The Hallowspeak Project is an ongoing endeavour by The Hallowspeak Team to construct a conlang based on the language written and spoken by the bugs in the game Hollow Knight.
What is a conlang?
The word “conlang” is short for “constructed language,” but it’s much more than one would expect at first glance. Many people who don’t know about conlangs often think that they’re just replacing each letter in English with a different symbol.
However, this is far from the truth. Creating symbols and then substituting them into a pre-existing language is called a cipher, which is not a conlang at all. A conlang has its own words and rules, as well as its own grammar. It is a complete and independent language.
How does Hallowspeak work?
Firstly, how Hallowspeak doesn’t work: Hallowspeak is not a translation of the in-game dialogue and lore tablets. The voice lines from the characters in Hollow Knight, and the lore tablet sprites, are all gibberish made-up by the voice actors and artists, and not an actual language. Because of this, we always use the terms “reconstruct” or “create based on…” to describe The Hallowspeak Project.
But of course, even in random gibberish, you can still find patterns. And that is what Hallowspeak is. We find patterns in the gibberish and then try to explain them the best we can, using scientific linguistics knowledge. This lets us construct a realistic language that fits the voice lines in-game as closely as possible.
FAQ
Who is The Hallowspeak Team?
The Hallowspeak Team is a group of about 10 passionate linguists, and also great friends :D Our Members are all around the world: with people from 5 different countries working together to make Hallowspeak a reality. Our skill levels range from near beginners, to those who have been studying linguistics for over 5 years. Above all, we’re just a group of friends who met over this wonderful game, and want to create a fully working language based on it!
Where can I find the current progress?
The working document with our progress isn’t currently available to the public. This is because it is still very messy and unfinished: there are many missing suffixes and new theories that are only half-proven. As soon as we get the Project to a more stable place where we’ve figured out all the suffixes and grammar rules, we’ll publish an official reference grammar for everyone to use!
This is also to prevent people from using a work-in-progress form of Hallowspeak, only to have the Hallowspeak in their work become wrong when we go back and change things with new evidence. We wouldn’t want anyone’s hard work to become obselete.
For now though, everyone is totally free to ask to see anything we currently have: dictionary, verb suffixes, etc. You can ask on The Shellwood Ordeal discord server!
How can I help out?
The best way to show support for The Project is to share it around! The more people are aware of Hallowspeak, the more motivated we become to pursue this goal; and of course, the more people will eventually be able to learn the language of the bugs in Hollow Knight!
If you want to help out by sharing any ideas or findings you have about Hallowspeak, then the best place to do that is The Shellwood Ordeal discord server!
Can I join the Team?
We aren’t currently looking for more members, but that doesn’t mean the Team is completely closed! However, rather than applying to join, new members show their interest and knowledge to us directly by participating in discussions on The Shellwood Ordeal discord! If we see someone there who’s active and would be a great help in the Team, we reach out to them and ask if they want to join.
Why hasn’t there been a reddit post in so long?
For those unaware, the original place that Hallowspeak was posted was reddit, back in the very early days of the Project. Now, the Project is changing so frequently that we don’t feel it would be a good idea to create a reddit post, only for that post to then become obselete as we discover new information.
Once the Project reaches a more stable place, perhaps when a first version of a reference grammar is complete, we’ll post about that!
If you saw the old reddit posts, but didn’t even know we were still working on Hallowspeak check here for some catch-up!
Did Team Cherry really make a whole language?
No, Team Cherry did not make a real language for Hollow Knight. The voice actors for the game were just told to make random gibberish sounds, and the lore tablets were simply designed to look cool.
This is why we always use words like “reconstruct”, rather than “decipher”. There is no language actually there to decipher! What we do is apply real-world linguistic analysis techniques to the voice lines from the game, and create a language that can explain them realistically.
How does the alphabet work?
The alphabet that you may have seen was from the old reddit posts, and before I explain them I need to make clear that they are severely outdated. The Hallowspeak Project has changed so much since those old reddit posts, and the alphabet shown in them is no longer correct at all.
Now that’s been cleared up, I can explain how the old Version 3 Hallowscript worked. Hallowscript was not an alphabet by the strict linguistic definition. It was more of a loose abugida, meaning the vowel symbols go around or attach to the consonants.
The different systems of the old Hallowscript caused a lot of confusion. System 1 was for inanimate things, and System 2 was for animate things. We knew that the spoken Hallowspeak language had an animacy distinction, so we used that to explain why there were so many unique-looking symbols in the lore tablets: every letter had multiple forms. However, we now know that this was wrong, and the grammatical animacy of Hallowspeak doesn’t affect the letters of Hallowscript.
I want to learn Hallowspeak!
Unfortunately, you won’t be able to actually learn Hallowspeak for a very long time. There is still loads more work to be done before Hallowspeak is at a point where you can learn it and speak it like other languages. Currently, many grammatical bits are unfinished or undiscovered, so there are some things you just completely can’t say yet!
The documents containing Hallowspeak’s progress are also only available to Members of the Team, since we still work in them and so they are very messy. However if there’s any part of it you’d want to see, we’d be happy to show you over on The Shellwood Ordeal discord.