Using Ria Cheyne’s “Created Languages” to incorporate literature

This semester I’m teaching a course on constructed languages. I developed the course for the Fall ’21 semester, and this is the third time I’ve run it.

I teach in an English department, and the course engages with literary analysis as well as with linguistics and materials on constructed languages in history and contemporary culture.

In all three iterations of the course, we’ve read Babel-17 , by Samuel Delany, as our primary literary text. In the previous two iterations, I struggled to integrate our discussions of constructed languages with the way they showed up in literary texts. Basically, very few authors bother building out very much of a conlang, and when and if they do, it’s not the best generator for class discussion.

One place this disconnect became very apparent was when I asked students to incorporate other class readings as secondary sources in their literary analysis papers. It was hard for them to tie a connection between the formal language structures and sociolinguistic phenomena we discussed and the way Delany presents the conlang Babel-17.

This semester, I’ve had much more success by incorporating Ria Cheyne’s “Created Languages in Science Fiction” into our secondary readings. I pair it with the extended definition of conlang terms at the end of Nathan Sanders’ chapter “A Primer on Constructed Languages.”

Sanders’ taxonomy is excellent, but in my course it is really helpful to have the following articulation by Cheyne:

Even when created languages are discussed, an approach through the larger category of constructed languages will tend to slight them, for the chief focus is necessarily not on the functioning of the created language within the text so much as as on the grammar, vocabulary, ideology, and other features of the language per se–even though very few of sf’s created languages are presented in terms of extensive lexicons or systematic grammar rules. Highly developed languages as Elgin’s Laadan and Klingon are much in the minority.

This framing gives students the space to adjust the focus of their literary analysis to thematic elements in the novel within a discussion of conlangs. As an example, in previous iterations of the course, students tended to reject the following excerpt from Babel-17 as an instance of language construction:

She looked down at the…not “webbing,” but rather a three-particle vowel differential, each particle of which defined one stress of the three-way tie, so that the weakest points in the mesh were identified when the total sound of the differential reached its lowest point. By breaking the threads at these points, she realized, the whole web would unravel. Had she flailed at it, and not named it in this new language, it would have been more than secure enough to hold her.

In this scene, Rydra Wong thinks in Babel-17 while examining a system of physical restraints and gains an analytic perspective otherwise unavailable to her. Class discussions on the scene were interesting, and I do think it’s valuable to discuss different definitions of key concepts. But we would get bogged down because I wasn’t successful in convincing my students to expand their definition of constructed language and then explore what that expansion made possible for their analyses.

Cheyne provides a list of created language features that may appear in sff texts. Some of the items relevant for the above passage are the provision of “phonemic information,” “information about grammatical structure,” and “descriptions of other notable features of the language.” Cheyne’s list gives students a schema to fit different texts’ created languages into. As a bonus, students can situate Cheyne’s discussion of created languages within Sanders’ broader taxonomy of conlangs; this provides the opportunity to practice synthesizing multiple scholarly sources.

edited 3/18 /25 for clarity and typos