Actor Reveals How the Simlish Language From the Sims Came to be
The Sims language has always seemed pretty funny, but some players thought it probably had some sort of meaning or structure. However, one of the voice actors associated with the game admitted that it is meaningless gibberish.
- The voice actor involved in the creation of the Sims language confessed that it was merely gibberish;
- That said, Simlish had to meet several requirements, such as sounding "American";
- The actors also had to invent a huge number of nonsensical words to be able to match them to different situations.
Creating artificial or artistic languages is often a huge undertaking that requires extensive planning. However, this is not the case with the simlish that fans of The Sims are familiar with. In fact, the way the game's characters communicate is a bunch of nonsense that doesn't translate into real words. This was confirmed by one of the voice actors associated with the game.
Kid Beyond, or Andrew Chaikin, spoke out on the subject of simlish in relation to a question asked by singer Lolo Zouai on Twitter. She wondered how she could translate the lyrics of her song into the Sims language. Chaikin then revealed that she shouldn't take it particularly seriously because Simlish is just nonsense made up on the fly. He confessed that as a voice actor playing characters from The Sims he was never given a script to follow.
However, this does not mean that the task was easy. In fact, Chaikin stated that the actors had to meet certain requirements. First of all, although the Simlish in reality is plain gibberish, it had to sound "American". It is difficult to imagine how to meet such expectations, but it was precisely this kind of challenge that the actors faced.
Moreover, they had to remember what nonsense they had already said. They couldn't keep repeating the same "words" over and over again. The dubbing of the Sims' speech had to be varied to fit many different situations, so players felt that the sentences they were hearing were different. Chaikin confessed that he had a tried-and-true way to do this. He would take one of the magazines lying around, turn it upside down, and then read a set of random words backwards.
The actor admitted that long recording sessions could seriously mess with his head. Hours of nonsensical gibberish made it hard to get back to speaking fluent English right away. However, the most important information coming from Chaikin is different. It turns out that, in fact, all of us can speak Simlish.
It's also worth mentioning that it's not the first time, when the creators connected with The Sims destroy the dreams of players who worked on structuring the Sims language and translating it. Jake Simpson, who works on the iconic title as chief simulation and tools engineer confessed earlier that it makes no sense to look for any grammatical rules in Simlish. Now, thanks to Chaikin, we've learned what exactly the work on this specific "language" looked like.
