Language: Lizardfolk

Depending on your edition preferences, you may be somewhat confused by the existence of this entry. In 3e and 5e (and, I'm forced to assume, 4e, but who cares about 4e), lizardfolk spoke Draconic. This is, I think, a result of efforts in 3e to simplify the number of languages floating around -- the 3e Players' Handbook lists exactly 20 “common languages" that a character can take, and those cover the vast majority of cases; then there are a few entries in the Monster Manual that give creatures their own languages.¹

The PHB languages are notably limited, though: seven are languages that a particular race or class starts with by default, like Dwarven; eight are languages spoken on other planes of existence, like Abyssal. The remaining five are Draconic, Giant, Gnoll, Goblin, and Undercommon. A lot of effort was made to ensure that players got their skill points' worth out of picking those languages, and creatures that formerly had their own language were pigeonholed into one of them for player convenience. This included the lizardfolk, who in AD&D had their own language, but now speak Draconic.

They also used to be called “lizard men", but we can leave that one behind.
Image from the AD&D Monstrous Manual.

In my campaign world, the “lizardfolk speak Draconic" thing is, in-universe, a common mistake. Their language is related to Draconic, but, importantly, the lizardfolk came first. It's just that the major civilizations have a healthy respect for dragons, and none for the primitives living out in the marsh, so they assume the lizardfolk borrowed the dragons' language rather than the other way around.

So, the language. As before, here is the completed PDF, and below this line, I will just ramble about the reasoning behind the decisions made in said PDF.

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.