If you’ve ever played any of the Sims games, you know that the characters “speak” in a series of sounds including pitch, cadence and vocal tone to indicate emotion.

muscle_boy just asked me if I speak Simlish[1].  I thought about it and commented I didn’t think Simlish was really a language as we generally define it.  While it does convey a rather interesting nuance of emotion, there are neither nouns nor verbs, so one cannot describe objects nor one’s relationship to them in Simlish.

Language wonks?  I’m curious about your opinion of this.  Can a language be a language if it only conveys emotional state, but cannot describe the physical world?

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[1] He knows I pick up languages pretty easily, even invented languages from movies.  Yes, I understand Huttese, Elvish and Klingon.  By the Return of the King, I did not have to read the subtitles to understand the Elvish.