IMPORTANT

This site is in the middle of a major overhaul. please be patient as existing and new content gets migrated and added.

If you haven't already done so - please download and install the Kryptonian fonts from the link at the top of the page. Without these fonts, you won't be able to properly view this page. These fonts are different from the simple transliteration font found elsewhere, and support the full Kryptonian alphabet.

If you have the fonts installed properly, the following two lines will be in Kryptonian. If not, then you will see a string of Roman characters:
s S h p k x t c f l m r i E A O e U u o a n R w v j d q g b D Z z
s S h p k x t c f l m r i E A O e U u o a n R w v j d q g b D Z z

Introduction

Krypton culture and its language, words, and writing have appeared in many different forms and places over the fifty-plus years of Superman's history. Needless to say, finding all of the relevant material, let alone getting a coherent grasp of it, is a difficult and daunting task. If you add in the many revisions and inconsistencies between the various comic incarnations, and then throw in radio, television, and film, the idea of combining all that is out there into one consistent language is, probably, impossible.

Fortunately, the writers and creative talent responsible for creating the rich Superman mythology that exists today have left the door open for the creation of a Kryptonian language which can bring together many seeming inconsistencies with minimal "deconstruction" of canonized material. Some of these reconciliations do, however, require the assumption and/or introduction of certain elements not currently found in Superman canon.

Here, I must give much acknowledgment and commendation to Al Turniansky for his work on Kryptonian which consisted of an alphabet of 118 characters, and served as a great inspiration for creating a "modern" version of Kryptonian - one based on the transliteration alphabet released by DC Comics in 2000. It is safe to say that without the inspiration of his work I may never have even thought of creating this new version of Kryptonian, and his Kryptonian numbers formed the basis of the modern Kryptonian number and math system, which has turned out to be an interesting and fun project in and of itself. It is with gratitude, respect, and humility that I leave this older (yet neither irrelevant nor outdated) form of the language in his capable hands as I move forward with my own version of Kryptonian. (See the section on Kryptonian linguistic history for more information on how his version plays into the whole scheme of things.)

In the explanations that follow, some material has been created to supplement the existing stories for the clarification and codification of the culture, mythos, and language of Krypton. It is with great deference to the creativity already poured into the Kryptonian mythos that I offer these creations, improvisations, and interpretations of my own.

Project Background

How did this whole thing get started? The shortest answer possible can be summed up in one word - Smallville. I am a big fan of the television show Smallville, and it was during the second season that I was first exposed to the official Kryptonian transliteration font created and released by DC Comics. As I learned to read what was essentially just English with a funny typeface, I noticed that the creators of the show started more and more to combine these symbols in strange ways. It was these inconsistencies with the transliteration guide that first got me thinking.

One fateful day in the spring of 2003, while stuck in traffic on the way home from work, my mind wandered to the things I had seen on the previous night's episode. I began to wonder what the differences meant, how the language might be working, what the actual language might be like, and so on. After reading a bit about Al Turniansky's work, I soon found myself creating a larger alphabet based on phonetic sounds, and not a strict transliteration of letters. This basic work (which is now mostly obsolete) grew to include the Kryptonian numbers and a few examples of basic math. It was posted online, and survived until this writing - much longer than I would have expected. I really appreciate all the interest that has been out there.

What this project wasn't, initially, was a full Kryptonian language. It was mostly just about the orthography (writing system). I wrote in this new orthography, but it was only ever transliterated English... akin to, for example, Pinyin. As such (and owing to a very busy schedule) the only other development that this new writing saw was the introduction of punctuation (again, mirroring English punctuation) which was never published online - this too has now been rendered obsolete.

After beginning work on a degree in linguistics at the University of Texas in the fall of 2006, I decided, with much excitement, to pick up the gauntlet of fleshing out a fully-functional Kryptonian language.