your alley.
Oh good Lord. I thought that I provided plenty of spaces between paragraphs. If the preview is what will be posted, I am so sorry for the wall of text.
Lol no worries about the wall of text, I appreciate the dedication and passion… honestly sometimes I worry that my own passion creates walls of text too, and it also doesn’t help that I’m a writer by trade 😅
As for if Galarian/Paldean is a conlang… it’s tough to say. I CAN say that I don’t believe that anyone responsible for the different translations of the game are working on Galarian/Paldean, as they tend to be spread out around the world and not really in the same room to work together on something.
That said, that doesn’t mean that the folks behind Galarian/Paldean don’t speak different languages and in turn infuse G/P with words from those languages… but the research crew over on the PA! Discord haven’t found much evidence of that. Most of G/P has been almost exclusively Japanese, given the frequent appearance of Japanese words and names in G/P words that are obviously those words (particularly character names and Pokémon elemental types). Speaking of Hisuian from PLA, Elementsnstuff on the Discord did some intense research on it and found that it was nearly exclusively Japanese and that the script was IIRC effectively a cypher.
As with Paldean specifically, we haven’t found any specific words to suggest they’re using Spanish, such as the names for Uva and Naranja Academies: both use five letters in the proper name and six in the word for “academy”, which fits neither “Uva”, “Naranja” not “Academia”. On the other hand, the Japanese names for the Academies—“Grape” and “Orange”, respectively—better fits the five letter format.
Now one hypothesis that I feel has some merit is that G/P words are written phonetically than as romaji… so like, even if “Orange” has six letters and its Paldean name has five, it may have just dropped the final “E” and is instead “orang” or even “oranj”. I think it’s a stretch but it may be possible!
The most fundamental problem with trying to decipher G/P is how inconsistent it is with the letters it uses… no one G/P letter is consistently the same Latin/romaji letter. It’s mere existence is still lots of fun and in a way I’m glad it is what it is versus having it be a straight-up cypher. Still tho, I strongly suspect that it’s not much more complex than literal random characters, kind of the “uncanny valley” of conlangs. I wish to be proven wrong, however, and that’s why I’m doing this work on researching G/P to see what we can work out.
Honestly, given the work put into the Hisuian script, I was half expecting Paldean to be a new language. Like, there was definitely an increase in conlang quality between Alolan (effectively a cypher), then Galarian (a potential conlang but mostly gibberish) and then Hisuian (basically a cypher but very elegant)… so I was hoping for Paldean to be something new and even more robust… but I feel like the rushed development time of ScVi meant leaning on Galarian again for Paldea’s language versus doing something new,y. But clearly someone on staff is interested in Conlangs, so I hope they are able to implement one proper in Gen 10.
One side effect of doing this work is that it has gotten the attention of other conlangers, which has been really fun in-and-of-itself because we’ve been chatting about conlangs in general. I for one have been working on one since high school, long before I heard the word “conlang”… so it’s just great to talk about conlang theories and seeing how much of that applies to G/P. If you haven’t already joined, maybe swing by the PA! Discord! We’d love to have you
Oh, one other point: I think discovering the true design goal for G/P will better reveal itself when we can work out the generic “Lorem Ipsum” filler text from proper aks clear G/P words. I’ve only just stated the work so we’ll see where this takes us. 😊