Poltersquid
Inkling
we determined the language to be gibberish, moved on in conlang in the thread linked 3 posts above me
Inkling: The Language of Splatoon
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OctagonalKahn
Inkster Jr.
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- otagonalkahn
Ehh, pretty much split both ways. This thread is now for the people trying to decipher the language, while the other tread is creating a new one!
RadioactiveMoth
Squidibli
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There's a separate thread for the fan-made language. (http://squidboards.com/threads/the-fan-language-of-splatoon.2914/) This thread can continue as a thread trying to figure the in-game language out.
If I read correctly, it said the dialogue was gibberish. While Inkling may not be spoken or a conlang in its own right, the writing may be a cipher a la Hylian. I'm probably not saying anything new here, tho.
Poltersquid
Inkling
we considered that, but the text didnt match up with english or japanese, also there were too many symbols for english, and too little for japanese
eli
Senior Squid
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FONT IS OUT! Woo! Check out my thread about it here!
http://squidboards.com/threads/inkling-font-download-included.3096/
http://squidboards.com/threads/inkling-font-download-included.3096/
Chocoling
Pro Squid
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a guy on youtube (SilverTheHedgehog) had a go at me saying all the "misheard lyrics" and "lyrics translated" videos are official deciphers or the songs. he was acting really annoyed every time i told him the vocals were just jibberish with english and japanese words thrown in.
and then he went on about other jibberish songs which were translated... so irritating and jerky.
and then he went on about other jibberish songs which were translated... so irritating and jerky.
цııര=៲
Inkling
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- AiMeilian
Greetings fellow Inklish fans!
First off, some wonderful work in this thread. And special kudos to eli for the font! Those are no small task (I speak from experience there).
For your entertainment and edification, I spent some time very carefully transcribing the two songs we have good audio for. Hopefully you'll be able to view the following links:
Splatfest Plaza Song / Tuni Nini Nakh Da Wini-Wini
Final Boss / You Weni Wanou / DON'T PANIC BOY
For your convenience I've also made a pronunciation guide for my romanisation scheme, which I hope will be helpful.
About me: I'm a lifelong language enthusiast and studied linguistics in college, though I would hesitate to call myself even an amateur linguist. I'm fairly fluent in French (having studied it for 14+ years) and passingly familiar with Italian and Spanish, and know a smattering of Mandarin and Japanese. I've been conlanging (creating languges for fun) for decades, sometimes in collaboration with my friend and housemate (who disagrees with me on a few things :D)
As for the text in "Tuni Nini," well... while individual words are captioned somewhat consistently, unfortunately there's a lot of inconsistency between them. E.g. the first two words appear to both be captioned as "БNII БNII," though they're pronounced completely differently. And while in theory the 1st line could be written rght-to-left (like Arabic and Hebrew), this pattern cannot be consistent throughout the song.
Anyway -- enjoy. Say fwaa!
First off, some wonderful work in this thread. And special kudos to eli for the font! Those are no small task (I speak from experience there).
For your entertainment and edification, I spent some time very carefully transcribing the two songs we have good audio for. Hopefully you'll be able to view the following links:
Splatfest Plaza Song / Tuni Nini Nakh Da Wini-Wini
Final Boss / You Weni Wanou / DON'T PANIC BOY
For your convenience I've also made a pronunciation guide for my romanisation scheme, which I hope will be helpful.
About me: I'm a lifelong language enthusiast and studied linguistics in college, though I would hesitate to call myself even an amateur linguist. I'm fairly fluent in French (having studied it for 14+ years) and passingly familiar with Italian and Spanish, and know a smattering of Mandarin and Japanese. I've been conlanging (creating languges for fun) for decades, sometimes in collaboration with my friend and housemate (who disagrees with me on a few things :D)
As for the text in "Tuni Nini," well... while individual words are captioned somewhat consistently, unfortunately there's a lot of inconsistency between them. E.g. the first two words appear to both be captioned as "БNII БNII," though they're pronounced completely differently. And while in theory the 1st line could be written rght-to-left (like Arabic and Hebrew), this pattern cannot be consistent throughout the song.
Anyway -- enjoy. Say fwaa!
Joseph Staleknight
Inkling Fleet Admiral
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Nice! Welcome to Squidboards, man!
I have to agree on the inconsistency between the in-game written and spoken languages; there are so many places where it would look like there's a connection, but it ends up subverted by other text/utterances. Fortunately, we just so happen to have our own take on the Inkling language (Inklish, as you call it) here, and we could appreciate your talents and contributions. It's not meant to be strictly accurate to the game (as we've decided what the game has is just there for flavor), but it should still be consistent and speakable!
