Reading Fictional Languages

Edited by Israel Noletto, Jessica Norledge, Peter Stockwell

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Provides a guide for creating, exploring, and understanding fictional, imaginary, and invented languages
  • Brings together many of the key creators, designers and researchers of imagined languages in literature, TV and cinema
  • Features the languages of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Star Trek, Avatar, Game of Thrones, Dune, and SpEEC, Lapin, Láadan, Marain, Speedtalk, Heptapod B, and many others including a language invented exclusively for this book
  • Serves as both a handbook and guide to the creation, design principles, exploration, analysis and experience of reading fictional languages

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

Israel A.C. Noletto is Professor of English Language and Literature at the Federal Institute of Piauí (IFPI), Brazil. He holds a PhD in Language and Literature from the Federal University of Piauí and has been a CAPES fellow at the University of Nottingham. He is interested in literary stylistics, narrative theory and fictional languages in science fiction as a literary phenomenon and has authored several scholarly articles on glossopoesis in writers ranging from George Orwell to Ted Chiang, Jonathan Swift to Anthony Burgess, Thomas More to Suzette Haden Elgin. He has co-edited Literatura, Memória e Cultura (2021), and Ensaios sobre teoria e crítica literária (Essays on Literary Theory and Criticism) (2020), a collection of papers on literary criticism by scholars from Brazil, Nigeria and Nepal.

Jessica Norledge is Assistant Professor in Stylistics at the University of Nottingham. Her research sits at the interface between English literature and English language, in stylistics and narratology. Jess has a particular interest in the style of dystopian literature and the experience of reading dystopian narratives, ranging from early utopian works through to 21st-century literary practice. She has published on the cognitive poetics of emotion, dystopian epistolary, unnatural and non-human minds, and worlds theories in dystopian fiction. Her books include The Language of Dystopia (2022), and the co-authored Digital Teaching for Linguistics (2022).

Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, and a Fellow of the English Association. He has published 20 books and 100 articles in stylistics, sociolinguistics, science fiction and applied linguistics, including Cognitive Poetics (2020), The Language of Surrealism (2017), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and The Poetics of Science Fiction (2000). He co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (2014), The Language and Literature Reader (2008), Contemporary Stylistics (2007) and Impossibility Fiction (1996). His work in cognitive poetics has been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Persian, Russian and Arabic.

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