Throughout this website and our blogs, you will find Hallowspeak written down using the Latin alphabet (English letters). But of course, in the game, you never see this. So how do we know how to spell Hallowspeak words in English?
Well… we made it up! The Latin alphabet doesn’t even exist in Hallownest, so there wouldn’t even be a proper offical way to write Hallowspeak using it. But it would be really difficult and cumbersome to try and write all the words in Hallowscript, and it would make it harder for people to understand too!
That’s why we’ve created a romanisation: a way of using the Latin alphabet to write a language that doesn’t normally use it. This makes it way easier to talk about Hallowspeak and explain how it works!
However, the romanisation isn’t completely the same as English spelling! Hallowspeak doesn’t have the same sounds as English, so it can’t be written exactly the same. Mainly: “c”, “j”, “x”, and “y”.
- The letter C in Hallowspeak represents the “ch” sound in “chair”. Sometimes, you will actually see this written as “ch”, because whether we spell it “ch” or just “c” has always been a big disagreement in The Hallowspeak Team!
- The letter J in Hallowspeak represents the “y” sound in “yet”. This is similar to some other European languages like German or Scandinavian languages.
- The letter Y in Hallowspeak represents a sound that has a few pronunciaions. The pronunciation of this sound varies from a short unstressed “uh” sound, like the “e” in “system”; to a vowel like the ü in German. If you don’t know how to say that sound, try rounding your lips as you say “eeee”.
- The letter X in Hallowspeak is quite rare, and we’re not sure if the sound that it makes is unique, or just a different pronunciation of another sound. Nevertheless, it represents the “ch” sound in “loch”.
The vowels are also always pronounced the same, unlike English. For example, the word “name” (meaning “have”) in Hallowspeak is pronounced “na-meh”
Here’s a table, with IPA values too, for all the linguists who feel like dying after those non-linguistic explanations.
Also, note those letters with a slash between them. They’re like that in the table because we’re still not actually sure yet whether Hallowspeak distunguishes them. For example, p and b might be separate sounds, or just two versions of the same sound in Hallowspeak. Until we figure it out, we always just write those pairs how we hear them.
| Romanisation | IPA | Closest in English |
| m | /m/ | mouse |
| n | /n/ | nose |
| p / b | /p/~/b/ | spin*, big |
| t / d | /t/~/d/ | twist*, dog |
| k / g | /k/~/g/ | skin*, glass |
| c | /t͡ʃ/ | chair |
| sh | /ʃ/ | short |
| f | /f/ | fish |
| v | /v/ | video |
| s | /s/ | start |
| z | /z/ | zebra |
| x | /x/ | loch |
| h | /h/ | him |
| w | /w/ | wish |
| l | /l/ | long |
| r | /ɹ/~/ɾ/ | ring |
| j | /j/ | yes |
| a | /a/ | start |
| e | /e/ | dress |
| i | /i/ | fleece |
| o | /o/ | thought |
| u | /u/ | goose |
| y | /y/ ~ /ə/ | system |
Now you can read the Hallowspeak text around this site!