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Fictional languages created for film, television series and literature are now used in university linguistics education, according to linguists.
Researchers say these languages have moved beyond the entertainment world and now serve as systems that help students study how language works.
Language creation exercises in universities help students better understand a language's basic components, including sounds, vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure.
By building their own language systems, students learn, in practice, which rules govern a language and how those rules relate to one another.
US linguist and author Arika Okrent said people want to learn a fictional language when it is designed well enough to give depth to the imaginary culture it belongs to, as it lets them “truly be part” of that world.
Others are driven purely by linguistic and intellectual curiosity, she said, and their central question is how a language with certain rules and limits works and how far it can be developed.
“Constructed languages pose no threat to natural languages and are a great way to understand human language and how it works,” Okrent said. “Creating a constructed language is used as a teaching tool in many universities’ linguistics courses to study natural language structure.”
Fatma Nihan Ketrez Sozmen, a linguist at Istanbul Bilgi University in Istanbul, Türkiye’s largest city, said she uses language building in her classes to explain linguistic concepts.
She said the method helps attract students’ attention and keeps their interest in linguistics alive. She also described constructed languages as useful for linguistics education, not only for the film and television industries.
“Regardless of the number of speakers and their real-life contexts, fictional languages are already real languages,” Sozmen said.
“The number of speakers of some fictional languages is higher than the number of speakers of some endangered natural languages. Some people speak some fictional languages as their native language. People speak Klingon with their children. Such cases are rare, but they do happen.”
Sozmen said she does not speak any constructed language herself. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she watched one episode of “The 100” every day and, after a while, could understand the series' constructed language without subtitles. She said this shows constructed languages can also be learned with enough exposure.
Sozmen said natural languages consist of more than words and phrases.
They have a specific grammar and structure, with consistent patterns, and a limited number of rules can produce an unlimited number of new expressions. In this respect, she said, human language is "creative."
Languages created for fictional productions do not always have these features, she said. According to Sozmen, Dothraki in its original form in George R.R. Martin's “Game of Thrones” was not fully a language.
However, linguist David J. Peterson's version for the screen adaptation became a real language system with grammar rules.
“These languages bring together people who share the same passion while also setting them apart from others,” Sozmen said.
“So they make it easier for people to bond and contribute to the formation of their social identities.”
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