Anyway, we appreciate you coming here and hope you have a great time! Stay fresh!
I have to agree on the inconsistency between the in-game written and spoken languages; there are so many places where it would look like there's a connection, but it ends up subverted by other text/utterances. Fortunately, we just so happen to have our own take on the Inkling language (Inklish, as you call it) here, and we could appreciate your talents and contributions. It's not meant to be strictly accurate to the game (as we've decided what the game has is just there for flavor), but it should still be consistent and speakable!
Anyway, we appreciate you coming here and hope you have a great time! Stay fresh!
цııര=៲
Inkling
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- AiMeilian
In an effort to further Inklish linguistic study, I've made a chart of Inklish syllables. Be warned, it and the accompanying notes are long and written with a technical audience in mind 
Say fwaa!
Say fwaa!
PiyozR
Senior Squid
Welcome to the fray, цııര=៲! Nice to see another language nerd joining the effort!
As you can probably see, we've already built up and elaborated on our own Inkling fan language based on what very little info that game's gibberish could provide us. Your extensive and well-reasoned suggestion for spoken Inkling doesn't exactly fit with out own. Not that that stops it from being awesome. It's just that this community has already set up its language and now we're working on projects to help this fan project proliferate. If you want to have your own Inkish thing, go right ahead.
Here's a cool idea! Within the world of Splatoon we have the language of the Inklings and the language of the Octarians. If you'd like to collaborate with us, why don't we take your comprehensive list of phonetics and apply it to the Octarian language? Because I had no plans on actually doing it on my own. Why don't we scribble down every Octarian letter and apply your work to them? No sense in it going to waste. I'd be happy to work one-on-one with you on this. How about it?
EDIT: I noticed you mentioned voiceless velar stops and alveolar nasal stops. In my own language work, I've avoided using such technical terms as to not scare away Splatoon fans who may not know what that means. Using IPA doesn't seem to confuse anyone, I noticed.
As you can probably see, we've already built up and elaborated on our own Inkling fan language based on what very little info that game's gibberish could provide us. Your extensive and well-reasoned suggestion for spoken Inkling doesn't exactly fit with out own. Not that that stops it from being awesome. It's just that this community has already set up its language and now we're working on projects to help this fan project proliferate. If you want to have your own Inkish thing, go right ahead.
Here's a cool idea! Within the world of Splatoon we have the language of the Inklings and the language of the Octarians. If you'd like to collaborate with us, why don't we take your comprehensive list of phonetics and apply it to the Octarian language? Because I had no plans on actually doing it on my own. Why don't we scribble down every Octarian letter and apply your work to them? No sense in it going to waste. I'd be happy to work one-on-one with you on this. How about it?
EDIT: I noticed you mentioned voiceless velar stops and alveolar nasal stops. In my own language work, I've avoided using such technical terms as to not scare away Splatoon fans who may not know what that means. Using IPA doesn't seem to confuse anyone, I noticed.
цııര=៲
Inkling
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- AiMeilian
Thanks, PiyozR!
As noted, I'm more interested in describing Inklish as presented so far by Nintendo, and piecing together what little we can from semi-random gibberish Not a critique of your efforts at all -- I just have different aesthetic and intellectual proclivities.
That said, even one "language" can show many different faces. On the one hand, there are dialects: sharing enough similarity as to still be intelligible to speakers of other dialects, though with their own sound rules and vocabulary. And on the other hand, there is the idea of linguistic register: specialised vocabulary for specific social situations.
Japanese of course has examples of both. Kantou-ben (the regional language in and near Tokyo) and Kansai-ben (in and near Kyoto) are about as far apart as, say, Caribbean and British English. (Despite being an OK Japanese speaker at the time, I was nearly stumped by the language I heard when I visited Nara!) Japanese is famous for its registers, too, namely its "honorific" and "humble" vocabulary sets. Wikipedia has really good examples for those interested. Not to mention the changes that occur in any language over time!
Could it be we're describing two different dialects or registers of Inklish?
Say fwaa!
As noted, I'm more interested in describing Inklish as presented so far by Nintendo, and piecing together what little we can from semi-random gibberish
Not a critique of your efforts at all -- I just have different aesthetic and intellectual proclivities.That said, even one "language" can show many different faces. On the one hand, there are dialects: sharing enough similarity as to still be intelligible to speakers of other dialects, though with their own sound rules and vocabulary. And on the other hand, there is the idea of linguistic register: specialised vocabulary for specific social situations.
