In the Land of Invented Languages

"I love this book. People have been inventing languages for hundreds of years. Think of Esperanto, or even the Na’vi language in Avatar. People have been doing this for a really long time and the underlying story – which is a funny, sweet, and sad one – is that many people have felt that existing languages were bad for one reason or another. They fall into two camps. Some people feel their natural language is ambiguous, illogical and messy, so have invented languages because they want to order the world, and force people’s thoughts into order. It draws on that thinking that we talked about earlier: people think that if the language is disordered it leads to disordered thinking. And it’s true that language is disordered and ambiguous, and vague. Any human language is that way sometimes. But these people who have tried to create perfect logical languages have failed to get anyone to learn them. They’re almost unlearnable, or extremely difficult. She also looks at the Esperanto folks, who weren’t trying to create the perfect language, but simply an auxiliary that’s no one’s first language, so that when any two people speak it, they’re speaking a neutral language. Esperanto draws on a host of European languages, so it has kind of a neutral feel to it. There’s also a third group, I guess, which is people who have done it just for fun. The Klingon enthusiasts, for example. They have conventions, there’s official tests. You can get your first level certificate in Klingon, your second level certificate etc. The author actually went and got her first level certificate in Klingon. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Artificial language as a subject has traditionally been dismissed by researchers. Arika Okrent is a proper PhD linguist and this is a great journalistic book about the real people who have done things. It’s a fantastic read and you learn a great deal – but you don’t feel like you’re learning while you’re reading it. Hope springs eternal for Esperanto people! There are a few native speakers. The author interviews one of them. It’s a couple, one parent is Polish, the other Belgian, and they raised their child in Esperanto. This guy is a first language speaker in Esperanto. She says you can really tell the difference. Everyone else speaks it well, but he speaks it so fluently and so quickly, like a real person speaks their first language. It’s a big community. They claim about two million people speak it. They’re certainly a big and active organisation, so it’s not impossible to find other folks. They’re very active on the Internet."