Language: Gnoll

I don't know about y'all, but when I'm naming NPCs and villages and whatnot, I tend to get kind of obsessive about doing it “right". Slapping together a bunch of phonemes until it sounds thematically correct just doesn't work for me. In the past, I've used the strategy of picking a real language, applying some simple sound changes, and using that, so the names can always mean something and have some linguistic consistency. (For instance, the fallen civilization of the reptilian peoples spoke a fricative-heavy version of Hittite.)

This has never worked right for gnolls. I mean, they're hyena-people, so it just feels weird to go, “okay, gnolls speak Portugese" -- gnoll speech should sound like growls and whoops, not like human speech. My general practice has been to just transcribe sounds my dog makes, which gets pretty close, but it's still kind of haphazard and I don't end up with words that mean anything.

So I've decided to fix that. I figure I can throw together a simple grammar & phonology, generate a list of random Gnoll words, and then pull vocabulary from the Swadesh list and stuff that I think is probably relevant to gnoll society. Then I'll be able to generate names for gnoll NPCs, tribes, & whatnot and have them actually mean something and be internally consistent. And I'll put it up here in case anyone else is as weird and obsessive as I am about this sort of thing.

If you just want the final result, here’s the PDF.

The rest of this post is self-indulgent rambling about the reasoning behind the choices I made designing the language.