Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG
Authors: Higley Sarah L. 
Published: October 2020

Could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or
give vocal expression to his inner experiences -- his feelings, moods, and
the rest -- for his private use? Well, can't we do so in our ordinary
language? -- But that is not what I mean. The individual words of this
language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to
his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the
language.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations par. 243

I will be using 'audience' in two ways in the following essay: as a
phenomenon that produces and is produced by media technologies (readers,
hearers, viewers, Internet-users), and as something, audiens, that is
essential to language itself, something without which language cannot be.
I shall do so in specific references to invented languages. Who, then, are
the 'consumers' of invented languages?
In referring to invented languages, I am not talking about speakers of
Esperanto or Occidental; I am not concerned with the invention of
international auxiliary languages. These projects, already well-debated,
have roots that go back at least as far as the 17th-century language
philosophers who were at pains to undo the damage of Babel and restore a
common language to the world. While Esperanto never became what it
intended to be, it at least has readers and speakers.
I am also not even talking about speakers of Klingon or Quenya. These
privately invented languages have had the good fortune to be attached to
popular invented cultures, and to media with enough money and publicity to
generate a multitude of fans.
Rather, I am talking about a phenomenon on the Internet and in a well-
populated listserv whereby a number of people from all over the globe have
discovered each other on-line. They all have a passion for what Jeffrey
Schnapp calls uglossia ('no-language', after utopia, 'no-place'). Umberto
Eco calls it 'technical insanity' or glottomania. Linguist Marina
Yaguello calls language inventors fous du langage ('language lunatics') in
her book of the same title. Jeffrey Henning prefers the term 'model
language' in his on-line newsletter: 'miniaturized versions that provide
the essence of something'. On CONLANG, people call themselves conlangers
(from 'constructed language') and what they do conlanging. By forming
this list, they have created a media audience for themselves, in the first
sense of the term, and also literally in the second sense, as a number of
them are setting up soundbytes on their elaborately illustrated and
explicated Webpages.
Originally devoted to advocates for international auxiliary languages,
CONLANG started out about eight years ago, and as members joined who were
less interested in the politics than in the hobby of language invention,
the list has become almost solely the domain of the latter, whereas the
'auxlangers', as they are called, have moved to another list. An
important distinguishing feature of 'conlangers' is that, unlike the
'auxlangers', there is no sustained hope that their languages will have a
wide-body of hearers or users. They may wish it, but they do not advocate
for it, and as a consequence their languages are free to be a lot weirder,
whereas the auxlangs tend to strive for regularity and useability.
CONLANG is populated by highschool, college, and graduate students;
linguists; computer programmers; housewives; librarians; professors; and
other users worldwide. The old debate about whether the Internet has
become the 'global village' that Marshall McLuhan predicted, or whether it
threatens to atomise communication 'into ever smaller worlds where
enthusiasms mutate into obsessions', as Jeff Salamon warns, seems
especially relevant to a study of CONLANG whose members indulge in an
invention that by its very nature excludes the casual listener-in.
And yet the audio-visual capacities of the Internet, along with its speed
and efficiency of communication, have made it the ideal forum for
conlangers. Prior to the Web, how were fellow inventors to know that
others were doing -- in secret? J.R.R. Tolkien has been lauded as a rare
exception in the world of invention, but would his elaborate linguistic
creations have become so famous had he not published The Lord of the Rings
and its Appendix? Poignantly, he tells in "A Secret Vice" about
accidentally overhearing another army recruit say aloud: 'Yes! I think I
shall express the accusative by a prefix!'. Obviously, silent others
besides Tolkien were inventing languages, but they did not have the means
provided by the Internet to discover one another except by chance.
Tolkien speaks of the 'shyness' and 'shame' attached to this pursuit,
where 'higher developments are locked in secret places'. It can win no
prizes, he says, nor make birthday presents for aunts. His choice of
title ("A Secret Vice") echoes a Victorian phrase for the closet, and
conlangers have frequently compared conlanging to homosexuality, both
being what conservative opinion expects one to grow out of after puberty.
The number of gay men on the list has been wondered at as more than
coincidental. In a survey I conducted in October 1998, many of the
contributors to CONLANG felt that the list put them in touch with an
audience that provided them with intellectual and emotional feedback.
Their interests were misunderstood by parents, spouses, lovers, and
employers alike, and had to be kept under wraps. Most of those I surveyed
