Found mainly in fantasy settings, this trope is about fictional scripts invented by the author. Sometimes, they are used as a fancy substitute for the letters in the work's original language, at other times, they come along with an entire Conlang/Fictionary.
An aspect of Worldbuilding. Super-Trope to Cypher Language. Compare Wing Dinglish.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica contains a number of inscriptions made in not one but three different runic scripts
, which had to be deciphered by the fans, who discovered that the runes were used to write sentences in German.
Asian Animation
- Happy Heroes parodies this. The writing systems for Dog Planet and Cat Planet are both literally just normal Chinese but with the end bulbs of a Stock Femur Bone and fishbones, respectively, placed all over the Chinese characters. Despite the minimal differences between the two, Ambassador Miao still has trouble reading a letter from Ambassador Wang written in "dog language" until Happy S. rewrites the dog bone bulbs into fishbones.
Film — Animated
- A parallel alphabet exists in Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire. In fact, Milo Thatch deduces that no further evidence of Atlantis has ever been found because one glyph was mistaken for an 'R', leading searchers to Ireland in vain. The glyph is rightly a 'C', because Viking raiders routinely made port in Iceland, near the dormant fumarole which is the access point to Atlantis.note
Film — Live-Action
Literature
- J. R. R. Tolkien is, if not the Trope Maker, then definitely the Trope Codifier for this one, as he had single-handedly developed several scripts (along with entire languages) for the peoples of his Legendarium. That he was a distinguished professor of linguistics has had a lot to do with this.
- Dinotopia has the Footprint Alphabet, whose letters are various arrangements of three-toed dinosaur prints. There’s also a bridge alphabet, the Chandaran Transitional Alphabet.
- The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents has a pictographic rat alphabet.
Live-Action TV
- Star Trek:
- The Klingons have their own language and writing system.
- The franchise has also designed distinctive lettering for Bajorans, Ferengi, Cardassians, Romulans and Vulcans, but none of these are attached to a Conlang or even a Cypher Language. (Ferengi script is based around 45 degree angles because it looks cool, but there's no official explanation of how that actually works).
- Circular Gallifreyan is the writing of Time Lords in Doctor Who.
- Babylon 5. The Minbari language◊ is used a number of times throughout the show. In one case they have a small joke; Vir is sent to be ambassador on Minbar and shows up later wearing a ceremonial welcoming robe which says on the front in Minbari writing "Aloha."
- The Ancient language in Stargate has a whole alternative alphabet. Why they had characters for 8 and 9 when their mathematics was supposed to use base 8 is unknown.
Mythology and Religion
- Adherents of various beliefs in Hermetic Magic created several "magical" or "angelic" scripts, such as the Theban script of Tritemius, the Alphabet of the Magi by Paracelsus and the Enochian script (and language!) by John Dee and Edward Kelly. Many of these scripts mimic the structure of the Hebrew script and are meant to write Hebrew words.
Theme Parks
- Subverted by the "Maraglyphs" in Disneyland's Temple of the Forbidden Eye: the characters look like a con script but are actually highly stylized letters of the Latin alphabet.
Video Games
- The Ultima series had the default Runic, Gargish, and Ophidian Alphabets. Its Creator-Driven Successor, the Shroud of the Avatar series has its own artificial runic script, as well.
- The Elder Scrolls series has the Daedric Alphabet, the Dragon Alphabet, the Dwemer Alphabet, the Falmer Alphabet, and they yet-untranslated Elder Alphabet.
- The Thief series has the Keeper Glyphs of the Order of the Keepers. Public signs in the third game also hints at the world of the series using a different script to any real world one, even though all in-game texts and readables are rendered in Latin scrip to the reader.
- In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker the Hylian language appears in text as a Artificial Script. In the second playthrough, Link can comprehend the Hylian language, or it becomes legible to the player at the very least. Or you can take the time to translate them yourself. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword also have their own Hylian scripts, while The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has an Ancient Sheikah script.
- Not an alphabet, but in Riven, you have to learn the base-25 D'ni numerals to solve some puzzles.
- The Ancient Language in Fire Emblem Tellius, spoken mostly by the Heron tribe, which uses a highly stylized writing. It's actually English in a font that's so fancy as to be unrecognizable. Translations can be found here and here.
- Commander Keen has an alien script but if you can translate it, the words are in English.
- Many Final Fantasy games have artificial scripts for the in-game languages, sometimes more than one in the same game. They tend to be substitution cyphers for English. Details can be found on the Final Fantasy wiki.
Webcomics
- For the various comics set in Overside, Evan Dahm created a number of different scripts and alphabets for the different societies. Some of them are just scribbles, but others are fully functional writing systems, such as Seen Script (from Rice Boy), Machine Script (mainly used in Order of Tales), and Sahta Script (from Vattu).
- In Paranatural, several ghosts and spirits speak in a script that's actually a modified Latin alphabet. Each letter is a rough trace of the negative space in the corresponding Latin letter, then the whole sentence is rotated 90 degrees.
- Unsounded: Magical Incantations in the Old Tainish Language of Magic are rendered in a unique script that goes untranslated. Depending on the circumstances and the spellwright's style, it's sometimes rendered in printed text, as calligraphy, or rushed and irregular.
Western Animation
- Futurama has an alien script which the writers threw in to amuse and bewilder their audience, but the script was solved fairly quickly. So they made up another whole alien script.
