A short introduction to glossopoiesis
5. Fictional languages
If some constructed languages can find their place in the real world, most of them only live within the virtual environment of fictional worlds.
The very first example of linguistic creation applied to literature seems to date back to 425 BC: it's the pseudo-Persian spoken by Pseudartabas, minister of the King of Persia, in Aristophanes' comedy The Acharnians (a parody of a foreign language, which, as we have seen, is a kind of game language). Also in Aristophanes we find a sample of bird language in the comedy The birds (414 BC), and a short sample of frog language in The frogs (405 BC).
The latter are only meaningless onomatopoetic passages, but often nothing more is required to set the right atmosphere...
A plenty of authors employed linguistic creation - be it just a few unintelligible words, entire languages or anything in between - to lend depth and likelihood to their fictional settings, to enhance the atmosphere, or just for fun. Among them, we may name, for example, Dante Alighieri (the obscure Papé Satàn, papé Satàn aleppe! in Inferno VII, 1, and Rafél maí amècche zabí almi in Inferno XXXI, 67), Thomas More (one sample of the language of Utopia), François Rabelais (samples of three immaginary languages in Gargantua et Pantagruel, 2nd book, ch. 9), Molière (pseudo-Turkish in Le bourgeois gentilhomme), Jonathan Swift (various immaginary languages in the so-called Gulliver's travels), Lewis Carroll (nine sentences of a dog language in ch. 13 of Sylvie and Bruno, where it is possible to identify 18 separate words and a few grammatical details), Howard P. Lovecraft (various samples of languages and scripts), Tommaso Landolfi (unknown, unintelligible language in Dialogo dei massimi sistemi; Landolfiano, an overly complicated joke language, with 4 genders, 7 numbers, 146 cases, 18 verb aspects, a great many auxiliaries and 1200 conjugations!), J.L. Borges (languages of Tlön in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius; various other samples), George Orwell (Newspeak in 1984), C.S. Lewis (the Malacandran language), Jack Vance (the languages of Pao, in the eponymous novel), Frank Herbert (the language of Fremen, in the Dune series) and Ursula K. Le Guin (samples of various languages in various novels and stories).
J.R.R. Tolkien's languages, often cited as the most illustrious example of fictional languages, in my opinion don't belong here: although they show the intimate connection existing between language creation and fictional creation, for Tolkien languages are primary. They're not just a device: they came first, and the whole background, including the literary masterpiece called The Lord of the Rings, proceed from the languages as a natural consequence. I'll propose a more suitable place for Tolkien's languages in a later instalment...
Fictional constructed languages aren't only found in literature. Games - especially role-playing games, but also a few computer games - employed them to various degrees; and one must not forget about cinema and television.
Indeed, from these media comes the most successful fictional language in the 20th Century: Klingon. Created by Mark Okrand on behalf of Paramount Pictures for the Star Trek movies and TV series, it has become so popular that regular Klingon classes are held, many books, including parts of the Bible and several plays by Shakespeare, have been translated to Klingon, and at least one child is being raised in this language... The success of Klingon encouraged many people to create a great many unofficial alien languages inspired by Star Trek, and it could be one of the factors that led to a linguist and language creator, Matt Pearson, being asked to create the Hive language for the TV series Dark skies.
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