So let’s talk about definitions. What defines a language? Is it just a bunch of words strung
together in interesting ways? Or are there some properties that make it special? However
you define it, there’s no denying that people love getting creative with language. After
all, when you use and think about words every day, it’s not that big a leap to want to
get your hands on some sounds and construct your own. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is
The Ling Space.
Language is a fundamental part of what humans do, and so is crafting things. So it’s no
surprise to learn that we’ve been making up languages for a really long time, and for
a bunch of different reasons. Some medieval examples include mystical or spiritual lexicons.
Most of these stemmed from religious devotion, but in a lot of these cases, the real reasons
why they were created have been lost to the SANDS OF TIME.
Later, during the Enlightenment, some scholars experimented with creating “philosophical
languages”, all about their perfect world of ideals. These days, though, languages are
often invented just for the fun of it, or to help flesh out imaginary worlds. We usually
call these constructed languages, or conlangs for short.
Some of the most famous conlangs have been created specifically for works of fiction.
If you’ve seen any of the Lord of the Rings or Hobbit movies, then you’ve heard J.R.R. Tolkien’s
imaginary languages, like the Quenya and Sindarin spoken by the Elves. And when the movie Avatar
came out, much was made of the alien language Na'vi, which was created by the linguist
Paul Frommer to be as much like a natural language as possible.
Maybe the most famous conlang of all, though, is Klingon, which was invented over the course
of decades for the Star Trek universe. A pretty sizable community has grown up around Klingon,
and they’ve done a whole bunch of fun stuff, like translating Shakespeare or the Tao Te
Ch’ing into it, or even writing whole operas in it. People have even tried raising bilingual
Klingon/English kids!
Conlangs invented for art and entertainment can be really engaging, and they show just
how creative and intricate human beings can get when it comes to language. But of course,
not all constructed languages were created with fiction in mind. Some aim to improve
communication between people, or help make the world become a better place. That’s the
case with Esperanto, a language invented in the late 19th century by L.L. Zamenhof.
Zamenhof dreamed of a language that would transcend borders, that would help everyone get along
and create a climate of peace in Europe. When he started drawing up Esperanto, he based
it on some of the languages that were around him, like borrowing some sounds from the Slavic
languages, and a lot of the vocabulary from Romance languages, like Spanish and French.
He deliberately made the grammar as regular and straightforward as he could, so that the
language could be easily used and understood. Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world
today use Esperanto as an auxiliary language, or one that complements the other languages that
they speak. There are even thought to be about 1000 native speakers of Esperanto worldwide,
or ones who’ve been learning it since birth!
Another approach you might take when creating a language from scratch is to try to remove
all the vagueness and ambiguity from the way we speak. The thing is, we tend to talk circles
around each other sometimes, and maybe you want to avoid that and be super exact.
That’s what John Quijada did when he made Ithkuil. The idea of Ithkuil is to cram as
much meaningful information as possible into the most compact bunch of sounds.
It has 45 consonants and 13 vowels, and a lot of single sounds that are used to encode some meaning.
It has like a million variables for building sentences, too - well, maybe not a million,
but it does have literally 92 grammatical cases, which is pretty close. So a sentence
like “azbal tui” means “I inadvertently anger someone”, whereas a sentence like “azbal toi” means
“my presence makes someone angry”.
Now, before you start thinking, “92 cases? How on earth am I supposed to learn that?”,
keep in mind that even the linguist that invented the language doesn’t speak it fluently.
Unlike Esperanto, the idea isn’t to have this be a language that people use for their everyday
lives. Rather, Ithkuil might be useful in situations where you need super exact laser-like
precision for your language, like legal or political debates - or, if you’re a Logic Bot.
Conlangs are cool and fun and creative, and they can help us learn about the different
dimensions and parameters that human languages can have. But the question that we want to ask,
as linguists, is: are constructed languages really languages? Well, there’s a few different
ways to answer that, so let’s take a closer look.
So one popular definition of language is any system by which humans use words to communicate.
If we do it this way, then conlangs would count, and so would things like codes and ciphers.
Usually, though, linguists tend to think you need a little more than that. For something
to be a language, it needs to have sprouted from the amazing mental
machinery we all have, known as Universal Grammar, or UG.
That’s because there’s a bunch of stuff that all of the natural languages of the world
do, and then another bunch of stuff that none of them do. So since every natural language
in the world follows UG, you could say any other system that follows those rules also qualifies
as a language. From this perspective, a system like Ithkuil wouldn’t make the cut. After all, no language
in the world encodes meaning as compactly and complexly.
What about something like Esperanto, then? Well, when children start learning languages that
originally started out as conlangs, things get a little bit hairier. Babies are born all set
to receive linguistic information and then build a grammar out of it. So any child exposed to
a constructed language from birth will try to turn it into a natural language, just
by virtue of being a human being with a regular human brain.
As we’ll see in a later episode, this is pretty much what happened with sign languages!
They might have been created from scratch at some point, but after generations of
use, pretty much any linguist will tell you that they’re full-fledged natural languages now. So by this definition,
the same thing should be true about Esperanto, too.
So at what point does something become a language? What should we say about Quenya, or Klingon,
or Na'vi? Or any other conlang that you might be making up right now? Well, if you’re
paying attention to the rules and parameters of UG, and you’re giving it a consistent
phonology, morphology, and syntax, then you’ve probably just created a language.
It’s only when your language gets processed through the brains of babies, though, that
it can cross over to become a real natural language, with native speakers. It may change
in the process, but then, all natural languages evolve over time, too. In the end, whether it’s for
socio-cultural reasons, to flesh out a fictional world, or for the sheer fun of creation, people
have been building languages from the ground up for a long time.
And if you want to make your language as realistic as possible, knowing about linguistics is a great
place to start. Understanding how human languages work makes for an awesome foundation, and creating
your own can help you learn more about Universal Grammar, and how rich and complex a language
has to be to feel real. And that’s a solid outcome, by any definition.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you weren’t too distracted
by the Klingon opera, you learned that constructed languages, or conlangs, have been created
for centuries for reasons ranging from faith to philosophy to fun; that some of the
most popular ones have been constructed to bridge cultures, create worlds, or express
a different way of thinking; that depending on your definition of language, conlangs may
or may not qualify; and that once babies learn a conlang, they can morph into naturalized
languages.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our production assistant is Georges Coulombe, our music and
sound design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE. We’re down in the comments
below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our website, where we have some extra material
on this topic.
Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, and if you want to keep expanding your own
personal Ling Space, please subscribe. And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Qapla’!