Simlish? Yes, it’s true: the mega-popular interactive The Sims computer game has actually spawned its own strange tongue. It’s called, appropriately enough, Simlish, and Sims fanatics everywhere are rapidly turning it into a viable virtual language. What is Simlish exactly? Simlish is a fictional language that was created in the Sims franchise games. A company called Maxis puts out the games. The first time Simlish made its appearance in one of the Sims games was in SimCopter. Simlish, however, has also been prominently featured in The Sims and The Sims 2. If you listen carefully, you can also hear Simlish being spoken in SimCity 4. Other games have also made good use of this growing language. For instance, non-Sims games such as the Firaxis game Sid Meier’s SimGolf also use a bit of Simlish in their game play.

How did Simlish come into being? When the Sims games were first being developed, the designers saw the need for dialogue in the game. The designer, Will Wright, knew that dialogue would be used in the game, but he didn’t want to burden the Sims characters with repetitive dialogue, as is usually the case in most computer games. He wanted something more vibrant and less static. This is where Simlish came into play. The voice actors who were working on the Sims are credited with actually giving voice to the Simlish language. These voice actors were Stephen Kearin and Gerri Lawlor. They were the voice team who were present during the design of the original Sims game.

The designers and voice talents that worked on the original Sims games decided to base this new virtual language on many real languages. They began to experiment with Tagalog, the language spoken officially in the Philippines. They also experimented with fragments of Ukrainian. They were also very inspired by the famous code talkers of the Second World War. These were the Navajo soldiers who created the unbreakable codes that could not be broken by the Japanese during the war. One of the original Sims creators, Will Wright, was interested in experimenting with the Navajo language, which many have feared will eventually be lost.

Even though many real-life languages inspired Simlish, most of the actual speaking part of it is improvised. Many Sims fans have noted that Simlish sounds a lot like baby talk. This is true: the game is more about expressive emotions and sounds than actual grammar and vocabulary. Simlish was created so that it could be more or less understood by any speaker of the language, new or advanced. The way that Simlish words are vocalized and delivered often resembles the sounds of other languages. For instance, Simlish often resembles the sounds of Latin, Italian, and Portuguese, and other non-Latin languages, including Irish, Czech, Dutch, Japanese and Greek. The way that Simlish sounds often depends on the speaker. The Simlish language seems to absorb the native language of the speaker.

Even though Simlish is almost completely improvised, the language still retains a remarkably consistent sound. In general, the vowels in the Simlish language tend to be emphasized more heavily than vowel in English. This is what is described as the ‘Latin’ sound of Simlish. There are many repetitions in Simlish, which makes the possibility of loose translations possible. For instance, here are few Simlish words that are considered pretty stable. Chumcha means pizza, or sometimes pizza delivery. Dag Dag means good-bye. Sometimes Soon-soon means goodbye as well. Nooboo refers to a baby. Shooflee is a sound made by charactes when they are distressed. Flibla means fire. Oonga! Oonga!, meanwhile, means that your Sim is hungry.

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