Suul-suul all.

When the game was new, people enjoyed posting phrasebooks. Yet still I feel the language is under-studied, and I would like to kick off a discussion amongst listeners of Simlish. ("Why not speakers of it?", you may ask. But the total number of voices in the game is tiny, and they aren't on MTS. We are.)

I'm not posting this as a questionnaire or survey, because a less constrained discussion would befit the broad importance of this beautiful language. But to put things in motion, I do have a specific question I've lately been wanting to put to Simmers:

Ronnie's kick-off question: Especially if you're from somewhere other than North America -- does Simlish strike you as having an American accent, or as perhaps being like English in other ways?

(We know that it's produced by US-based voice actors, but I wonder how much the sound of Simlish owes to their personal accents, rhythms etc. I myself don't hear that accent, because I grew up in it.)

Yablarko,
Ronnie.

Yeah it has an American, specifically west coast American accent to it, but imo that's fine. Even if the language does feature some words from various real world languages, the words aren't exactly used in the same context, nor carry the same real-world definition to the Sims themselves.

As I've heard it said, linguistics is a descriptive science, not a prescriptive one

It has always sounded American to me but I've never really noticed any accent to it, though, or maybe I just haven't really paid any real attention to that.

I don't understand this reply. Simlish is a conlang (constructed language) - nearly the whole language is prescribed.

The sound inventory comes from the voice actors' native tongues because a concrete sound inventory has never been officially codified. They are, more-or-less, given a list of phrases to say spelled out and are left to their own devices.

My tongue-in-cheek reply was because we aren't in the position of prescribing it. So I agree with HarVee that the West Coast accent is okay, but that's partly because it has to be okay -- value judgments won't help us really. Thus we are more in the position of linguists than of, say, grammarians.
I believe they are given even less guidance than that! From what I've heard, the actors are asked to completely ad-lib the utterances for given situations, like "tell your boss you're quitting". A very few words and phrases are fixed -- like "chumcha" for pizza -- but even then, I don't believe they get much guidance on whether to pronounce it, e.g., "choom-chuh" or "chum-chah" or how.

Under that assumption, they are not reading from scripts but babbling, and we're hearing the results of a sort-of-linguistic production process on the voice actor's part. In that case it's fair to -- at least lightheartedly -- use the framework of linguistics when we discuss what we hear.

It has the same accent\sound inventory as American English, but the actual words don't really sound like English or any other language. You don't get "Alphes narp elkaction dunder." (which could potentially be English just very rare words) it's more of "Shusba bazoo kafufu gloo." They sound like cartoony gibberish.

The three voices have distinct accent but still American just three distinct feels. I'd love to replace them with realistic\semirealistic Georgian, Armenian, and Azeri words\sounds. It would be so cool.

As an American currently living in the UK I gotta say it yeah it sounds very American, and like very generic, suburban American at that.

In all honesty It always sort of bothered me that if I no matter what kind of sim I made, criminal from the wrong side of the tracks or a rough and tumble cowboy who lives on a rural farm and they just end up sounding like Bill from accounting every single time.

I Hope if they make a TS5 they have a bunch of different voice options from different people from all walks of life.

Also: Polygon actually has a pretty interesting video about video game voice synthesis that ya'll might be interested in. [LINK]

I should clarify that my question had spoken Simlish in mind.

The situation must be different for Simlish song, where EA performs a Simlification of existing lyrics. In that case the wording is, as @Alistair stated, completely prescribed by EA. Also in the case of a Simlified popular song, the singer obviously uses the same accent, prosody etc. as their original. [Link to Pixie Lott doing this]. I know there's plenty of good Simlish music that does not have a popular human-language source, but I wouldn't be surprised if in many cases there really was an English original unknown to us, that's been Simlified by the same process.

