Edited by Israel Noletto, Jessica Norledge, Peter Stockwell
Reading Fictional Languages brings together scholars, creators, designers and speakers of fictional languages from across the world in a unique book that explores the imagined languages of fantasy, science fiction, dystopia and alternate realities. It explores the role of invented languages in world-building, characterisation, and the feeling of authentic immersion in the forms of thought of aliens, animals, machines, and the people who inhabit alternative worlds from our own.
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: reading fictional languages, Israel Noletto, Jessica Norledge, and Peter Stockwell
PART I: Design
2. Conlanging with non-conlangers: the art of language invention in television and media, David J. Peterson and Jessie Sams
3. On the inner workings of language creation, BenJamin Johnson, Anthony Gutierrez and Nicolás Matias Campi
4. Dialects in constructed languages, Harry Cook
5. Alien typographies in sf and the influence of Asian languages, Victor Fernandes Andrade and Sebastião Alves Teixeira Lopes
6. Design intentions and actual perception of fictional languages: Quenya, Sindarin and Na’vi, Bettina Beinhoff
7. Phonaesthetics of constructed languages: results from an online rating experiment, Christine Mooshammer, Dominique Bobeck, Henrik Hornecker, Kierán Meinhardt, Olga Olina, Marie Christin Walch, and Qiang Xia
PART II: Interpretation
8. Tolkien’s use of invented languages in The Lord of the Rings, James K. Tauber
9. Changing tastes: reading the cannibalese of Charles Dickens’ Holiday Romance and nineteenth-century popular culture, Katie Wales
10. Dialectal extrapolation as a literary experiment in Aldiss’ ‘A spot of Konfrontation’, Israel Noletto
11. Women, fire, and dystopian things, Jessica Norledge
12. Building the conomasticon: names and naming in fictional worlds, Rebecca Gregory
13. The language of Lapine in Watership Down, Kimberley Pager-McClymont
14. Unspeakable languages, Peter Stockwell
Index