Does Orkish Sound Evil? Perception of Fantasy Languages and Their Phonetic and Phonological Characteristics.
Christine Mooshammer, Dominique Bobeck, Henrik Hornecker and 4 others
PMID 38018568WHAT IT FOUND
German listeners judged fictional languages by sound alone, preferring those with familiar phonemes and voicing.
Klingon and Dothraki sounded evil, but Orkish sounded pleasant, contradicting its design. This shows aesthetic judgments rely on similarity to the listener's native language, not just inherent harshness.
Key findings
01Listeners rated languages with more non-German sounds as more unpleasant, evil, and aggressive, while those with more voiced sounds were rated more positively.
02Klingon and Dothraki were rated negatively as intended, but Orkish and Khuzdul were rated more positively than their designers intended.
03The female speaker's stimuli received more extreme ratings, with Elvish languages rated more positively and Klingon rated more negatively compared to the male speaker.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study used only three sentences per language, which may not represent the full phonological system of each conlang. Participants were exclusively native German speakers, so findings about 'foreign' sounds are relative to German phonotactics and may not generalize to other languages. The study could not fully control for participants recognizing some stimuli, though most were unidentified. Only two speakers produced all stimuli, so differences between male and female ratings may reflect individual voice characteristics rather than gender effects.
Declared interests
The authors declared no financial support for the research, authorship, or publication of this article.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that 'harsh' phonetic features like gutturals or stops universally cause negative perceptions. The study found that sounds familiar to the listener's native language (German) were rated more positively, and that Orkish, despite its intended harshness, was rated as pleasant, likely because its sounds were not 'foreign' to German speakers.