The majority of Simlish is made up on the spot, say The Sims developers

polygon.com:

Simlish, the gibberish language spoken by the characters of The Sims, has always been one of the most immediately recognizable aspects of its worlds. The garbled gab is as colorful as it is emotive, and it brings a comedic flair to the popular simulation game.

In a new episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast, the host Dallas Taylor chats with various developers from the series as they dive into the making of the language. Claire Curtin, who served as a designer and voiceover director of the first Sims game, which was released by Maxis Studios in 2000, told the story of the making of Simlish.

Although the language has some commonly used words, like “sul sul,” which means hello, the vast majority of Simlish is made up on the spot by voice actors. The developers had previously tried basing Simlish on real languages like Estonian or Ukrainian, but they ended up with something completely different: A truly universal language that anyone could understand, made up of pure brainless babbling. The goal was to create a language with no structure, which would not repeat, so players didn’t end up hearing the same voice line over and over while tinkering with the game.

To make Simlish, Curtin decided to try an improv exercise where one actor performs a poem on the spot in a gibberish language, and another actor translates it to the audience in English. Curtin brought two voice actors into the studio while recording; they would see animations of the characters moving, and then they’d voice their own ideas of what it should sound like. Sometimes the team would do up to 20 takes, going back and forth. In the end, it worked, and the result was the Simlish language.

Because of the improvisational nature of the language,