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Meet the developer who designed Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s fictional Isu languageYou may need to develop a sixth sense if you fancy learning it
You may need to develop a sixth sense if you fancy learning it
Henry tells me the plan to come up with the Isu language started out as a wild idea he didn’t think would actually happen.
Some Isu text and its translation you can find in the present day sections of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Their main goal when creating the Isu language was to “add a layer of depth to the Assassin’s Creed universe”. The Isu lore already goes pretty deep too - they’re an ancient and advanced race of god-like people who made the human race to act as their workforce. You can find info on them dotted about in Valhalla, (and the entire series) which essentially tells an alternate history for our world. However, because the Isu created us, them having their own ancient language meant that it had to develop into the more modern languages of the human race. That’s where some clever reverse-engineering comes in.
“It seemed logical that they would have taught humans, at the very least, some of their language in order to communicate with them,” Henry says. “To convey this, the Isu language has been designed as a fictional ancestor to Proto-Indo-European - the theorised common ancestor to one of the largest families of languages on earth.”
“The process of creating the Isu language was writing in reverse a history of how humans learned it from the Isu, and how it then evolved over time to become Proto-Indo-European,” he adds. “I started from old languages in that family (Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, etc.) and academic reconstructions of what Proto-Indo-European could have been like, and worked my way backwards from there.”
A language created like this is usually referred to as a “conlang” (literally, constructed language), and it requires a lot of knowledge of how real languages work. Henry tells me he’s been conlanging professionally for years, but even with all that experience, creating the Isu language wasn’t exactly the easiest of jobs.
“The biggest challenge was to find a balance between credibility as an ancestor to real languages and artistic intent. Languages have an aesthetic to them, and as a creator, it’s great to have control over that,” he says. “But at the same time, I wanted to make sure it fits the lore we had decided for it. Sometimes that meant letting natural linguistic (de)evolution drive the creation process. In a sense, I feel like I discovered this language as much as I created it!”
Another difficulty Henry faced was trying to make the language connect with the existing lore of Assassin’s Creed. Previous games already have various symbols and glyphs that artists have used, and Henry tells me he wanted to use some of these pre-existing bits to make it feel as though the language had always been there.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla - We have Deciphered The isu Secret Language!Watch on YouTube
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla - We have Deciphered The isu Secret Language!
Seeing as the language has been mostly figured out now, I wondered how doable it would be to learn to read, write and speak it. Henry reminds me that the Isu language is designed for an advanced race who have a sixth sense, so there are aspects of it that we could never truly comprehend. Despite that, the answer is still yes, you can learn it - as well as a simple human possibly could, anyway.
He says he actually recorded an “Isu 101” video for Gudmundur Thorvaldsson and Chantel Riley (the voice actors for Valhalla characters Sigurd Styrbjornsson and Layla Hassan), so could understand how to speak their Isu lines. The only problem with the language is that there aren’t really any words for normal things we’d want to talk about in 2021.
“The community has done a tremendous work breaking down the vocabulary, syntax, grammar, numerals and pronunciation from the extracts found in-game. From this, I think anyone interested enough would be able to speak and write basic sentences,” Henry tells me. “However, they would have to discuss engineering the human species, the end of the world, or other topics of interest to the Isu whose writings are found in the game. Otherwise, they will be a bit short on vocabulary!”
Well, I suppose these could be things we talk about in 2021. The year is young. If you fancy learning Isu yourself, Henry says they might consider releasing more official info on it in the future, but they don’t exactly have plans to release a grammar book. Ubisoft want to keep a few mysteries to themselves, after all, so for now you’re stuck with studying the texts in Valhalla. That’s doesn’t seem too bad a deal though, as Henry puts it:
“What better way to learn than to play?”
