Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2021 May 10;376(1824):20200201.
doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0201. Epub 2021 Mar 22.

Comparing prehistoric constructed languages: world-building and its role in understanding prehistoric languages

Christine Schreyer  1 , David Adger  2
Affiliations

Comparing prehistoric constructed languages: world-building and its role in understanding prehistoric languages

Christine Schreyer et al. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. .

Abstract

In this paper, we compare the languages each of the authors invented as prehistoric languages for popular culture media. Schreyer's language, Beama, was created for the film Alpha (2018), while Adger's language, Tan!aa Kawawa ki, was created for a television series on how early hominins spread throughout the world (the series was green-lit but then cancelled). We argue that though this creative process may seem far removed from classical research paradigms on language evolution, it can provide some insight into how disparate research on the possible properties of prehistoric languages can be brought together to illustrate how these languages might have worked as whole linguistic systems within these imagined worlds, as well as in prehistory. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'.

Keywords: anthropology; conlang; language evolution; linguistics; prehistoric languages; world-building.

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Okrent A. 2009. In the land of invented languages: Esperanto rock stars, Klingon poets, Loglan lovers and the mad dreamers who tried to build a perfect language. New York, NY: Random House.
    1. Peterson DJ. 2015. The art of language invention: from Horse Lords to Dark-Elves, the words behind world-building. New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
    1. Adams M (ed.). 2011. From Elvish to Klingon: exploring invented languages. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    1. Sanders N. 2016. Constructed languages in the classroom. Language 92, 192-204. ( 10.1353/lan.2016.0055) - DOI
    1. Punske J, Sanders N, Fountain AV. 2020 Language invention in linguistics pedagogy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

LinkOut - more resources