Secondary Languages in _Time_ and _Heterogenia Linguistico_

Heterogenia Linguistico is a manga series about a field linguist / ethnologist exploring a fantasy realm and documenting the languages and cultural practices of fantastical races.

Time is a Hugo-award-winning long-form webcomic / animation hybrid thing, published as the 1190th strip of XKCD in 2013 about far-future humans occupying a dried-out Mediterranean basin discovering that the ocean is about to flood back through the straits of Gibraltar and destroy their home.

What could these two bits of media possibly have in common? They both integrate secondary languages using techniques uniquely suited to the comic / graphic novel medium.

Additionally, both are ambiguous in their possible usage of a narrative translation convention! It is possible, though unlikely due to the large time span for linguistic evolution to take place in, that the main characters in Time actually do speak English. Meanwhile, though I read Heterogenia Linguistico in English translation (which obviously establishes a translation convention by virtue of the fact that it was literally translated, in the real world), the original is in Japanese, and seems to originate in a fantastical analog of Japan--so the human characters might very well be intended to actually be speaking Japanese. These things are not always clear-cut! However, Heterogenia Linguistico does display an explicit translation convention insofar as all speech which the main character understands is presented on the page as English (Japanese)--thus ensuring that the reader remains on the same metaphorical page as the viewpoint character.

Time features one full conlang (first appearing in frame 2658, externally labelled "Beanish" since its speakers appear to wear beanies), and one fictitious language (first appearing in frame 2865, externally labelled "Unglish" since it's... not actually English).

Beanish is presented in its own unique script. This has the effect of making it obvious to the reader that they, just like the main characters, are not expected (and thus not required) to understand what is being said. In fact, it short-circuits any attempt at understanding, as the invented script eliminates any possible phonetic cues that might prompt a reader to try... well, reading it! While theoretically this could be done in purely-written media (and written media like War and Peace will on occasion include examples of secondary natural languages in their native scripts, even when those scripts differ from the primary script of the work), it is considerably more difficult to do both for technical reasons (the need to create custom fonts or embed images) and for audience-compatibility reasons; encountering an unreadable script switches one's brain from "visual language processing mode" into "generic image processing mode", and/or triggers skipping over that span of incomprehensible text to the next bit that you can recognize, and that kind of cognitive interruption is more unexpected and more jarring in running prose than in the context of a comic panel, where you are already primed to take in narrative-relevant information from the whole image rather than just text, and in where the eye is already practiced at skipping between non-contiguous dialog sections.

In frame 2703, Cueball makes an attempt at speaking Beanish, and subsequently is excited that he has finally learned a word, giving a diagetic translation of it; however, in subsequent frames, we discover that he is aware of the "gavagai problem" (which previously came up in John Carter (of Mars)), and is unsure of the precise meaning of the word after all. Still, this is probably the best entry point we have into the decryption on Beanish--which is, as of yet, still incomplete. Despite the lack of a decryption, however, we can be confident that Beanish really is a consistent conlang, rather than simple visual gibberish, for two reasons: internally, it has regular repeating structure that looks language-like (although, so does the Voynich Manuscript, and plenty of people are convinced that that is just very cleverly-constructed nonsense); and externally, Randall Munroe has stated that he got a linguist to create it for him! Thus, rather than being purely a matter of Making It Irrelevant, the use of Beanish in Time seems like a very long-term example of Easter Egging, having presented Beanish as a puzzle to be solved.

Unlike Beanish, Unglish is partially comprehensible, with some difficulty, to Time's main characters. To convey that same experience to the readers, Unglish is presented as distorted English text, with smudging, odd grammar, and overlaid words. This is kind of the opposite of Making It Obvious--it is Made Unobvious, but accessible with difficulty. Again, this is an approach that simply could not be done with anything like comparable effectiveness in a different medium.

All dialog from Time, including images of the Beanish and Unglish text, with links to the source frames, can be found transcribed here.

In comparison, Heterogenia Linguistico, despite having more dialog and being explicitly about linguistics, shows much less sophistication in its presentation of secondary languages. As noted earlier, it simply translates everything that the main character can understand; but what about things that main character can't understand? Unlike Time, it neither presents a textual representation of non-human languages (except for a few personal names, which are approximately-phonetically transcribed), nor does it visually distort words to impede easy comprehension. Instead, partially-understood speech is peppered with black boxes--kind of like redaction bars--replacing words, morphemes, or just weirdly-pronounced sounds. Much like the unique script of Beanish, the use of obviously-non-linguistic blocks of blackness makes it very clear to the reader that they are not meant to understand, and that that is in fact part of the intended experience; if the reader is missing something, that's fine, because the viewpoint character is also missing something and will act accordingly. As the narrative progresses, and main character gains better familiarity with local languages, the distribution of redaction boxes shifts from context words almost entirely to function words (articles, prepositions), which (especially with the visual and narrative context) leaves the complete meaning easily recoverable while sill conveying the idea that the main characters language competence is still not perfect. This partial redaction approach to secondary language representation is still something that I don't think you could get away with in any other medium... but it is very similar to something that you could get away with in English literature a Long Time Ago; in particular, works like H. G. Wells's The Time Machine occasionally simply replacing bits of dialog with dashes, as illustrated in the line:

“Where’s——?” said I, naming our host.

in which it appears that the author simply couldn't be bothered to come up with a name that really should have appeared in dialog.  If that were an established modern trope, it could probably be extended to representation of secondary languages with very explicit Make It Irrelevant messaging--but I would not recommend actually trying it outside of a comic strip setting!

While Heterogenia Linguistico is less sophisticated than Time in its handling of secondary language content, it nevertheless is a decent example of linguistic science fiction, largely focusing on alternate modalities for interspecies communication, like in Semiosis. And, of course, it is one of very very bits of popular media (like Disney's Atlantis) which have a linguist as the main character, so it gets points for that! But wait, you might be thinking, didn't I say it was fantasy? Well, yes... but it leans on linguistic science, and presents fictional linguistic scenarios to be scientifically analyzed. It may be within a fantasy setting, but none of the linguistics is explicitly fantastical; there is no telepathy, or Whorfian determinism, for example. And that is enough for me to call it linguistic sci-fi, even if its set in a fantastical background. A sample of the linguistic fictions that it explores:

1. A color-based writing system derived from the color-based language of Krakens (which can alter their skin color at will, just like real-world octopodes and squid), which appears to be used logographically / semasiographically as it is not phonetically connected to the speech of the Lizard People who use it.
2. A werewolf community which uses anomalously little acoustic speech because they can obtain so much social information through smell instead.
3. A language that uses primarily ingressive rather than egressive sounds.
4. An interspecies lingua-franca that uses a different phonetic inventory for each species that uses it, tailored to their articulatory abilities.
5. A sign language based on full-body dance movements as an interlanguage for an avian race which cannot make humanoid-like speech sounds and lacks hands for humanoid sign languages.

I'd like it better if some of these things were developed as actual conlangs and more fully integrated into the text (you'd think they'd have to do something for the color writing... but it's a black-and-white comic, so they nicely sidestepped that!), but the ideas are pretty cool on their own.

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