Rocketmix Articles - Simlish
Simlish is a fictional language which was created by Will Wright for the Sims series, which is released by the company Maxis. The first game that Simlish was featured in was a game released in 1996 called SimCopter, which was a flight simulator.
History
Will Wright, creator of Sims, and language expert, Marc Gimbel were thinking about changing the Navajo language in order to create Simlish, but due to lack of voice actors who could talk in Navajo, and other reasons which will be described shortly, they figured they would create the language using gibberish. This actually worked out best as they start creating "The Sims" series because they wouldn't have to worry about the costs of translating, would avoid the problem of being less repetitive and give the player the freedom to "translate" what the people were saying using their imagination.
Development
Simlish was taken more seriously when Maxis and EA Games started development on a game called "The Sims". The sound of Simlish was created by the improvisation of two voice actors, Stephen Kearin and Gerri Lawlor.
The reason why Simlish wasn't repetitive is because of the fact that it's very out when it comes to real life languages. Will Wright even found even languages that were very rare like Navajo or Estonian were still repetitive.
There were two ways of telling what a Sim said even in a fictional language, the tone of the message were more exaggerated, this would describe the emotion of the Sim. You could also find out what it's talking about due to having speech bubbles above the Sims head with a picture of the thing that they're talking about.
Music
Having music in a language which was real could have problems, such as repetitiveness and ruining the immersiveness of The Sims world. So to fix that they got singers to create Simlish versions of their songs. However instead of being in total gibberish, they cleverly made it sound like the original, yet not actually being the lyrics.
Dictionaries
Users which are fans of The Sims series have created Dictionaries for Simlish, they do this by noting what the Sim says, when they say it, and what it might mean.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simlish
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter
https://web.archive.org/web/20060106145215/
http://uk.videogames.games.yahoo.com/ngc/previews/the-sims-bustin--out-e72277.html
https://archive.is/20091014213556/http://gaming.savvy-cafe.com/2008/09/gonna-play-the-sims-you-gotta-speak-simlish/
http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=476049
http://www.country1073.ca/on-air-personalities/randy-owen/2200-country-gibberish.pdf