Translated into over 60 languages from Bengali to Sinhalese, Harry Potter is of course deeply entrenched in much of popular culture. It is the highest grossing movie series of all time and has spawned a theme park, a line of jelly beans (watch out for the earwax flavor) and a merchandise brand worth over $15 billion.
Potter’s magical world of wizardry has its own customs, currency, food and, of course, vocabulary.
“Potter-ese” is definitely not a full-fledged language. You can’t set your Google search settings to it like you can with Star Trek’s Klingon, and it doesn’t have its own alphabet like Tolkien’s Elvish languages. But some Harry Potter lingo has become a mainstay of our language.
Take muggle, for instance, referring to non-wizards. Muggle has been included in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2003. In some common parlance, muggle refers to someone not in your social circle, as in “I tried to explain it to her, but she was such a muggle. She didn’t get it” – Urban Dictionary. MuggleNetis the name of a major online Potter fan group.
Apparate is another big one. Similar in meaning to teleport, apparate means to magically relocate oneself. As a skill many would like to possess, this word has potential for use outside of Potterland. The word itself makes plenty of sense in an English language format: app- brings to mind the word appear, while –ate indicates that the word is a verb, arguably simpler and easier to remember than teleport.
Linguistic innovations abound from the rules and regulations of the wizard sport Quidditch. And yes, real humans play Quidditch – just check out The International Quidditch Association for proof. They have their own world cup and team in 13 countries. The game involves the use of various balls termed snitches,quaffles, and bludgers.
Taken from https://voxy.com/blog/index.php/2011/11/harry-potter-language/
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