Inkling (language)

Inkling, also referred to as squid language, is the language in which Inklings in the Splatoon series and many other species use to communicate. While individual letters, words, and the occasional phrase are often similar to real-life languages, Inkling as a whole has been confirmed to not be very thought through, and thus inconsistent.

Spoken language
The spoken language used in Splatoon is represented through clips of one or more syllables played in random order during dialog. Certain voice lines, intentionally or not, vaguely resemble words in real-life spoken languages.

Song lyrics, regardless of the species they are sung by, consist of gibberish lines. Official lyrics for songs by Off the Hook and the Squid Sisters have been distributed with merchandise, such as albums and piano sheet music. An in-universe interview with Wet Floor also disclosed a couple of lines for the song Inkoming! that incorporate sounds resembling English words. Lyrics for Ebb & Flow (Octo) are also shown to incorporate the word "splatoon", albeit slightly deviated from how it is normally spelt in katakana. In addition, Tentacle to the Metal by Damp Socks feat. Off the Hook has a line sounding like "hey hey, tentacle!" sung by Pearl.

Audio
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Written language
The written form of Inkling is represented through numerous scripts, ranging from unique glyphs to ones resembling human scripts like Japanese, Arabic and Cyrillic.

Scripts
A "script", in the sense used when documenting how the written form of Inkling is represented, is a consistent set of characters that is used in a sufficient number of places throughout the game. Characters that are not used recurrently are not considered a script. As an example, the letters of many company logos appear to be unique to the logo design and do not show up anywhere else.

When characters do appear consistently enough to be considered a script, it has been discovered that many of those are decipherable. Scripts that are decipherable have each fictitious letter correspond to the letters of the Latin alphabet; this is referred to as "deciphered" when talking about occurrences of these scripts in the game.

Another way the scripts are used is "mimicking", where the characters are picked based on how closely they resemble Latin letters, or occasionally, Japanese script, to make a word or phrase.



An example would be the cover artwork of Turquoise October from Splatoon. In this case, the square script at the bottom is used in a way to mimic the band's name, even though this is not the actual meaning of the letters based on the deciphered version of the script. With few exceptions, any situation in which fictitious letters seem to resemble an English word most likely does not reflect the true meaning of the script, and should not be used as a basis for deciphering work.

There are also situations in which scripts are used neither to mimic, nor in its deciphered order, but in a scrambled manner. In these situations, characters are used to display gibberish text, and may be rotated, flipped or slightly altered. In text where characters are rotated, flipped, or altered in ways that should not exist based on the cipher, the text can be considered meaningless.

Glyphs that resemble characters from other human languages, such as Chinese or Arabic, are not known to have a proper decipherable form.

Focusing on the usage of the deciphered versions of the scripts, there are also different languages in which the scripts may be written. While most of the time the developers write in English, there are also frequent occurrences where the scripts are used to write romanized Japanese.

Octarian language
The Octarians have a language different to that of the Inklings. Its written form is sometimes represented with square script, but this is not consistent. Its spoken form is represented by Octolings with sounds similar to those uttered by Inklings to represent their language. Octosnipers, Octocommanders and all varieties of Octotrooper instead make groaning sounds that bear some resemblance to the noises Inklings and Octolings make when they take damage or are splatted.

In Japanese Splatoon media, Inkling language is represented through regular Japanese, while Octarian speech is written entirely in katakana. In Japanese media, a character's dialogue being written with katakana can imply a foreign accent or language of some sort. When Callie is brainwashed, her speech is entirely in katakana, showing that she may be speaking Octarian. Marina occasionally slips into speaking Octarian; detailed in The Art of Splatoon 2. Off the Hook's songs are bilingual, with both Pearl and Marina singing portions in Octarian. They mostly sing in their respective languages, but there are times when Pearl sings with Marina in Octarian, even if her lyrics are still written in hiragana. An Inkling's experience listening to them has been compared to Japanese people listening to English-language songs without an understanding of the language, but an appreciation of the melody.

When using the Octoling amiibo in Splatoon 2, their dialogue is written in broken English, implying that they do not speak the Inkling language natively. However, in Splatoon 3, this is no longer the case, as they now speak perfect English.