I'm going meta! I'm reviewing people who are reviewing people who use conlangs in fiction!
Reading Fictional Languages (that's an Amazon Affiliate link, but you can also get it directly from Edinburgh University Press) is a collection of articles that follows up on the presentations given at the eponymous Reading Fictional Languages conference, which brings together both creators and scholars of constructed languages used in fictional works. I was provided with a free review copy as a PDF, but not until after I had bought my own hardcover anyway.
The first thing to note is that the title is kind of poorly chosen. It is telling that articles by conlangers refer to their subject as "constructed languages" or "conlangs", while articles by literary scholars refer to their subject as "fictional languages". Based on personal communication with some of the contributors, it seems that the organizers of the conference on which this volume was based (which I did submit an abstract for myself, but was not accepted) were unaware of the modern conlanging community and taken somewhat by surprise when actual language creators showed up to talk about their work! And they had thus developed their own analytical terminology ahead of time in isolation from conlanging practitioners.
Chapter 1, the introduction, contrasts "real" languages with languages which are "imagined for an equally fictional community of users, where the environment is being imagined at the same time as the language is being constructed". However, that misses out on a very important distinction in the types of non-natural languages that are actually used in fictional works: those that do not exist as usable languages in the real world, and those that do. I.e., those which actually are fictional, and those which are real, despite being artificially constructed.
Skipping to page 77, in Chapter 6: "Design intentions and actual perception of fictional languages: Quenya, Sindarin, and Na’vi", by Bettina Beinhoff, specifies that "fictional languages" are a subset of "constructed languages", being languages constructed for use in fictional works. That's sensible, but when talking about Quenya, Sindarin, and Na'vi in particular--all languages which have been heavily developed and actively used by communities outside of their fictional contexts--it really highlights the inadequacy of this academic terminology.
We also get an explanation of the "Reading" part of the title--in short, it's about the reader's interaction with a text, and how the use of invented languages influences the creative process and the reading experience. Apart from defining terminology, however, Chapter 1 does provide a decent overview of the history of invented languages in fiction and of the proceeding contents of the book.
Chapter 2, by David Peterson and Jessie Sams (who has since become Jessie Peterson) explores the nature of working with television and film makers as a language creator. I couldn't possibly do this justice in summary; David and Jessie probably have more experience with film and TV language construction than everyone else in the industry combined, and they certainly know what they're talking about! One complication of working in Hollywood, however, is not unique to working in Hollywood:
A script writer often won’t have heard of language creation and will have no sympathy for someone whose role they don’t understand commenting that the line of dialogue they want to be cut mid-word won’t work in translation because the verb in the conlang comes at the end of the sentence and won’t have been uttered yet if cut off after three words
That's basically the lament of every translator ever! Especially the ones that have to translate dialog for foreign-language editions of novels, movies, and TV shows.
Just from having been active in the conlanging community for a good long time, there was a lot in this chapter that I already knew, even though I could not have articulated it as well as David and Jessie do. But the biggest insight I gained came in an explanation of how the form of a constructed language is constrained by the needs of a film production--and not just in the sense that actors need to be able to use it. Additionally, the language creator needs to be able to translate rapidly, which means they need to construct a language that is easy for them to use without too much practice. I have long thought that Davidsonian languages all seem to have a common sort of character about them, which is partially attributable to David's construction process--but now I can see there's a darn good reason for it, and I can't actually blame him! That's just more reason to work towards getting a greater diversity of language creators into the film industry, so that we can start to see a greater diversity of languages reflecting differences in what is easy for individual creators to use in service of the needs of a film production.
I found Chapter 3 "On the inner workings of language creation: using conlangs to drive reader engagement in fictional worlds", by BenJamin Johnson, Anthony Gutierrez, and Nicolás Matías Campi, to be the most immediately useful to me, and probably to most of the people who read my blog (or at least, the intended audience for the Linguistically Interesting Media Index, which is authors who want to figure out how to do this better!) It's pretty comprehensive, covering why you might want to do this, how to handle collaboration between an author and a conlanger if you don't happen to fill both rolls yourself, and some very basic stuff about the mechanics of actually using a conlang in fiction. This is where BenJamin introduces his 5-level categorization of the types of textual representation for conlangs, which I immediately latched onto and began expanding on after seeing the conference presentation that preceded this chapter, as a complement to my own categorization of comprehension-support strategies.
Chapter 4 is a case study in creating dialectal variation in a constructed language. Useful for a language creator, but you're left on your own as far as making use of that variation in your fiction writing. Personally, I think it might be hard to justify, given the difficulty of representing natural language dialects in a non-annoying way in most modern writing. Of course, if you get one of those coveted film jobs, it becomes more practical; see, for example, Paul Frommers call back to create a new dialect of Na'vi for The Way of Water.
Chapter 5, by Victor Fernandes Andrade and Sebastião Alves Teixeira Lopes, is an exploration of the visual influence of Asian scripts on alien typography in science fiction media. I'm not completely convinced, but the argument is worth reading. They've got interesting data to look over, at least.