This, it seems to me, is susceptible of being studied for something like the statistics of different phonemes in Simlish as opposed to conversational English. For example, a testable hypothesis might be "Long/open vowels are more frequent in Simlish than English". (Three, not six?) Certainly this argues for coding & analyzing the voices separately (again, that's for spoken Simlish).
Yes it would!! What are some sounds that would signal you that you're listening to a Sim from one of those countries?

1) I think that the songs made for the game aren't really done with specific lyrics, more of a generic feel\meaning, and are usually not a professional singer but the actual voice actors for the voices themselves, as if it was actually them singing. Actually it would be a nice idea to have albums of whatever sims are in the music carreer or singing profession in each hood. Like the base game having albums where Bessie\Stiles\Zelda\Pauline sing and play music. And each expansion having the albums of the sims from each expansion. (Store sims' albums get added on patches) And if your sim is in the music carreer or singing profession they can get an album with their actual voice
But I literally mostly listen to instrumental music and almost never listen to music with a singer from my hometown. Sims 'hoods are much smaller and much less populated.

2) I think so. Also a lot of initial "sh", final "b", "bs", or "b+wowel". Like they're all shooba, sheebi, shuub, shaabs. Also, it's 3 voices per gender, each voice is both in the male and female counterparts. If you make a male and female Young Adult sims with the same voice number at the same pitch, they sound like male and female version of each other. The Zompist generator could be useful to create a Simlish.

3) Well, for one thing those languages are all from completely different language families, with Azeri being a rather recent arrival from Central Asia\Siberia, and thus not yet adapted to the regional sounds of the area. Armenian arrived in the area around 5000ish years ago from present-day South Russia, and is thus related to of course Russian but also many other languages through Europe, West Asia, and South Asia, including English, but it had several odd sound changes, such as "dw" in the ancestor language (Aryan or Proto-Indo-European) becoming "erk" in Armenian, which is then spelt erk (երկ, both Georgian and Armenian have their own alphabets, Azeri uses the "default" Latin Alphabet but in a slightly different way then European languages do. This is because indigenous Siberians and Central Asians were illiterate nomads. If they were part of a country\city it was because people from current European Russia had moved in mass there and built it first, not only current Siberia but also ancient Scythia Asiatica, Sogdia, Bactria, Margiana, and Chorasmia, with legendary cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara being once the Norilsk of their time.) but pronounced yerk. Hence the Armenian word for two is yerku. Armenian being such an old language also has a lot of borrowings from a lot ancient West Asian languages of various linguistic families. Georgian is as old as the people living in the area, being only related to a few Georgian regional languages such as Mingrelian, Svan, and Laz. Well, technically Laz is'nt spoken in Georgia but in a part of Turkey that used to be part of Georgia until recently, Turkish and Azeri are actually two dialects of pretty much the same language, with Azeri being only a little more distant to Turkish than it is to South Azeri which is spoken in Iran, and by more people than "regular" Azeri is. Until 1918, both Azeri and South Azeri were known as Eastern Turkish, or more properly, Azeri was Baku Turkish, South Azeri was Tabrizi Turkish, Turkish was Instanbul Turkish, and Turkmen back at home in Central Asia was Ashgabat Turkish.

So yes, three languages from three walks of life. An ancient prehistorical one, an ancient but close to recorded history one, and a semi-modern one. But yes, they sound very different from each other.

Georgian is more like: "P'tori nvark'i lt'ani mgorobrebi."
Armenian is more like: "Yerekhavan ranats kharsorutyun"
Azeri is more like: "Cerem olum ogolilar merem yot"

Turkish as I said above, would be very similiar to Azeri. Maybe one day hopefully Turkish will evolve to resemble Hittite and Azeri to resemble Caucasian Albanian, but that will be at least centuries from now.

