Intention, Intervention and Language Invention

Nearly 15 years ago, veteran producer Jayantha Chandrasiri made a teledrama called ‘Rajina’ (The Queen). Story stretched as aliens from a faraway galaxy searching for their queen on earth. As a big fan of Star Trek I found many techno wise similarities in Rajina and Star Trek including the alien language used in both creations. I have a slight memory that Jayantha using subtitles in Sinhalese to translate that alien language to the viewers.

When you hear the term ‘invented language’, you probably think first of the famous imaginary languages of fiction, for instance, the mind-numbing Newspeak of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or the Russian-based criminal argot Nadsat in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, or Elvish and other languages in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps it brings to mind the feminist language Láaden in Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue, or Wardwesân, the language of Frédéric Werst’s sensational Ward, published in France, the first original work of fiction to be written entirely in an invented language, accompanied by a helpful parallel French translation — well, helpful if you happen to read French.

Invented languages

Of course fiction extends beyond print into other media, and film and television have their invented languages, too: Star Trek in its various incarnations has Klingon, and James Cameron’s Avatar has Na’vi. Many invented languages, however, belong to the real world and have real speakers. Some of these are plainly utopian, international languages intended to bridge the linguistic and cultural gaps that have plagued human relations, so the story goes, since the Tower of Babel, when God confounded our tongues.

Aliens in ‘Star Trek’

The most successful of these, Esperanto, introduced in 1887 by Ludwig Zamenhof, is still cultivated in speech and writing. By the end of the twentieth century’s first decade, there were nearly 2,000 books published in Esperanto, 350 periodicals published in 48 countries, and nearly 1,500 Esperanto societies worldwide, though the tangible effects of Esperanto have dwindled since then.

Some invented languages of the real world are revitalized and modernized versions of natural languages, like Modern Hebrew, Hawaiian, Maori and Cornish. Though not utopian, each of these is an ongoing project towards a ‘better’ language, one that enables a ‘better’ future for the people who speak it as a national language, and often prompting argument about what better languages and better futures would be.

National identity

Some such languages (Cornish, for instance), are nostalgic: they recover an ethnic past, express a historical ethnic or national identity in the present, and preserve it for the future. Others, like Modern Hebrew, are updatings: Ancient Hebrew, though a religious and literary language from Biblical times to the present day, was effectively ‘dead’ as a spoken language in the second century AD, when Jews adopted Aramaic as their vernacular. Ancient Hebrew, then, was not adequate to describe the natural and cultural phenomena of twentieth-century life. Modern Hebrew has invented words and modes of expression that make it modern, hand in hand with Zionism and the establishment of Israel.

Planning and codifying a language (that is, making up the rules and words for it and recording those rules and words in grammars, dictionaries, and the like) is a species of invention. As linguists observe, whether an invented language is fictional, utopian, or revitalized, it arises from dissatisfaction with the current linguistic state of affairs.

Recognition that language can be used for promoting or changing the social, cultural, and political order leads to conscious intervention and manipulation of the form of language, its status, and its uses.

The language we have is not always the language we want or need, and inventing a language or making an old language new serves ideological as well as practical purposes.