Muggle, Hogwarts, Horcrux, mudblood, Parseltongue… a new fictional universe demands a new lexicon, and the success of the Harry Potter series must be credited in part to J. K. Rowling’s creative use of language. The author invented, reinvented or blended words to make new ones that seem both familiar and magical. So, what are the main strategies that Rowling used to create the language of wizarding?

latin-esque

Rowling uses imitation Latin (rooted in or inspired by Latin) especially in the spells. By drawing on Latin’s cultural authority as a learned language and its association with alchemy and magic, a charm is made to seem so much more authentic. In spells such as ‘Expelliarmus’, a defence spell, and ‘Finite Incantatem’, a multi-use spell that blocks another, fans are given a clue as to what the spell does by its name. This also goes for magical objects, a ‘Horcrux’ sounds creepy and occult because it blends the word ‘horror’ with the Latin ‘crux’, meaning ‘cross’. Rowling has great fun with these Latin-inspired words: take ‘Riddikulus’, a spell that ingeniously makes one’s opponent ridiculous, so that you’re no longer frightened by it.

BLEND WORDS

These are words made up from joining or mashing two together. ‘Animagus’, a blend of ‘animal’ and ‘magus’ (a kind of wizard) is a typical example. In doing so, Rowling often takes what could be insults and makes them magical and grand. Mudblood is a witch or wizard who is born to non-magic parents, and is a combination of two common English words: ‘mud’ and ‘blood’. The ‘Hogwarts’ of Harry’s school of witchcraft and wizardry combines ‘hog’ and ‘wart’; the name’s origins, in a dream had by the brilliant Scottish witch Rowena Ravenclaw, undermines the romanticism of myths by endowing a warty hog with sufficient majesty to have a famous school named after it.

LOAN WORDS

Some names conjure up foreign airs, paying homage to language loaned to English from overseas. Be they French (Voldemort, Lestrange), Scottish (McGonagall, St Mungo), East European (Gregorovitch, Karkaroff), German (Bode, Durmstrang), Scandinavian (Skeeter), South European (Salazar, Dolores), Asian (Padma Patil, Cho Chang), or Latin (Nigellus, Severus). For key characters, the original meaning of the names indicates what sort of people they may be. The unpleasant Malfoys take their name from the French ‘mal foi’, ‘bad faith’ in English. Voldemort has an intriguing name: born Tom Marvolo Riddle (a ‘riddle’ is a puzzle in English), Voldemort is not only an anagram of that name, but its meaning in French ‘vol de mort’ can be translated as either ‘flight of death’ or ‘escaping death’, both character traits of the evil wizard. 

TOTALLY MADE UP 

Some words in Harry Potter are total inventions, yet have become real words since. The onomatopoeic Parseltongue, the language of serpentine creatures, was inspired by an “old word for someone who has a problem with the mouth, like a harelip”, the author explained. Two invented words have even been added to the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘quidditch’, a game Rowling invented that is now played in real life, and ‘muggle’, meaning a non-magical person in the Harry Potter books, that has expanded in real life to mean a novice or an uninitiated person. So, after all this information, you now have no reason to feel like a muggle in the Potterverse! 

J. K. ROWLING

British author Joanne Kathleen Rowling came up with the idea for the Harry Potter books in 1990, while on a train journey from Manchester to London. After spending some years in Porto in Portugal, where she taught English, she returned to England a single mother. She finished the first book in 1997, but publishers rejected it twelve times. Finally, Bloomsbury agreed to publish it, although she was asked to use the initials J. K. rather than her full name as they thought a female author would only appeal to girls.

It was a massive success: not just with boys and girls, but with millions of grown up men and women too! Rowling went on to write six more books, all of which revolve around Harry’s adventures as a wizard-in-training, and his conflict with the evil Lord Voldemort. The book series has sold more than five hundred million copies to date, making it the best-selling book series of all time. A cultural phenomenon, it has been translated into more than eighty languages. Once struggling to survive, Rowling became a celebrity.