In the early hours of this morning, a TikTok video appeared on my For You page titled “Is Japanese with a California Valley Girl accent = Simlish?” The algorithm knows me too well.
In the video, creator Oyasumisushi tests the hypothesis by quickly addressing the accent of California’s Valley Girls (think of Cher in Clueless or Elle in Naturally blonde), then she speaks a few sentences in Japanese with the correct intonation. “Hajimemashite,” Oyasumisushi says first with the characteristic Valley Girl’s voice and nasal tone. That means “Nice to meet you.”
The answer is yes, it sounds Exactly like Simlish, the invented language of the Sims series. The video is brilliant, the internet is going crazy and the whole thing has led me down a rabbit hole.
After reading way too many of the nearly 6,000 comments on Oyasumisushi’s video, I came across another viral video from earlier this year, in which creator lildummydev pleads with viewers to help him, saying it’s two in the morning and he “can’t stop speaking French in a frat brother’s voice.”
“Qu’est-ce que tu vas faire, mon amie?” says lildummydev. It means “What are you going to do, my friend?” But with the slow, breathy diction of a young man who has joined a fraternity at university, it sounds, you guessed it, Exactly like Simlish.
Almost every single one of the 5,000+ comments on lildummydev’s video points out this fact.
“I love that adding a brother accent turns about 70% of languages into Simlish,” says the brilliantly named user, the silliest of all geese.
Another user, Starborn, said: “Please do some Valley Girl French, it probably sounds like Simlish too.”
To be honest, the Valley Girl accent and the Frat Bro accent actually have a lot in common, as etymologynerd points out in a TikTok video.
The etymology of Simlish is equally interesting: The Sims Developer Maxis Studios originally tried to base Simlish on real-world languages like Ukrainian, as Polygon’s Ana Diaz noted in 2022. In the end, most of the invented Simlish language came from voice actors watching character animations and improvising how they would sound.
Although Simlish is mostly gibberish, it’s worth noting that Maxis was based in Redwood City, California—and some of the voice actors may have traveled from Los Angeles (perhaps with Valley Girl or sorority accents) to participate in the process. Or maybe that’s just a conspiracy theory I came up with in the middle of the night while chasing the rabbit.
Regardless of where Simlish comes from, the whole thing is a scene where Katy Perry – infamous for her Valley Girl accent – sings “Last Friday Night” in Simlish, and I find that very entertaining.
