Alex Massé’s Paralives, a highly anticipated entry into the life sim genre, has released a public demo featuring the unique gibberish language of its characters, the Parafolk. Parli, the name of the language itself, represents a point of competition between Paralives and life sim mainstay The Sims 4, where characters speak the iconic (if nonsensical) language of Simlish. According to the development diary posted by Massé on April 14th, the Paralives team used tried and true techniques of linguists in order to create their own “conlang,” or constructed language. On April 20th, the team posted a video on Twitter of two Parafolk chatting in Parli.

🚨🚨 BIG REVEAL 🚨🚨

Our Parafolks can now speak! 🔊🔊 pic.twitter.com/SagfeMQnr9

— Paralives (@ParalivesGame) April 20, 2023

Since 1999, The Sims franchise has dominated the life sim genre. Now published by Electronic Arts, the game allows players to build homes, start families, and get abducted by aliens – all while speaking the supposedly incomprehensible Simlish. The language of The Sims was created by Will Wright in order to cut potential translation costs for the game. Though it may sound like gibberish, at least some words of Simlish have real translations. Musicians from Katy Perry to Lily Allen have recorded covers of their own music in Simlish for Sims to listen to on the radio. 

As Paralives continues development, many fans of The Sims 4 have kept their eyes on Alex Massé and team, speculating that Paralives’ constant release of new features might mean a more in-depth life sim experience than The Sims 4 currently offers. However, while Paralives and The Sims 4 may differ on features like object placement and pathfinding, both games now use a constructed language. When creating Parli for Paralives, the development team “decided that the language should be incomprehensible gibberish” as well as “different from the made-up languages of other franchises.” The Paralives team also emphasized the minimalistic and realistic vision they had for the language.

As for the technical ins and outs of Parli? “At first we came up with simple ideas such as altering existing words,” wrote the Paralives team. “As we progressed, we came up with more and more complex ideas and got to study how actual linguists create their own conlangs (made-up languages) by first choosing a specific palette of sounds and then making all sorts of rules to combine them. So we used these same approaches for some of our ideas and the results were pretty cool!” In total, Parli only has fourteen consonants and five vowels. Parli has developed into a detailed and unique fictional language since the start of its development in 2021, but it remains unknown whether Parli will have a written counterpart like Simlish.