Speak like the Sims: why Simlish is peak UX

Ben Davies-Romano
7 min readApr 15, 2022

Sul-sul! Any game-obsessed teen who poured countless hours into the Sims in the early 2000s has probably heard this phrase countless times. It’s how the Sims greet each other — and is one of the few Simlish phrases to have a set meaning.

One of my favourite parts of the Sims was always the way they spoke. In between avoiding kitchen fires, spine-chilling burglaries and failing to keep my Sim kids out of military school, I imagined whole personalities for my sims based on their utterances. Sometimes they would sound exasperated, so I’d let them watch TV…

Ben Davies-Romano

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