: Re: How to create place names that feel like they belong to a culture? As somewhat of a follow-up to my previous question: How to create a consistent feel for character names in a fantasy setting?

@Fox6458700

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Not all place names are based on a specific pronunciation, and not all languages emphasize a specific pronunciation.

Take Chinese, for example. If you just use Google Translate and obtain the Pinyin romanizations, then that still will not show you the actual pronunciation. Google Translate may pronounce for you, but don't trust your ears too much. Adult ears are not as sensitive as a child's ears, and an adult's brain has a hard time with word segmentation, unlike a child's brain.

So, my advice for you is to not take the advice about hearing the sounds of other languages on Google Translate.

Instead of taking a real-life language, I would highly recommend conlanging. Here are the steps:

Create your phonetic inventory of consonants and vowels. Consider monophthongs and diphthongs and different types of consonants. The International Phonetic Alphabet will be your best friend in this!
Think about how words are constructed. Are there consonant clusters? Are there stop consonants? Are words monosyllabic or multi-syllabic? Is the language analytic with no or minimal conjugation, or synthetic with a lot of conjugation?
Create grammar. Consider sentence structure. SVO and SOV sentences are the most common type of sentence structures. However, not all languages in the world emphasize the role of the subject. Some languages - such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese - would emphasize the topic-comment structure, in which case the subject is dropped, being replaced by a topic; and this type of sentence structure explains punctuation use in the language. Determine whether or not your language is highly analytic or highly synthetic. Highly analytic languages, like Chinese, will have no inflections. English is on the analytic side, but it carries mild inflections. For example, there are singular/plural inflections, tense inflections, and many more.

There are some authors who are professional linguists. They take their own linguistic knowledge to create a useable, functional language and then plop the language into the fictional world. In this way, names in the story would appear very consistent, as if they belong to a culture. And the best thing about it is, it's fictional. You're not supposed to pronounce it. Basically, you spell the words with IPA letters, write in Latin-script orthography (if you plan on using a logographic script, you'll be conlanging for a real long time, and you have to Romanize the logographic script) - and tada! - you have a conlang!

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