Persian is also Indo-European, but while Armenian is its own branch, Persian is Iranic branch (Armenian was once thought to be Iranic too, since many of its words are from ancient Median\Old Persian) so it is slightly newer than Armenian but still quite ancient. The Iranic branch (and Indo-Iranic before it, Sanskrit came to current Pakistan from current Chelyabinsk Oblast) actually started off in South Russia and Central Asia. Eventually, but still fairly early in world history, Persia was West Iranic (which still seems to have started in Russia\Central Asia) while Ukraine (Sarmatia), Russia (Scythia. Even sort of the north and central federative districts. The Finno-Permic speaking peoples from there were known as Budini of Scythia by those living in the Roman Empire.), Central Asia (Scythia Asiatica, Sogdia, Chorasmia, Margiana, Bactria), and Afghanistan (Indo-Scythia). Eventually the East Iranics in Europe got assimilated by Turkics (Yes, like Azeri. The Pecheneg language in Ukraine was pretty much a sibling language of medieval Turkmen. Russia had at least two branches of Turkic: The one that became Chuvash, and the one the other present day Turkic languages belong to) and then Slavs, making Russian about as new as Azeri is. Most languages across Europe and West Asia are pretty new. Those in Central Asia got displaced by Siberians\Central Asians (mostly of the Turanid phenotype, so descent from present day Kyrgyzstan, Altai Mountains which also Turkic language urheimat, and\or around Baikal lake) and the few remaining Iranic Caucasoids in Central Asia got assimilated into Persians. The Soviet Union then decided to start writing the Central Asian dialect of Persian in Cyrillic, and renamed the cyrillic-Persian to Tajik. Parts of Indo-Scythia which got full of Siberians\Central Asians (our Hazaras and Aimaqs) also got assimilated into Persian language, and the Persian of South Asia became the Dari dialect. But the actual official language Afghan is still East Iranic and descended from Indo-Scythian. Meanwhile Ossetian in the Caucasus (including parts of Georgia that became Ossetian-speaking also fairly recently in West Asian history) is descended from Alan, a dialect of Sarmatian that arrived in the Caucasus early on. (Though the actual name Alan is from Breton). Back in Central Asia, Yaghnobi is descended from Sogdian, and Pamir from Bactrian. So they're actually all a big and ancient family.

Other than Ossetian, there are also really ancient languages on the Caucasus other than Kartvelic like Georgian, there is the Adyghe-Abkhaz or North Caucasian language family (Abkhaz which is another regional Georgian language and has been there since prehistory, plus a few on the Russian side, such as Circassian\Adyghe), and the Nakh-Dagestanian, such as Chechen, Avar (which a Khanate was actually named after since they were one of the most feared tribes in Scythia), Lezgin, and Udi, which is the descendant of Caucasian Albanian. And there are Turkic languages there too, such as Nogai.

So yeah the area is very linguistically complex and varied. There's a bit of a rivalry between the speakers of the newer languages and the speakers of the older ones, much like in the Balkans.

So, for a nice "EP pack" (or comparison) to the Caucasus language voices:

Persia and the Caucasus actually are very connected\interrelated to each other, in culture, history, and genetics. While Armenia instead is more interrelated to Turkey. But all of the bunch is actually very similiar to each other cuz they're all Northwest Asian after all. Turkish and Azeri are dialects of the same so I did'nt include Turkish.

Abkhaz sounding: "Aznaakshoup patalaj pitsh zygashoup"
Ossetian sounding: "Bӕrӕhi furn anӕcin tamiz lӕn"
Circassian sounding: "shərryg nyshəg bəshhyg yrrjə"
Chechen sounding: "Hoza tshont alil ozara mishpeg"
Persian sounding: "Hӕmir bӕshiri mӕrӕjand lӕtamӕr"

To save space I think that it would be better to roll both North Caucasus groups into one Simlish (have one Simlish to reprecent both Adighe-Abkhaz and Nakh-Dagestanian) and roll the Iranics also together. It seems like each branch has a "sound" of its own. We of course also hope that one distant century, South Russian and Ukrainian would end up sound Iranic. (North Russian would instead start sounding Finno-Ugric if anything )

It's not really a language since most of the 'words' don't have meaning and as far as I can tell, there is no grammar.
TS3 sounds very much like some version of American English to me while TS2 Simlish seems a lot more varied. I imagine hearing some kind of Spanish as well.