Japanese of course has examples of both. Kantou-ben (the regional language in and near Tokyo) and Kansai-ben (in and near Kyoto) are about as far apart as, say, Caribbean and British English. (Despite being an OK Japanese speaker at the time, I was nearly stumped by the language I heard when I visited Nara!) Japanese is famous for its registers, too, namely its "honorific" and "humble" vocabulary sets. Wikipedia has really good examples for those interested. Not to mention the changes that occur in any language over time!
Could it be we're describing two different dialects or registers of Inklish?
Say fwaa!
PiyozR
Senior Squid
I'm 100% sure it's all gibberish. That's been our consensus since the game came out. That's why we started from the ground up.
OctagonalKahn
Inkster Jr.
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- otagonalkahn
I know we determined that the spoken language is gibberish, but when doing the amiibo challenges, the characters seemed to talking as the text was scrolling, kinda like how the villagers talk in Animal Crossing.
Mitt Romney XIIV
Inkling
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- Jun 24, 2015
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This might sound ridiculous, but what if the text is a semi-syllabary, like some of the paleohispanic languages used?
цııര=៲
Inkling
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- AiMeilian
Actually I'm only convinced that the written language is gibberish (or at least inconsistently mapped to the spoken language). This is excluding the clearly procedural dialogue, such as performed by Crusty Sean and the other shopkeepers.
Obviously some of the Squid SIsters' dialogue is canned and repurposed with different meaning, but not always inconsistently. E.g. something that Marie often says that sounds kind of like /yamamas kedou/ (don't have my notes handy ATM) is always glossed as 'great' or 'sweet' or 'splatastic' or the like.
That said, while I do doubt that spoken Inklish is a full-on conlang that can be deciphered, it does seem to have clear phonetic rules and processes it obeys. That's why I'm partial to working within that framework and teasing out as much as we can therefrom. YMMV
Say fwaa!
Obviously some of the Squid SIsters' dialogue is canned and repurposed with different meaning, but not always inconsistently. E.g. something that Marie often says that sounds kind of like /yamamas kedou/ (don't have my notes handy ATM) is always glossed as 'great' or 'sweet' or 'splatastic' or the like.
That said, while I do doubt that spoken Inklish is a full-on conlang that can be deciphered, it does seem to have clear phonetic rules and processes it obeys. That's why I'm partial to working within that framework and teasing out as much as we can therefrom. YMMV
Say fwaa!
eli
Senior Squid
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- frozenpandaman
Me too. However, the spoken language has also been confirmed to be gibberish by Nintendo. Listen to the Squid Sisters songs or other voices and you can see this. Furthermore, looking at the ripped sounds from the datamine, Callie and Marie's speech is randomly stringed short voice clips – so, gibberish, unfortunately.
Lavender
Inkling
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- Jul 15, 2015
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I've actually been looking through this thread over the past few days collecting resources for my little project thing, and I've been wondering about how they might have made the language. It's entirely possible that what they have is a list of official characters they use in game to represent actual text. From what I've seen in game, it seems to be a mishmash of mangled Japanese, Korean and Cyrillic (Russian script) and possibly some other scripts I'm not able to recognise. My thought is this, Japanese uses three different modes of writing, Hirigana, Katakana and Kanji. I've seen a lot of characters being used maybe only once throughout the games graphic assets, so what intrigues but also terrifies me, is that in the graphics department they might have decided to put together a list of Kanji used in game, and swapped what they look like for a made up character. Which means a character, even if we could prove it was kanji, could be one of over 2000.
This is all just hypothetical, but it's something I can't shake out my mind. Another thought of mine is that we are inherently terrible at randomness, so replacing actual words and sentences would end up looking more natural in a made up script rather than trying to totally improvise, not to mention it makes it way easier to churn out graphic assets when you have an agreed system in place for a whole department to draw from. It creates consistency, without people accidentally using the same exact set of characters and creating assets that look too similar.
I dunno. Just some thoughts. I know ever translating it is wishful thinking, but speculating on potential systems the game/graphic designers may be using is fun.
This is all just hypothetical, but it's something I can't shake out my mind. Another thought of mine is that we are inherently terrible at randomness, so replacing actual words and sentences would end up looking more natural in a made up script rather than trying to totally improvise, not to mention it makes it way easier to churn out graphic assets when you have an agreed system in place for a whole department to draw from. It creates consistency, without people accidentally using the same exact set of characters and creating assets that look too similar.
I dunno. Just some thoughts. I know ever translating it is wishful thinking, but speculating on potential systems the game/graphic designers may be using is fun.