For Fans Seeking Community, Nonsense Starts the Conversation

The use of Klingon as shorthand for “nerd” has become such a well-worn device in pop culture and entertainment that the website TV Tropes has a page dedicated to making fun of it. This stereotype is not without merit: Klingonists are a notoriously academic bunch and tend to identify more closely with the study of the language than with “Star Trek,” its source material.

In the context of fandom, the mention of most any constructed language — called a conlang, for short — may summon similar imagery of monastic fans, poring over their Elvish or Dothraki texts and exchanging inscrutable phrases to affirm their shared commitment to the same book or film franchise.

But the linguistic arena of modern fandom includes outright gibberish, too: There’s the gobbledygook spoken by the Minions in the “Despicable Me” series, the mix-and-match nonsense of the Sims known as Simlish, and the sped-up burble of phonetic syllables in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing called Animalese. Technically, none of these on-screen inventions qualify as true constructed languages, but fan phonologies persist. See: a voice actress speaking Simlish as different celebrities on TikTok; an open-source English to Minionese translator.

Should these experiments be dismissed as failed conlangs, which for lack of any real linguistic refinement can’t hope to make themselves useful? Or are we entering fandom’s Dadaist era: utter nonsense, served up in the name of something real?

Conlangs are said to have begun with Hildegard von Bingen, a Christian mystic in 11th-century Germany, who invented her own language as a way to commune with the divine. In the centuries since, the ambitions of the most popular conlangs have been similarly metaphysical: L.L. Zamenhof created Esperanto because he dreamed of a common language that could promote world peace; Sonja Lang created the minimalist Toki Pona in an attempt to “understand the meaning of life in 120 words.”

For fans of media properties, however, speaking an unknown language tends not to be about better understanding the world we live in, but about escaping it altogether. In a video essay that traced the evolution of constructed languages in gaming, Jenna Stoeber, a writer and content creator, explained that “constructed languages were more about making certain characters and settings appear foreign, while still empowering the player to understand what they’re saying.”

I reached out to Ms. Stoeber, since she flits regularly among fandoms at Comic Cons and PAX West panels to discuss her work, and asked her why fans tended to be drawn to speak certain constructed languages over others.

“The world that that language is spoken in is this whole universe,” Ms. Stoeber explained. “By speaking that language, you’re making yourself a participant in that universe.”

If, like interviewees who dress for the job they want, fans who speak constructed languages are talking for the world they wish to inhabit, then it’s conceivable to imagine such escapist desires settling on the controlled reality of the Sims or the whimsical utopia of Animal Crossing. And lofty as these aspirations may seem for the fans bopping along to Katy Perry’s “Lass Frooby Noop” or perfecting their K.K. Slider covers, they make for great conversation.

Mae Belen, a voice actor from Vancouver, British Columbia, feels certain that she’s talked to someone in Animalese before.

“A lot of people don’t realize it comes with a lot of understanding when you pay attention to the inflections,” Ms. Belen said, “rather than what the person is saying.”

Ms. Belen, 28, has played Animal Crossing since it was on the Gamecube console in the early 2000s, and she grew up mimicking the voices in the game; only now, she has a rapt online audience of 1.3 million on TikTok. When we spoke, she recounted the times she had been recognized by strangers on the street who wanted to exchange notes in Animalese.

“After the conversation,” she said, “we would say something like: ‘I was saying this. What were you saying?’ ‘Oh my gosh, I was saying the same thing!’”

To a lay person, this anecdote may seem beyond belief. And let’s not mince words — no human can actually match the speed of the characters in the game, who are speaking with digitally accelerated phonemes of orthographic text which, if slowed down, sound like the voices of “Twin Peaks” characters from inside the Black Lodge.

Samara Bradley, too, prefers not to get caught up in the details. An avid fan of the Sims since she was 5 years old, Ms. Bradley, now 27, performs popular songs on TikTok that feature alternating lyrics — the first line in English, the second in Simlish.

“I just try to base it off of what I think the Sim language sounds like to me,” Ms. Bradley said when we spoke. What did the language sound like to her? “English, but goofier.”

For both Ms. Bradley and Ms. Belen, perfection isn’t the point. They just love getting audiences to suspend their disbelief in the way these games have allowed them to do.

“That’s a skill I didn’t realize was a skill,” Ms. Belen observed of her talent, which she attributed to having experimented with gibberish as a child in order to mimic fluency in other languages. “But it is something to make it more cohesive and believable.”

Logan Kearsley, a linguist whose blog covers the best-known conlangs of various books, television shows and film series, remained skeptical of just how far the collective belief in a nonexistent language could be taken.

“If you want to use a conlang to attract a community of speakers, it must be figure-out-able,” he wrote to me in an email. “And that means there must be consistent rules behind the scenes to allow you to construct consistent utterances for the fans to then analyze and figure out. Without that you essentially get Simlish.”

While he acknowledged that languages like Simlish and Animalese could be used to “convey emotion,” he stopped short of calling them conlangs and said that they couldn’t be used to “convey precise linguistic propositions.”

And yet, as the success of Ms. Belen’s efforts affirms, humans have an uncanny ability to pluck sense from a bramble of nonsensical sounds. The kiki/bouba effect, for example, shows that people can nearly unanimously categorize a pair of shapes, words or abstract concepts as either the spiky kiki or blobby bouba; Jean Berko Gleason’s Wug Test finds that children reliably apply common morphemes to nonsensical creatures (they begin by pluralizing the birdlike “wug”).

The most significant metric of success for Simlish, Animalese, Minionese and their ilk may not be in how much they can be made sense of, though. It may simply be a question of our own tolerance for nonsense.

By this measure, it’s tens across the board: Take, for example, the explosive #GentleMinions meme, which led droves of teenage boys to step out in their junior-prom best to see “Despicable Me 3: The Rise of Gru” and its Minionese-speaking henchmen in theaters. Look at how PinkyDoll’s “Ice Cream So Good” drone captivated the internet with what many have described as the dialogue of an NPC, or nonplayer character, in a video game — the meaningless, made mesmerizing.

Modern fans certainly don’t seem to need to understand what’s going on in order to care. If anything, the motto lately is: the less we get, the better.

For Ms. Bradley, nonsense has yielded something tangible, too: What began as a pandemic-era hobby has blossomed into a reliable means for the Los Angeles-based musician to promote her music. Observing Ms. Bradley’s nearly 400,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, I had to marvel. Maybe the real conlang was the friends she had made along the way.

“Most of the people who do listen to my music are from that,” she said, referring to her Simlish videos. “And I get people saying, ‘I came for the Simlish, but I stayed for the music.’”

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro.