General Notes

Pronunciation

• Hylian pronunciation is a mix of Japanese and French.
• There aren’t any diacritical marks in this language because Fanfiction.net, which I’m cross-posting my fic to, will cause those accented letters not to display.

Alphabet

• While inspired by Japanese hiragana characters, this isn’t a set of syllables, but an alphabet like in English.
• There is no uppercase or lowercase in Hylian.
• Not every one of these letters has much of a use in this conlang, like “x”, but I figure I might as well make a full set of 26 just in case anyone needs them.

Verbs

-AR Verbs

• Gerunds are verbs ending in -ing. The Hylian usage of these is the same as in French; they express an action related to a main verb, and they’re not commonly used. If you ask “Where are you going?” in Hylian, you use the present tense conjugation, not the gerund.
• Not every verb can become an adverb! The verb “kairen” means “to go home”, for example, but one cannot “go-homingly” do something.
• The “conditional” tense accounts for verbs accompanied by “would”. E.g. “Yi kauffei sal?”, which translates to “Would you buy this?” due to the infinitive “kauffar” (to buy) being conjugated in the conditional tense. “Can” would turn into “could” in this tense.

• The difference between “to teach” and “to learn”, both “apprendar” in Hylian, is whether the verb is being done to a noun in the sentence. “I am learning Hylian” is “Mi apprenda hylian” (I learn Hylian), while “He is teaching me Hylian” is “Sa mi apprendi hylian” (He me teach Hylian). The verb is conjugated to match the subject doing the verb (“sa”/“he” in the example) and applied to a sentence object by putting a pronoun in front of the verb (“mi”/“I” in the example). All verbs can be used this way, but few change meaning in the process.

-EN Verbs

• -EN verbs aren’t as common as -AR ones.
• I added these mainly to boost complexity. It just felt too simple to keep things to only one verb ending 😅

• There is a verb for romantic/sexual love and another verb for familial/platonic/queerplatonic love because I’m aro/ace and rather annoyed at the limitations of my native language. Both “liiben” and “arden” hold the same weight and are considered Big Deal, ride-or-die words; typically one would use “suchen” to say “love” because it lacks those heavy emotional implications. Using “arden” when you mean “liiben” or vice-versa can lead to some rather interesting misunderstandings.
• There is a pet-specific “sit” command verb entirely because I’ve read/watched Inuyasha. Yes, it comes from “osuwari”.

Vocabulary

LEGEND:

Here’s how interpret the parentheses and whatnot I’ve put around some words in the following vocabulary charts:

• word, word  ⇒  The words mean essentially the same and translate the same way. This format is also used to show genered forms of a Hylian translation.
• word; word  ⇒  The words are similar or related, but translate differently.
• word (word)  ⇒  The word in parentheses is a specification for the translation.
• word [word]  ⇒  The word in brackets is the translation of the literal phrase or compound word that the English term becomes in Hylian.
• word/i  ⇒  A space-saving way to write the masc/fem forms of a word ending in -nn.

• This list includes foods native to Hyrule and imported in from nearby nations (Holodrum, Labrynna, Hytopia), mostly based on the Breath of the Wild Compendium. This list is limited for worldbuilding purposes.
• Gerudo borrow-words are particularly common when it comes to food in Hylian. The words “yavlika” (berry), “kadahi” (a South Asian frying pan similar to a wok), and “savlepesh” (Safflina petals), for example, are distinctly Gerudo. I’m not going to come up with a whole conlang for Gerudo, I don’t think, but in my head the language sounds vaguely Russian-Arabic-Persian.
• For extra foods I’m not going to use in my Zelda works, but that people might need words for, please consult the following table. ↓ ↓ ↓

• This vocab is being kept separate (except for bomb flowers, which are also in another chart) because I headcanon these things as being new and unfamiliar to most speakers of Hylian.
• A lot of these are direct translations from the in-game terms, which is why I haven’t included a lot of specific game items/inventory on this page. I headcanon that a lot of in-game stuff is literally just named that, so I’d be calling a lot of it the same thing in my conlang here. Let me know, though, if anyone wants a chart specifically for in-game stuff like Zapshrooms or Hearty Radishes, et cetera!

Speech Samples

• In the above table, words in (parentheses) are either implied and not literally said, or lack a direct translation to English.
• If you don’t know any French, the easiest way to translate an English sentence into this conlang is to plop it into Google Translate, change it to French, and switch out the words. I know some French, so I adjust the Google readout to be more accurate to what I want to say before switching the words to Hylian. I will readily admit that not even my syntax is perfectly consistent in this conlang, so please don’t feel pressured to exactly match what I’m doing here.

• I don’t have a lot of ideas for these because I speak a standard form of my language in a very standard-speaking region, but I’ll add stuff as I think of it.