said that they had been inventing a language well before they had heard of
the list; that they had conceived of what they were doing as unique or
peculiar, until discovery of CONLANG; and that other people's Websites
astounded them with the pervasive fascination of this pursuit.
There are two ways to look at it: conlanging, as Henning writes, may be
as common and as humanly creative as any kind of model-making, i.e.,
dollhouses, model trains, role-playing, or even the constructed cultures
with city plans and maps in fantasy novels such as Terry Pratchett's
Discworld. The Web is merely a means to bring enthusiasts together. Or it
may provide a site that, with the impetus of competition and showmanship,
encourages inutile and obsessive activity. Take your pick. From
Hildegard von Bingen's Lingua Ignota to Dante's Inferno and the babbling
Nimrod to John Dee's Enochian and on, invented languages have smacked of
religious ecstacy, necromancy, pathology, and the demonic. Twin speech,
or 'pathological idioglossia', was dramatised by Jodie Foster in Nell.
Hannah Green's 'Language of Yr' was the invention of her schizophrenic
protagonist in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Language itself is the
centre of furious theoretical debate. Despite the inventive 'deformities'
it is put to in poetry, punning, jest, singing, and lying, human language,
our most 'natural' of technologies, is a social machine, used by
multitudes and expected to get things done. It is expected of language
that it be understood and that it have not only hearers but also
answerers. All human production is founded on this assumption. A
language without an audience of other speakers is no language. 'Why
aren't you concentrating on real languages?' continues to be the most
stinging criticism.
Audience is essential to Wittgenstein's remark quoted at the beginning of
this essay. Wittgenstein posits his 'private languages theory' as a kind
of impossibility: all natural languages, because they exist by consensus,
can only refer to private experience externally. Hence, a truly private
language, devoted to naming 'feelings and moods' which the subject has
never heard about or shared with others, is impossible among socialised
speakers who are called upon to define subjective experience in public
terms. His is a critique of solipsism, a charge often directed at
language inventors. But very few conlangers that I have encountered are
making private languages in Wittgenstein's sense, because most of them are
interested in investing their private words with public meaning, even when
they are doing it privately. For them, it is audience, deeply desireable,
that has been impossible until now.
Writing well before the development of CONLANG, Yaguello takes the stance
that inventing a language is an act of madness. 'Just look at the lunatic
in love with language', she writes:
sitting in his book-lined study, he collects great piles of information,
he collates and classifies it, he makes lists and fills card indexes. He
is in the clutches of a denominatory delirium, of a taxonomic madness.
He
has to name everything, but before being able to name, he has to
recognize
and classify concepts, to enclose the whole Universe in a system of
notation: produce enumerations, hierarchies, and paradigms.
She is of course describing John Wilkins, whose Real Character and
Universal Language in 1668 was an attempt to make each syllable of his
every invented word denote its placement in a logical scheme of
classification. 'A lunatic ambition', Yaguello pronounces, because it
missed the essential quality of language: that its signs are arbitrary,
practical, and changeable, so as to admit neologism and cultural
difference. But Yaguello denounces auxiliary language makers in general
as amateurs 'in love with language and with languages, and ignorant of the
science of language'. Her example of 'feminine' invention comes from
Helene Smith, the medium who claimed to be channeling Martian (badly
disguised French). One conlanger noted that Yaguello's chapter entitled
'In Defence of Natural Languages' reminded him of the US Federal 'Defense
of Marriage Act', whereby the institution of heterosexual marriage is
'defended' from homosexual marriage. Let homosexuals marry or lunatics
invent language, and both marriage and English (or French) will come
crashing to the ground.
Schnapp praises Yaguello's work for being the most comprehensive
examination of the phenomenon to date, but neither he nor she addresses
linguist Suzette Haden Elgin's creative work on Láadan, a language
designed for women, or even Quenya or Klingon -- languages that have
acquired at least an audience of readers. Schnapp is less condemnatory
than Yaguello, and interested in seeing language inventors as the
'philologists of imaginary worlds', 'nos semblables, nos frères, nos
soeurs' -- after all. Like Yaguello, he is given to some generalities:
imaginary languages are 'infantile': 'the result is always [my emphasis]
an "impoverishment" of the natural languages in question: reduced to a
limited set of open vowels [he means "open syllables"], prone to syllabic
reduplication and to excessive syntactical parallelisms and symmetries'.
To be sure, conlangs will never replicate the detail and history of a real
language, but to call them 'impoverishments of the natural languages'
seems as strange as calling dollhouses 'impoverishments of actual houses'.
Why this perception of threat or diminishment? The critical, academic
"audience" for language invention has come largely from non-language