Mysims had some similarities to TS2 (same "generation") and sometimes sounded a bit japanese or korean. Makes sense since it was a bit anime styled and they dressed kinda J-fashion.

I believe the opposite will happen, I mean the speakers of those indigeneous languages will end up sound Russian/Ukrainian or speaking Russian and/or Ukrainian only in the future because of linguistic/cultural assimilation and globalisation. Their dialects will probably be quite distinct mainly in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary because of language contact but Russian and/or Ukrainian will still be considered more prestigious ones because these are the languages spoken by the majority of the population, lingua franca in the region. I know one regional difference in pronunciation of Russian is different patterns of vowel reduction in southern and northern dialects. However, IMHO it's still too little for speakers of Russian in those regions to sound Iranic or Uralic.

Anyway, whenever I listen to Simlish I have a sorta 'American feeling' to it although I can't say exactly what makes me feel so most of the time.

I believe I can hear this in Simlish song as well (Da Linnip, Mayzie Grobe, etc.) even though it's generated differently from the speech.
Just to clarify, are the word-final labials in this one typical for Abkhaz, or are they part of your hypothetical Simlification of that language?

Yeah of course since it's not only related to the actual "area", it's also related to what other languages they tend to interact with, like as a common second\third language, or the languages of its neighbors. Well and it's mostly random also related to the accents, but accents also kind of develop randomly. I don't really have the same accent as someone from the Roman Empire Sicily. But the medieval Sicilian accent is somewhat inbetween the Roman Sicily and modern Sicily accent, and the renaissance Sicilian accent is also somewhat inbetween the medieval and modern accent. Heck, the earliest recorded London accents did'nt sound anything like current London accents, they sounded kinda American if anything.

Like French, it sounds much different than both Italian and Spanish, but it does'nt really sound Celtic either, as it would if what I said was true... But that does'nt mean a descendant of French can't sound Celtic, anymore than a descendant of English or German or Hungarian or Turkish or Chinese or Swahili can't. After all is just a blip in time.

Also, the languages they tend to interact with may not even be originally from Earth. Because, well, aliens. Likely with a phonemic system much different than ours. What if they come to Earth, and assimilate a bunch of people, heck maybe the closest thing in that alien language to a B, actually finds its closest Earth phonetic equivalent in a E, or the closest thing to the U in Bunch sounds more like a N, making the substrate of "Bunch" more like "En'a" or something like that, with many wowels corresponging to consonants and viceversa. Maybe their mouth lends to strings like Pknmnpipnknsnskghkck or Oaoeoaaeoanoaoeieieauauaiao. Maybe it will be more extreme, like all wowels or all consonants. Maybe the words are conveyed in the tone and lenght, and the feel\meaning\intensity in the actual sounds, a la Morse Code. It IS an alien language. But now it's on Earth, and the aliens go away. This language is then influenced by Earth tongues and takes a lot for them. So you then have an Earth language where saying a stuff as you'd read it instead as it was a question, or if you're saying it excitedly instead of angrily, actually changes the grammatical meaning. This could eventually turn into tones, coupled with different wowels or consonants being associated with different parts of speech, and a lot of substrate and borrowings, with also many sounds being allophones, with different phonemes changing both what grammatical part it is, and in what way you're saying it. And if it's like in Hungary or Crimea or another place that does'nt really use tones, the tones get lost and turn into new non-allophonic phonemes. So words eventually get distinguished by their syllable patterns, with different sounds often turning it into a different grammatical part. Eventually the noun, verb, and adjective versions of the same word start to drift apart, and the language becomes more Earth-like. And let's say, a descendant of English or Spanish that ends up on Planet __._.'_.-_--?!_. would undergo the reverse process.

