The only 'agreed upon' Simlish phrase with an analog in real English is 'sul-sul,' (SOOL-sool, /'sul.sul/) which is a greeting phrase. Wright wanted the player to be able to tell whether a Sim is feeling flirtatious, upset, laid back, or tired, based entirely on their tone and tempo. The team went out to record hundreds of voice clips in Simlish, each with their own unique cadence and emotional nuance. He found that this problem persisted even when he tried using Navajo, Ukrainian or Estonian, but that, because the gibberish of Simlish was so far removed from any existing human language, it was very difficult for players to detect repetition in it. One of Wright's biggest concerns while developing The Sims was that giving the characters actual dialogue would have made such dialogue extremely repetitive, because even if Wright had been able to fit five CDs' worth of voice clips into the game, players would eventually have started hearing the same voice clips over and over again. The actual sound of Simlish was improvised by voice actors Stephen Kearin and Gerri Lawlor. Wright later commented that using a nonsense language turned out to be the right development choice, as people were capable of imagining it more realistically than a computer could simulate a real language. He also decided that Simlish worked best as a 'language' made up of gibberish words that could not be translated, so that the dialogue's meanings would be left open to the imagination of the player. Simlish was created because Will Wright, creator of The Sims, knew that the game needed dialogue, but thought that using real-life languages such as English would cause the dialogue to be repetitive and would be expensive translating the entire dialogue Sims may say. It is also featured to an extent in Firaxis Games' Sid Meier's SimGolf. Civilized Creatures in Spore can also be taught to speak Simlish. Simlish can also be heard in SimCity 4, SimCity Societies, SimCity (2013 version), and SimCity BuildIt but far less frequently. It debuted in SimCopter (1996), and has been especially prominent in The Sims franchise, as well as in its spinoff MySims series. Simlish is a fictional language featured in EA's Sim series of games. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. This article contains IPA phonetic symbols.

Sims get to work origin