inventors and it is woefully uninformed. It is this audience that
conlangers dislike the most: the outsiders who cannot understand what they
are doing and who belittle it.
The field, then, is open to re-examination, and the recent phenomenon of
conlanging is evidence that the art of inventing languages is neither
lunatic nor infantile. But if one is not Tolkien or a linguist supported
by the fans of Star Trek, how does one justify the worthwhile nature of
one's art? Is it even art if it has an audience of one ... its artist?
Conlanging remains a highly specialised and technical pursuit that is, in
the end, deeply subjective. Model builders and map-makers can expect
their consumers to enjoy their products without having to participate in
the minutia of their building. Not so the conlanger, whose consumer must
internalise it, and who must understand and absorb complex linguistic
concepts. It is different in the world of music. The Cocteau Twins,
Bobby McFerrin in his Circle Songs, Lisa Gerrard in Duality, and the new
group Ekova in Heaven's Dust all use 'nonsense' words set to music --
either to make songs that sound like exotic languages or to convey a kind
of melodic glossolalia. Knowing the words is not important to their
hearers, but few conlangers yet have that outlet, and must rely on text
and graphs to give a sense of their language's structure. To this end,
then, these are unheard, unaudienced languages, existing mostly on screen.
A few conlangers have set their languages to music and recorded them. What
they are doing, however, is decidedly different from the extempore of
McFerrin. Their words mean something, and are carefully worked out
lexically and grammatically.
So What Are These Conlangs Like?
On CONLANG and their links to Websites you will find information on
almost every kind of no-language imaginable. Some sites are text only;
some are lavishly illustrated, like the pages for Denden, or they feature
a huge inventory of RealAudio and MP3 files, like The Kolagian Languages,
or the songs of Teonaht. Some have elaborate scripts that the newest
developments in fontography have been able to showcase. Some, like Tokana
and Amman-Iar, are the result of decades of work and are immensely
sophisticated. Valdyan has a Website with almost as much information about
the 'conculture' as the conlang. Many are a posteriori languages, that
is, variations on natural languages, like Brithenig (a mixture of the
features of Brythonic and Romance languages); others are a priori --
starting from scratch -- like Elet Anta.
Many conlangers strive to make their languages as different from European
paradigms as possible. If imaginary languages are bricolages, as Schnapp
writes, then conlangers are now looking to Tagalog, Basque, Georgian,
Malagasay, and Aztec for ideas, instead of to Welsh, Finnish, and Hebrew,
languages Tolkien drew upon for his Elvish. "Ergative" and "trigger"
languages are often preferred to the "nominative" languages of Europe.
Some people invent for sheer intellectual challenge; others for the beauty
and sensuality of combining new and privately meaningful sounds.
There are many calls for translation exercises, one of the most popular
being 'The Tower of Babel' (Genesis 10: 1-9). The most recent innovation,
and one that not only showcases these languages in all their variety but
provides an incentive to learn another conlanger's conlang, is the
Translation Relay Game: someone writes a short poem or composition in his
or her language and sends it with linguistic information to someone else,
who sends a translation with directions to the next in line all the way
around again, like playing 'telephone'. The permutations that the Valdyan
Starling Song went through give good evidence that these languages are not
just relexes, or codes, of natural languages, but have their own
linguistic, cultural, and poetic parameters of expression. They differ
from real languages in one important respect that has bearing on my
remarks about audience: very few conlangers have mastered their languages
in the way one masters a native tongue. These creations are more like
artefacts (several have compared it to poetry) than they are like
languages. One does not live in a dollhouse. One does not normally think
or speak in one's conlang, much less speak to another, except through a
laborious process of translation.
It remains to a longer cultural and sociolinguistic study (underway) to
tease out the possibilities and problems of conlanging: why it is done,
what does it satisfy, why so few women do it, what are its demographics,
or whether it can be turned to pedagogical use in a 'hands-on', high-
participation study of language. In this respect, CONLANG is one of the
'coolest' of on-line media. Only time will show what direction conlanging
and attitudes towards it will take as the Internet becomes more powerful
and widely used.
Will the Internet democratise, and eventually make banal, a pursuit that
has until now been painted with the romantic brush of lunacy and secrecy?
(You can currently download LangMaker, invented by Jeff Henning, to help
you construct your own language.) Or will it do the opposite and make
language and linguistics -- so often avoided by students or reduced in
university programs -- inventive and cutting edge? (The inventor of Tokana
has used in-class language invention as a means to study language
typology.) Now that we have it, the Internet at least provides conlangers
with a place to hang their logodaedalic tapestries, and the technology for
some of them to be heard.