So yes, Mexican Spanish is more likely to evolve to resemble the languages of whatever planet gets colonized by Spain, than to mutate into Nahuatl-like phonetics due to it being a predestined landmass-related substrate. But it does'nt mean a descendant of Mexican Spanish can't resemble Nahuatl. Nor that the other planet does'nt have languages that phonetically resemble Nahuatl.

Out of all languages there, there could be a language that coincidentally evolved to resemble its precedessor, well more likely a ruler deciding to bring back phonetics. Like if I became president of Mexico and changed Mexican Spanish into its own language by giving it Nahuatl-like phonetics.



Abkhaz has a lot of -oup, -sh, -j (soft g) endings, with the only wowel ending being pretty much -i which is the usual ending in Georgian. So really it should be more of "aznaakshoup patalaj pitsh zygashoup." I did it really hastily I guess. It was a long post.

Distinctly Western in tone. Obviously created by and for American voice actors. Could pass for European too, if you're willing to think of Americans as some kind of discount Europeans.

Either way I'm as Western as they come so it never sounded exotic to me. It wasn't until I was in the Czech Republic this summer and noticed just how different the language sounded, even though I'd only travelled halfway across Europe, that I figured a Czech conlang would sound very very different from an American one. There is some overlap between American glibberish and Dutch glibberish due to the linguistic similarities. Especially watching something like Star Trek you hear a lot of alien names that just sound like weird old European ones. And if you go out into the country far enough, you start to notice a lot of the weird old farmers are actually aliens from the Beta Quadrant. So it checks out.

This is what I think of when I hear sims talk

https://youtu.be/257Cmj0s2q8?t=15

I really do not care what the accents or origins/etc. are, and I sure as heck am not interested in Susan Wainwright. We are back to that again? (Same poster with about third user name here?)

The only thing that matters to me is that I try to set the voices for the Sims I create to be as least IMO irritating, scratchy harsh to listen to.

@AGuyCalledPi, for native speakers of Polish Czech sounds funny and for native speakers of Czech Polish sounds funny. For example a Polish word szukam (I'm looking for) has a completely different meaning than a Czech false friend šukam (I'm fucking). A Czech word divka means 'a girl' but a Polish false friend dziwka means 'a whore'. To me Czech doesn't sound exotic because both Polish and Czech are Slavic languages. Despite many similarities, the two aren't mutually intelligible.

There is a really American feeling when a sim enters the hangar which came with Late Night and you can hear a rehearsal or part of a movie when a sim is inside the rabbithole. Those voices do sound American to me.

For me, exotic-ness has something to do with how 'r' is pronounced. Spaniards, French, and Germans each seem to produce it in different parts of their mouths (and this is part of the reason I have a terrible accent when I attempt French or German, though I can pull off a Spanish single 'r' fairly well.) When I listen to TS3 Simlish, the 'r's feel to me as not "exotic" in any way, but pretty much straight down the middle of a General American accent.

But on the subject of r's and l's -- there's one sound for which I have no good explanation which is nevertheless important to Sim culture, namely the soft "l" in "sul-sul" in the TS3 splash screen, eh?

That's the west coast American accent for you.

Yes it is western, and it's clearly more western than Czech, and often more western than Dutch.

And yes, some Star Trek\Klingon names do sound Slavic.

Actually, there was an episode where the crew pretended to be humans in 1930's New York, and Jadzia said her name was a Dutch name.



Yes I was the poster with the three names (Kaiko Espurr Mikkusu). I will put the Susan thing as its own post instead.



A retroflex lateral approximant?

Also I was thinking about surnames

In sims 1/2/4 most surnames are an English word or pun that describes the family, like the Curious family are... curious. Or they are just a funny words that isn’t really a surname and doesn’t really mean anything, like “Neengia”.

Meanwhile in sims 3 most sims have regular surnames, I know there are out of universe gameplay reasons for that, you’re supposed to be watching generations of premade descendants, and there are so many families that meaningful or simlish word surnames may get too old fast.

Could be, I guess. It's a shame we have so few samples of it and no video of how a person makes it.

Either that or voiceless

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voi...al_approximants