A lot of work goes into creating a language from the ground up. A Northeastern linguist breaks down what goes into this process and what it says about our own languages.
Years before J.R.R. Tolkien published “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit,” he had started work on a language in search of a world.
Even before Bilbo Baggins set out on his grand adventure, Tolkien was tinkering with the many languages that filled Middle-earth. He called it his “secret vice,” one he spent decades working on, up until his death in 1973 –– and he’s not alone.
Constructed languages, or conlangs, are everywhere in fantasy and science fiction, from “Game of Thrones” to “Star Trek,” but they also exist outside of fiction, too.
According to Adam Cooper, director of the linguistics program at Northeastern University, a conlang is any language that has been consciously designed. Developing a conlang involves creating a full linguistic system –– from the most basic units of sound to words, sentences and vocabulary –– from scratch. There’s a reason Tolkien spent decades creating his Elvish languages.
Constructing a language might seem like a linguist’s dream, but Cooper says conlangs, fictional or otherwise, actually reveal how much we take for granted every time we choose to speak.
“What it boils down to is recognizing that language is a rule-governed system,” Cooper says. “There are multiple layers of linguistic structure at each of which there are rules that govern how the units are manipulated. Consciously creating language is recognizing that you have to actively think about what those rules are going to look like at each of those levels, from individual sounds all the way up to full phrases and sentences.”
Most people hear conlangs in their favorite TV shows and movies, but Cooper says there are conlangs in our world, too.
Created by Ludwik Zamenhof in the late 19th century, Esperanto is the most well-known real-world conlang. It was designed with the intent to bridge linguistic and cultural divides between different groups of people. While it might not have reached the millions of speakers Zamenhof hoped for, “it is one of the more successful examples of a constructed language,” Cooper says.
“There is a community of both native and non-native Esperanto speaking people, so there are actually people who learned Esperanto natively,” Cooper says.
So, how do you actually create a language?
Generally, it involves developing a form for the language and connecting that form to a meaning or way of conveying meaning. In spoken language, that requires the development of multiple levels of sound structure, starting with the smallest units of sound, or phonemes.
“It’s not just developing the inventory of the sounds but understanding what their combinatorial possibilities are to create fuller sound expressions and even whole words,” Cooper says.
From there, you have to create a vocabulary: What is the meaning attached to specific words? How does that meaning develop or change when you combine words?
Creating a conlang means breaking language down into its basic building blocks, deconstructing the linguistic features we don’t consciously think about when communicating. But conlangs, particularly those created for fictional worlds, also help us think about how language doesn’t exist in a vacuum, Cooper adds.
“A large part of successful conlang design is thinking about the world in which the conlang is going to be used,” Cooper says. “What are the priorities of the users? What are their interests? What motivates them? … Tolkien obviously gave a lot of thought to that and created this whole world of Middle-earth to give space for the languages to thrive.”
The best conlangs help bring the people and cultures of their world alive. Cooper points to Klingon, the language spoken by the warlike alien Klingons in “Star Trek,” as the starting point for how TV shows and movies started to take language more seriously.
Prior to linguist Marc Okrand’s work in “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,” most conlangs in Hollywood productions sounded like Huttese in “Return of the Jedi.” Spoken by the wormlike crime lord Jabba the Hutt, it was simply a series of sounds combined to seem like a language.
In “The Search for Spock,” Okrand built a language befitting the militant Klingons, one that could be, and is, actually spoken outside the show. Klingon uses “less common phenomena in terms of the basic word order of the sentences, in terms of the sounds and the sound combinations,” Cooper says.
“He included many sounds that are not found in the English language, sounds that are produced further back in the vocal tract,” he explains.
Klingon has since taken on a life of its own; a small number of people can speak it conversationally, and some people have even tied the knot in Klingon.
That kind of attention to linguistic detail has been adopted more broadly in Hollywood, from “Game of Thrones” to “Dune.” However, Tolkien’s influence still looms large, particularly in how linguists try to weave historical development into their conlangs.
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A historical linguist Tolkien not only created several languages; he created entire language families full of interrelated linguistic systems that developed from common sources and changed over time.
“That’s one of the tricks or techniques that’s suggested today: Create a language but then apply some regular processes of language change, and then you get a system that is that much more typologically plausible and natural,” Cooper says.
Tolkien took conlang design to an extreme, but Cooper, who teaches a class full of students who are tasked with creating their own languages, says it’s a testament to the power, and complexity, of language itself.
“It speaks to how remarkable language is as a linguistic phenomenon that you can spend decades upon decades developing a system, refining a system, even down to the small details,” Cooper says.