Sulsul! Here's a Brief History of Simlish
"F'bukin gah, bookie ma moo, bookie ma fooby fooby.
Ava cha zar, sikala fay beena sha shooby shooby."
-Carly Rae Jepsen (Run Away With Me lyric in Simlish)
Surely you know the strange language in The Sims, but do you really understand every words of it? When we play The Sims we completely don't understand what our Sims are saying to each other, or to us, yet we do know what they needed or how they feel. That means aside of being the unique identity of The Sims franchise, the strange language is successfully working as it was meant to be.
How Simlish Were Made
The Sims' language, or Simlish, was originally designed by Will Wright, the creator of The Sims. He wanted to create a language that spoken by the Sims to be unrecognizable but full of emotions so that it could still be understood by the player. Why didn't he just use English or other real life language? Because he thought it would cause the dialogue to sound repetitive, and also would be expensive to translate the entire dialogue of the Sims.
Wright and his team did experiment with fractured Ukrainian, Tagalog, and even the native American language Navajo. But eventually Wright and his team decided that it would be better to use an original, improvised, nonsensical language performed by two improv specialist, Gerri Lawlor and Stephen Kearin. That way, the meaning of whatever the Sims says would be left open for the player to construct and imagine their own stories without being specified and confined by an already-written narration. So Simlish is a fictional improvised language.
Despite being a made-believe language, they put a lot of careful planning to it that they held an audition to pick the best Simlish voice actors for The Sims 2 back in 2003 participated by over 100 actors from San Fransisco and Los Angeles, and there were only 9 actors chosen to voice the characters in all the age range from baby to elder, who were working on 8 hours day of voice recording over a hundred of animations a day.
Since then the Simlish is used in not only The Sims series, but we can also hear Simlish spoken in several other games in similar manner The Sims did, including SimCity games, Spore, and Sid Meier's SimGolf. But still more notable to be The Sims' original language.
The Simlish alphabet we see in the games is more complicated and seems to be total nonsense characters with almost no consistency, leaving them to be just some random lines. The letters looks similar to Latin or Cyrilic, but still (almost) no actual pattern from the real known alphabet are used. Well that's the purpose, right? Although there is no official dictionary for Simlish from Maxis, you can find the unofficial Simlish dictionary here, which I suppose it is approved to be the correct translations of Simlish.
They Even Get Musicians to Sing in Simlish
In case you don't know who these Sims resemble, click here.
Did you know that there is a lot of famous artists re-done their musics in Simlish, including Katy Perry, Pixie Lott, Paramore, Echosmith, My Chemical Romance, Zedd, Carly Rae Jepsen, and various other artists? Isn't it makes you wonder how did they convert their songs into the made-up language Simlish? Just as what it is, made up language, so they made them up.
According to the Senior Audio Director of The Sims Studio, Robi Kauker, many of the artists made their own form of Simlish when re-writing their songs, and also slip in some real words. So I think maybe.. The artists, the entire studio are actually do not know what to say and what to write until they start working on a project and the Simlish words are just made out of the blue(?)
But no matter how they made them, Kauker said that the singers are surprisingly loved it. I'll leave you with the Simlish version of Carly Rae Jepsen's Run Away With Me
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Cool little piece :) Simlish is a fun little language
Great post! Would you mind if I included it in today's "best of gaming"?
Would be glad if you include it, thank you!
With the unofficial dictionary you can actually learn it, if you are ready to step onto that level of geek lol.