Spring4Sims – The Best Finds, Downloads & Hints for Your Sims

Anyone who saw Pingu, Swiss animated-plasticine serial, knows its main charm is the dialogue that sounds like mixing European languages together. If we think a little about it we can notice that it’s because of the fact that the way of interpretation is very emotional and so it simple attracts people, so there’s no need to make translations. Will Wright, the creator of The Sims, also wanted to make Sim language full of emotions but he didn’t want to use existing languages. Why? People wouldn’t like to play the game with written scripts – it would decrease using of their imagination.

Simlish is a language that actually wasn’t made of existing languages as many of us might think. Creators experimented with Ukrainian (one of the original The Sims designers was a native speaker), Tagalog, the language of The Philippines, and Navajo, Indian language from America, inspired by code talkers of World War II. None of these languages were used even though they were studied.

It is sometimes called “grammelot” – a form of theatre invented by comics from the Commedia dell’Arte that has its origin in the European Culture in the XIVth century. Playwright Dario Fo created this sound-language from modern Italian phonemes and dead dialect from the Po region of Italy). But French and English grammelots were made by translations for foreign audiences.

Simlish almost could be compared with some other contemporary languages as Klington which was created for Star Trek, or Taelon, created for television show Earth: Final Conflict. Those fictional languages became real: they have their own syntax, grammar and its own dictionary. That means people can learn them. Simlish does have a small vocabulary of words that repeats in game, such as chumcha for pizza, nooboo for baby and sool-sool for goodbye, but they appear randomly; Simlish still doesn’t have conditions to be a real language – it doesn’t have a syntax and grammar.

After all the trying and studying of existing languages, the developers decided for improvisation, originated and performed by SF Bay Area professional actors Stephen Kearin and Gerri Lawor. There were chosen nine actors performing all the range words: baby, toddler, child, adult and elder. The auditions were held January through May 2003 with over 100 actors from SF and LA trying out. There was selected a highly talented cast and they were quickly get to work recording many full 8 hour days, recording voice to over a hundred animations a day, resulting in thousands of takes a day. With such a huge amount of voice data – 40,620 samples at the moment the pre- and post-production processes have been streamlined to get the voice into the game so it can be listened to, assessed and either re-recorded (in rare cases) or hacked (constructed out of similar-sounding files).

Simlish has also affected many singers who participated on making music for The Sims game. Want to know more about how they liked it? Then stay tuned for the second part of the article.