Constructed Languages and the Sociolinguistics of Language Making

Abstract

This book offers a critical sociolinguistics of language making. While many readers will be somewhat familiar with the “novlang” of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, or with Esperanto or J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional languages, the subject of what is here called constructed languages is generally understood to be unworthy of serious scholarly attention, treated at best as an amusing footnote to “respectable” structural, descriptive, philosophical, historical, social, and cultural studies of language. Taking a different route, this edited volume engages critically with the foundational beliefs, driving rationales, and social and linguistic thought of the creators, users, and supporters of constructed languages, as well as with connected debates and critiques. The book explores constructed languages in a critical frame, troubling handed-down notions of naturalness and artificiality in linguistics and sociolinguistics. Following a substantive introduction, the volume gathers eight case studies both historical and contemporary, from a wide range of sites, including revolutionary France, the global auxiliary language movement, the League of Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Basic English and Minimal English, Star Trek, and machine learning. Constructed languages, as the chapters show, constitute a pervasive mode of imaginative thought that can be understood as response to crises—social transformations, war, or economic and political upheaval—or other sociolinguistic tensions, feeding into visions of language-driven amelioration of linguistic and social wrongs. Constructed languages and practices of language making accordingly beckon sociolinguistics to increase its reflexivity around notions of universality, community, nativeness, justice, authenticity, and humanness.