🌍 NOVO NEWS #04: The Language of Novo and how it came to life!

Tiai amodi!

It’s Klas again, writer and co-director of Planet of Lana. Today I thought we’d dive into an aspect of Novo we haven’t really revealed much of yet, the language of Lana and the rest of its human inhabitants. Now be warned; as the origins of the native Novo-ites play a part in the story and wider world building, I can’t really go into too much detail of the origins of the language itself, but rather I’ll focus on our internal process for concocting it.

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Disclaimer 1: Neither myself nor anyone else on the team are linguists and definitely don’t claim to be. At the end of the day our goal was to make up a fantasy language that felt pleasant to listen to, and sounded like it could have evolved on an alien planet.

Disclaimer 2: While we did our best during the language process to come up with unique words and make sure they didn’t overlap with phrases in existing languages (especially potentially offensive ones), there are over 6500 languages spoken on earth. So please know that any such instances are wholly incidental and not intentional by any means.

Now, let the transparency-vs-spoiler-tight-rope-act commence!

The Language of Lana

As my co-director Adam wrote in the first edition of Novo News, the creative process that birthed Planet of Lana goes back to the very first key art that he painted almost 6 years ago:



What really struck me the first time I saw this image was all the questions it provoked in my head; ”What is this place? Who is this girl and her little fur-ball friend? And what is the strange robot doing up on that rock? It doesn’t look like it belongs. Why isn’t the girl hiding in the grass or running for her life? Is that a subtle look of defiance in her body language? Curiosity?”

For a writer of course, that kind of visual provocation is gold. In my last post I touched briefly on the minimalist mindset that shaped the narrative of the game, but thinking back on it now, it really was the equal parts of “said” and “unsaid” in that picture that inspired this approach from the get-go.

For the first year or so of writing and pre-production that very approach meant that we planned on not having our characters speak at all, but rather just communicate with body language and perhaps some subtle grunts and noises. As the story grew in complexity however, we quickly realized that we would need one more layer of expression to tell the story effectively. Enter; The Novo-language.



The first part of building the language was to figure out who the people are that speak it. The planet’s inhabitants lead simple, and by modern standards, rather primitive lives. This in combination with the fact that we decided early on we would not include any subtitles but instead infer meaning from context and allow players to figure out key phrases to slowly piece together the language themselves, it felt logical to keep things fairly simple.

The easiest place to start was of course the one word we already had:

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“Lana”

There is nice simplicity in the name of our heroine; A melodic consonant vowel consonant vowel structure that felt as good a place as any to start building on. From there we allowed ourselves the luxury of the inverse as well-meaning vowel consonant vowel etc. etc. So, we moved on with the words we knew we had to come up with to make the game work; The commands that Lana uses to control Mui. After a lot of just saying random words according to our arbitrary rules, the first one (that just felt right) ended up being:

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“Ima” = Stay/Stop

And:

“Olai” = Come here.

And then a slight variation on both, but still in a way that made sense with the foundation we had:

“Kialo” = To do something/Perform an action

And finally:

“Pama Ki” = Go there.

Moving on from the Mui mechanics, we decided a natural next step would be a greeting phrase, that we just found melodically pleasing, positive, and something that would be hard to say without smiling (go ahead and try!).

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“Tiai” [tee-aye] = Hello

To begin laying a cultural foundation for the people and their language, we then added a more colloquial title that could be used to address a stranger in an affectionate, respectful manner. The idea being that there is an underlying cultural assumption of kinship/friendship with whomever you encounter:

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“Tiai lang no” = Hello stranger/someone”

And then a simple introduction phrase,

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“Ona Lana” = I’m Lana.

Now, with these basic phrases at our disposal, we already had a pretty solid foundation to start building on. Throw in a couple of filler words for “and”, “for”, “in” etc. and it’s amazing what you can start constructing. I was personally surprised how just coming up with a few basic phrases really opened the door to develop more. It felt almost like a musical exercise where once we had found the basic melody and rhythm, the rest came easy.

There is also something to be said about language and inferring meaning from sounds on a human level. Some words just seem to sound like what they mean, even if you don’t know the word per se. The word “Ima” turned out to be a perfect example of this, as someone pointed out in the comments of the first gameplay footage we released, that “Ima” actually means “stop” in Zulu language. Of course, we had no idea, we just instinctively thought it sounded appropriate. Who knows, perhaps there is something innate to language that we don’t fully understand? 🧐



The Voice of Lana

So having found our basic language structure and sounds, we quickly discovered that we needed an actress that spoke an earth-language with a compatible melody to our made up one. We tried out a couple of very talented young Swedish actresses but to no fault of their own, there was just something in the two languages that didn’t gel. The accents were simply not compatible.

Luckily, our talented sound designer Francesco Ameglio lives in a land with a language so melodic you’d think Vivaldi himself wrote it. You guessed it, Italy 🇮🇹. So, one day Francesco strapped a field recorder on and went to the Liceo Coreutico Teatrale Germana Erba in Torino to hold some open auditions. And wouldn’t you know it, the geographical change was just what was needed! Listening to voice after blessed voice had us wondering if Fran had actually just gone to Novo itself to hold auditions. While everyone who participated did extraordinarily well, one young lady named Bianca Zoe Mantelli stood out for us.



She had never acted professionally before but both me and Adam just knew instinctively that she was our Lana when we got the recordings. Over the coming months, we spent several studio sessions working with Bianca to record the performance of Lana and we couldn’t be happier with the results. We also learned that the studio we recorded at were so impressed with her that they hired for other jobs as well!

OK that’s it for this time! Keep an eye out for our next "Novo News" that will focus on the ACTUAL melody of Novo, the soundtrack, and its creator Takeshi Furukawa.

Till next week!
Klas


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