I already briefly mentioned Chapter 6; essentially, it determines that the languages studied were perceieved as intended on some subjective axes, such as "pleasantness", by a surveyed population, but failed in aethetic design aims on other axes, and that cultural context is important to aesthetic evaluations. Chapter 7 "The phonaesthetics of constructed languages: results from an online rating experiment" by Christine Mooshammer, Dominique Bobeck, Henrik Hornecker, Kierán Meinhardt, Olga Olina, Marie Christin Walch, and Qiang Xia is essentially the same thing, just better, as it covers a broader selection of conlangs, and gathers responses from both English and German speakers, rather than just English speakers from the UK, and controls for gender, age, and linguistic background. They additionally tested listeners' abilities to discriminate between conlangs, as well as their subjective evaluations. This is potentially useful information for conlangers who are trying to target a particular aesthetic effect on a particular audience--however, it also suggests that doing specific research on this isn't really necessary for a creator, as the languages studied were pretty good at achieving their creators' stated goals already!
Chapter 8 "Tolkien’s use of invented languages in The Lord of the Rings" by James K. Tauber is basically exactly what I do on this blog--an analysis of how secondary languages are used in a fictional work to augment the narrative! I've avoided doing this sort of analysis on The Lord of the Rings myself because it is a Very Large Work, so I'll definitely be coming back to this chapter to see what I can integrate into my own analytical system later.
Chapter 9 "Changing tastes: reading the cannibalese of Charles Dickens’ Holiday Romance and nineteenthcentury popular culture" by Katie Wales analyses the representation of a truly fictional language--one which does not exist as a developed and usable language in the real world--in terms of the sociological environment in which it was published, and how the tastes of modern audiences and thus the appropriate means of cultural representation have changed over time. It is a reminder that appreciating old literature often requires being intentional about not ascribing modern points of view and modern judgments on people of the past, and trying to understand the literature as it would've been read by it's original intended audience.
Chapter 10 "Dialectal extrapolation as a literary experiment in Aldiss’ ‘A spot of Konfrontation’" by Israel A. C. Noletto reads like a pretty standard sample of Dr. Noletto's work; he's the only academic author represented in this volume with whom I have a prior acquaintance, such that I can compare his other work! Noletto argues that " the presence of an unfamiliar fictional language interlaced with English as the narrative medium does not necessarily constitute a barrier to understanding as might otherwise be expected", and that the use of the extrapolated dialect in fact serves as an important means of conveying the theme of the story through narrative style. There's a little bit of my sort of detailed analysis of the text to show it is constructed to support comprehension.
Chapter 11 "Women, fire, and dystopian things" by Jessica Norledge examines the successes, failures, and impact of Suzette Haden Elgin's Láadan language as a language for a dystopia--and particularly as a language meant to expand the user's capacity for thought, in contrast to other dystopian languages, like 1984's Newspeak, which are intended to restrict thought in a Whorfian fashion. The title is of course a reference to George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.
Chapter 12 "Building the conomasticon: names and naming in fictional worlds" by Rebecca Gregoryis a broad survey of how names are constructed and reflect language and culture--or fail to do so--in a variety of fictional works. She ends with "with a bid for names to be seen as just as fundamental a part of language creation and conceptualisation as any other of language’s building blocks", which I can only read as a plea to academics doing literary analysis, not language creators or authors, given the broad recognition that already exists in the conlanging community of "naming languages" as a thing that is useful in worldbuilding for fiction across many types of media.
Chapter 13 "The language of Lapine in Watership Down" by Kimberley Pager-McClymont analyses the idioms, conceptual patterns, and attested formal structure of the Lapine language, how it is connected to the embodied experience of rabbits, and thus contributes to generating empathy in the reader for non-human protagonists. An excellent case study to reference for conlangers who want inspiration on the developing the connection between language and culture, and especially for those working on non-human languages.
The final chapter, 14, "Unspeakable languages" by Peter Stockwell, presents another case where my intuitions clash with the chosen terminology. Stockwell examines languages which are difficult or impossible to represent directly in the narrative--i.e., a subset of truly fictional languages which necessarily remain fictional for practical reasons related to their asserted nature, not merely because the author didn't bother to flesh them out. Stockwell introduces the term "nonlang" for what I would simply call a fictional language. Terminological disputes aside, though, this chapter presents an intriguing overview of how science fiction works have dealt with the concept of the "linguistically ineffable"--languages which we can never hope to decipher or understand. The only quibble I have with the actual content is that Stockwell claims that "it is evident that the pragmatics of a question and an exclamation are still carried even in Speedtalk by intonation (marked here by ‘?’ and ‘!’)."--but that is an unwarranted conclusion based on the evidence presented, as intonation is definitely not evident on the page, and we should not assume that the use of '?' and '!' in the text actually correspond to intonation contours in the fictional spoken form--or, if they do, that the intonation contours so indicated actually correspond to questions and exclamations, given that the Speedtalk text is untranslated and explicitly not understood by the character transcribing it.
Overall: I have some complaints, and not all chapters are of equal quality or usefulness from my point of view--but there is plenty of good stuff in here that makes it worth a read, and I for one am strongly in favor of further, perhaps more intentional, collaborations between academics and conlangers in analyzing the use of constructed languages in fiction.
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