Teaching Proto-Indo-European as a constructed language

Traditionally, to even begin studying Proto-Indo-European (PIE), one must have many years of experience with one (or multiple) ancient Indo-European (IE) languages. Yet, the dwindling number of students who meet these expectations makes teaching PIE at the undergraduate level an increasingly difficult task. This chapter proposes a unique solution: instructors should teach students a constructed language (conlang) version of PIE as a precursor to discussions on the individual surviving branches and the methodologies behind historical reconstruction. This approach was developed through the synergy of the authors’ experiences teaching a conlang version of PIE to actors for the video game Far Cry Primal, teaching PIE to undergraduate students at the University of Kentucky, and previous training in language pedagogy and transformative learning.

The design(ing) of language

Courses on invented languages can do much more than just introduce students to linguistics. Through three case studies, it is shown that as students learn how to design a language, they also learn about the design of human language in a way that is unlikely to occur in other courses. The first case study involves the creation of a lexicon, in relation to John Wilkins’ invented language of 1668 and to Saussurean arbitrariness, commonly regarded as a fundamental design property of human language. The second case study concerns phonemic inventories. By designing their own from scratch, students see the competing pressures that phonemic inventories must satisfy in all languages. The third case study concerns inflectional morphology and the pressures that determine the form of particular morphemes. All of these case studies are accessible to students and help them engage with important aspects of the design properties of human language.

Three conlang projects at three educational levels

This chapter reports on three distinct implementations of conlang projects: one for elementary school children aged 5–10 that was developed with the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, one as a one-week summer program for secondary students aged about 15, as part of Queen Mary University’s Widening Participation initiative, and one for university students at Queen Mary College that was based on Adger’s experience creating languages for a television series. For each project, the development process, learning outcomes, and project mechanics are described. The projects vary considerably in structure and focus, and are shown to benefit students at all educational levels.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the volume by setting the larger context of the increasing attention on pedagogy in linguistics and specifically recognition of the pedagogical benefits of using language constructed to teach linguistics. The chapter discusses relevant recent history and research and lays out summaries for the remaining chapters of the volume.

Extraterrestrial message construction

This chapter presents a set of exercises ready for use in the classroom, in which students use basic pattern recognition skills to solve an “alien” message that includes both numbers and other elements. The other elements define relations among the numbers, and students determine how those relations can be mapped to words in a human language—whatever the language of instruction. Rationale for the utility of this approach is discussed, as are ways to modify the instructions to present the exercises to student populations with different levels of sophistication in math and computation, and different levels of linguistic training. The exercise and rationale exemplify one way in which constructed languages can be used to introduce key concepts in linguistics for students from a variety of academic disciplines.

Learning about language through language invention

This chapter analyzes the implementation of Invented Language Projects in different institutional and pedagogical contexts, focusing on introductory level linguistics. The data the chapter draws on come from students at three public universities, in a variety of class sizes, across undergraduate cohorts, and using a variety of integrations of language invention in course materials, over the last five years. The chapter identifies patterns of effectiveness in the use of language invention in the classroom by analyzing data collected inside and outside of these courses, assessing students’ mastery of core concepts in linguistics, their beliefs and attitudes about language, and their perception of the utility of language invention for their own learning. Though there is variation in the effectiveness of these strategies as they are instantiated in different contexts, the chapter shows that language invention is a promising way to engage with and effectively teach introductory students about the workings of natural human language.

Teaching invented languages as an introductory course

This chapter focuses on the introduction of an invented languages course to the English Department of a comprehensive state university in the midwestern United States in Fall 2016. The department has limited offerings in linguistics, with no major or minor. The course acted primarily as an applied introductory class without prerequisites, open to students with varied academic backgrounds in linguistics. Because this course was the only exposure to linguistics some students would have in their academic careers, teaching it called for some constraints. An early-semester look at international auxiliary languages such as Esperanto inspired several students to create invented languages that were easy to learn. At the same time, those with a more extensive background created more complex structures. The resulting projects ranged from minimal to highly developed; overall, though, the students maintained a high level of enthusiasm and interest in their work.

Teaching invented languages to the undergraduate major

This chapter discusses how creating an invented language allows students to master critical reasoning skills and apply their linguistic knowledge to a creative language project by using the various strands of linguistic training they have received during their undergraduate years to produce their own invented language. The structure of the course, which includes weekly discussions and presentations, along with a grammar workshop that focuses on each of the elements needed to build the language, starting with phonetics and phonology and then continuing through various syntactic elements such as word order, case, and relative clause structure are detailed and discussed. Pedagogically, the course builds on four pillars: peer-to-peer learning, close and critical engagement with original source materials, problem-solving, and creative engagement with linguistic theory.

Using language invention to teach typology and cross-linguistic universals

This chapter outlines a group project where students learn about language typology by creating a naturalistic constructed language. Students learn about cross-linguistic variation in natural languages (in areas such as phoneme inventory, word order, and case alignment), and then determine which grammatical properties their invented language will have. Decisions are made at random by spinning a wheel. Attached to the wheel is a pie chart, where the size of each slice represents the percentage of the world’s languages possessing a given setting for some structural parameter or combination of parameters. Crucially, each decision constrains subsequent decisions in accordance with known implicational universals. For instance, in determining whether the language has prepositions or postpositions, the pie chart is adjusted based on the order of verb and object in the language, as decided by a previous spin of the wheel.

A primer on constructed languages

This chapter outlines the history of language construction, beginning with the earliest recorded examples of linguistic creativity and continuing with the first true constructed languages from the Middle Ages up through the Renaissance and Enlightenment, when language construction was guided largely by religious and philosophical concerns. The chapter continues by exploring more recent history, when language construction was guided more by practical goals to unite humanity. At the same time, language construction as an art form was also being developed, most notably by J. R. R. Tolkien, who set the stage for the modern era of artistic language construction requiring specialized knowledge, talent, and hard work. The chapter also discusses the emerging role of language construction as a tool for language revitalization and concludes with a summary of terms and concepts that are important to the study of constructed languages.