FirstAdopter.com: Jade Empire Speaks a Real Made-up Language

April 20, 2005

Jade Empire Speaks a Real Made-up Language

Bioware actually paid an linguist $2000 to create a brand new Asian sounding language with a real vocabulary and alphabet for the game Jade Empire. $2000 for a whole new language? A bargain. The dude has already created four more languages for Bioware's future epic, Dragon Age. I hope he was able get a bit more money for those.

He invented an alphabet and began making words, 50 a day and then 200. "Person" would be "uyu" (pronounced OO-yoo). Blood was "kawisrihr" (caw-wee-SHEER). Some words were inside jokes: Rabbit was "punihrapith" (POO-knee-raw-peeth). Similarly, the word for "director" was "wankaawayi," sounding somewhat like Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong film director.