References

Von Bingen, Hildegard. Lingua Ignota, or Wörterbuch der unbekannten
Sprache. Eds. Marie-Louise Portmann and Alois Odermatt. Basel: Verlag
Basler Hildegard-Gesellschaft, 1986.
Eco, Umberto. The Search for the Perfect Language. Trans. James
Fentress. Oxford, England, and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995, 1997.
Elgin, Suzette Haden. A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan.
Madison, WI: Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science-
Fiction, 1985.
Henning, Jeffrey. Model Languages: The Newsletter Discussing Newly
Imagined Words for Newly Imagined Worlds.
<http://www.Langmaker.com/ml00.htm>.
Kennaway, Richard. Some Internet Resources Relating to Constructed
Languages. <http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/jrk/conlang.php>. (The most
comprehensive list (with links) of invented languages on the Internet.)
Laycock, Donald C. The Complete Enochian Dictionary: A Dictionary of the
Angelic Language as Revealed to Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley. York
Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1994.
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P, 1994.
Salamon, Jeff. "Revenge of the Fanboys." Village Voice 13 Sep., 1994.
Schnapp, Jeffrey. "Virgin Words: Hildegard of Bingen's Lingua Ignota
and the Development of Imaginary Languages Ancient and Modern." Exemplaria
3.2 (1991): 267-98.
Tolkien, J.R.R. "A Secret Vice." The Monsters and the Critics and Other
Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984. 198-223.
Wilkins, John. An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical
Language. Presented to the Royal Society of England in 1668.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed. Trans.
G.E.M. Anscombe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1958.
Yaguello, Marina. Lunatic Lovers of Language: Imaginary Languages and
Their Inventors. Trans. Catherine Slater. (Les fous du langage. 1985.)
London: The Athlone Press, 1991.

Citation reference for this article
MLA style:

Sarah L. Higley. "Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on
the Internet." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date
of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php>.
Chicago style:

Sarah L. Higley, "Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing Languages on
the Internet," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000),
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php> ([your date of access]).
APA style:

Sarah L. Higley. (2000) Audience, Uglossia, and CONLANG: Inventing
Languages on the Internet. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1).
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/languages.php> ([your date of access]).