As I post prompts for Conlang Year, I’m completing them, too, and starting a brand new language.
My Speakers
My speakers are inspired by the nisse (known by other terms, such as tomte and tonttu) of Nordic folklore and also by my love of garden gnomes. Wherever they originally came from, these nisse creatures view themselves as guardians of the earth’s resources, including things made from those resources. They care just as deeply about a wooden barn constructed from logs as they do about the trees growing in the forest. While they do not view themselves as guardians of animals, they do consider it their duty to make sure humans, in particular, are kind to animals.
They view themselves as teachers, of a sort, and their pupils are humans. Specifically, whoever owns the house or garden they choose to make a home in becomes their student. When they deem that the human has mistreated a resource or behaved unkindly toward an animal, they serve their own kind of justice. They may play a prank, such as rearranging the furniture, hiding keys, or making objects stand upside down, or they may serve “Aldren justice” (to steal a term from How I Met Your Mother) by taking something away. They are the primary cause of the single lost sock in households around the world.
They also reward what they consider good behavior, often by using their magic to help around the house, farm, or garden. They might complete chores for their human, like weeding a garden, baling some hay, washing dishes, cleaning the windows, or organizing a junk drawer, or they might help along the growth of a plant, add blooms to flowers, or lead local bees to specific flowering plants to make their honey even more delicious.
They are not particularly predictable in their rewards and punishments. What bothers them today may not bother them tomorrow, and what stands out as something to be rewarded right now may not stand out later on today.
They are a bit fickle, these nisse of mine.
Selecting speakers for a language is deeply personal and intertwined with larger goals for the language. For me and this particular language, it is not part of a larger creative project (like a book or script), so I get to choose details based on what I’m feeling in this moment. My choice boiled down to three things: (1) I like doodling conical-hat-wearing gnome figures, and I think it will be a lot of fun to doodle images to go along with my language descriptions; (2) this past year, I was introduced to the show Hilda, which is amazing and fun and features a Nisse named Tontu, which got me interested in learning more about the folklore behind the nisse; and (3) I really cannot understate how much I like gnomes and mythical creatures like them.
I also like situating speakers in a world similar to ones I know, whether that means they are literally part of my current world (which is where these nisse of mine will be living) or live in areas directly inspired by or based on ones I am familiar with (such as my Zhwadi speakers living in the woods of Missouri where I grew up—or a place very much like that area). A major reason behind that preference is that I rather enjoy looking at the world around me and asking, “How else could this world I’m seeing be described?” That’s essentially what conlang vocabulary creation is about—creating categories to describe the speakers’ world and their interactions with it and then assigning labels (i.e. word forms or word-like forms) to those categories.
I find more joy in creating new organizational systems than I do in creating a new world filled with fantastic beings and plants. That’s just a personal preference.
A final note is that some of the traditional folklore stories of nisse include violent tendencies and behaviors. I chose to make my speakers much more peaceful while retaining the spirit of the reward-and-punishment behaviors. That’s why my nisse just pull pranks. They do not harm or otherwise endanger humans, animals, or plant life. Heck, they don’t even harm the humans’ objects or possessions. They just take them or move them around! This decision is based on where I am right now, and right now I want humor and silliness rather than scariness and fear.
History
Legend has it that these nisse are the corporeal form of the Northern Lights. The Northern Lights became solid forms when they met the Earth’s surface, and these forms would frolic about until it was time to return to the sky. One night, some of those forms didn’t return to the sky before the lights separated from the earth, leaving them behind. Ever since that night, the lights haven’t returned to the surface but have stayed in the sky. The nisse left behind had to make a new home. They have thrived and multiplied and are now spread out across the globe.
Their proto-language is quite old, dating back to the time there was a single community living in the Arctic Circle in the area that is modern-day Finland. As they spread, their language shifted, and now there are many languages belonging to the “Nisse” family.
This year I’ll be creating and describing the branch of that language family that represents the community of nisse speakers that originally lived in areas where humans spoke Northern Germanic languages and migrated to settle in the suburbs of southern California.
Having a handle on where their proto-language began will play an important role in deciding what words should be represented by basic roots in the language’s vocabulary. I wanted to build a language with a longer history for this project to play around with more sound changes (leaving open a possibility to expand this project into a large language family, should I choose to do that) and to incorporate borrowings where I think the nisse would see reason to have a word for a concept that is best borrowed from the humans they live with (while they may not interact with their humans directly, they are around them enough to pick up on their language).
Appearance
The nisse are short (no taller than two feet), appear to be wearing a hat and tunic with mittens and boots, and have long white beard-like hair with large round noses. What appears to be clothing, though, is actually not clothing—those are part of their physical forms. Their magic allows them to change the color and general appearance of those areas (the portions that look like hats, tunics, mittens, and boots), but they cannot change their hair or nose colors. They can see and hear, yet they have no discernible eyes or ears, and their mouths are almost always completely hidden by their beards.
In other words, they look a whole lot like garden gnomes.
I am looking forward to thinking through the kinds of words they will have in their language to refer to body terms. Without assigning forms, the semantic breakdown of words I’m thinking of include these:
| NisseLang | Meaning | Human World Referents |
| word1 | head | hat, cap |
| word2 | hair | hair, beard |
| word3 | hand | mitten, glove |
| word4 | foot | boot, shoe, hoof |
| word5 | nose | nose |
| word6 | body | coat, dress, tunic |
For example, the word meaning “head” in the NisseLang will be used to refer to the hats and caps that humans wear (nisse do not wear such things because they’d cover up their natural, perfect, Northern-Light-formed beings). The nisse find humans to be very naked forms—after all, the nisse and the animals populating the world around humans don’t need to cover up to survive. So a human putting on a pair of mittens is, to them, like a human putting on a hand so they can get to work. A hand without a mitten is a very odd thing to them. That means the NisseLang will have different ways to, for example, refer to a human hand (they’ll probably have a compound or some common derivation for human body parts).
**Any time you see an arrow before text, that means you can click on it to expand for more information. Here, that means you can read the reasons behind my decision-making process. It allows me to give information without cluttering up the overview with all the behind-the-scenes information!