Have you looked at the Gargun of the Harn setting… it is essentially the cultural reality you have described…

Throw in the fact they are ‘queen born’ insects that look like mammals… but are still in fact insects and you have their version of an orc.

It is impossible not to have a culture. It just doesn’t have to be very advanced or “cultured,” by our standards.

Luke Maciak wrote:

Right, but Orcs create and use complex tools – iron and steel swords, armors, bows, siege machines and etc. They don’t build these by instinct (well, except Warhammer Orcs, but they are comic relief) but rather must learn and transfer these skills. This means they must have high intelligence to plan, design and improve their tools, and means of communication that allows them to share abstract concepts on how to build and use them.

Neither Wolves nor Great Apes actually have that sort of things. Some apes may use tools, but they usually don’t teach each other that skill. Rather, individuals stumble upon ad-hoc solutions to problems that require tool use. They also don’t specialize as tool users – there are no apes who specialize in picking and sharpening the right sticks, and transferring these skills to young apprentices. Orcs must have weapon smiths, siege engineers and strategists.

i was just re-reading that old text and noticed something. Ants do use tools too. Weaver-Ants glue leaves together (with silk) to build huge structures that complex are far beyond what a single ant could grasp. Others cross water over a bridge consisting of other ants. They even have some kind of tactics when dealing with enemies.
Or a different Example in Wikipedia:

Ants of the species Conomyrma bicolor pick up stones and other small objects with their mandibles and drop them down the vertical entrances of rival colonies, allowing workers to forage for food without competition.

So we have building structures, using tools, combining Materials and something similar to besieging/organized warfare.
Everything of course purely based on instinct and a instinct-driven Orc group would be far more predictable than a group of thinking humans, but they should be capable of everything we see “typical” orcs do in most stories.
Only Exception: the pretty much won’t fight each other inside a clan. There would be no “Cirith Ungol”-Scenario with hive-orcs.

What do *I* think?

Kill’em all and let Gruumsh sort’em out.

[…] with Cockney accents and in Ishtar they are hairy ape-dudes. A little while ago I even designed my own version. But for Ravenflight I want to use them a little bit […]

I really love this version of orcs! Very clever *throws science glitter and vanishes into the night*

Hey man just going to say I love these, but one question how would these orcs feel about other orcs? Would they form emotional bonds like friends or lovers? Perhaps their paternal and maternal relationships are only out of necessity and will exist only up until the young orc is self sufficient then the parents will feel no attachment to it, and let it do what it wants. Any thoughts?

@ Liudvikas:
Not sure if you explored that aspect, but there’s a complex correlation between language and the actual high-level thinking. If language has no word for some concept, it’s a good indication that such concept does not exist for the culture which uses it.

So I think to propose a new language would mean to propose a new way of thinking about things, and you want a non-“flowery” orc (with definition of “orc” given above) language?
Can any human possibly produce such a thing?
I mean, in a functional-thing sense, so another human being can be taught it from the start, and won’t immediately invent a new “words” afterwards, due to stuff embedded in our brains by the millions of years of evolution.

@ Luke Maciak:

Personally I don’t trust nature to do anything properly, we should step in and use our intelligence to redesign any and every aspect of our existence, language included. The idea in Culture series of Marain language fascinated me – design a language to influence thought in desirable ways. What if we did that? Poetry doesn’t need to change, human mind does, we still have many harmful leftovers from our evolutionary development and this could be one of the ways to dispose of them.

@ Liudvikas:

I actually like our “flowery” language with all it’s idiosyncratic and inconsistencies. I’m actually opposed to the reductionist efforts that aim to streamline and simplify it. If the language was exact and there was exactly one way to say something, how would we write poetry… Or sitcoms for that matter – a lot of our humor revolves around building up, and escalating series of miss-communications and misunderstanding into blown out proportions.