Meet the conlangs: how artificial languages are becoming mainstream
By: Ben Bartlett
Tags: Language, Esperanto, Fantasy, Conlang, Game of Thrones

We’re in the middle of a language learning boom — but it’s maybe not the languages you’d expect

Constructed languages can offer insights into fantasy worlds and open up opportunities for learning other languages. Photo by veeterzy on Unsplash.

If you start looking down the list of languages that the language learning app Duolingo offers, you’d think you wouldn’t be in for many surprises. And certainly when I went to the landing page for the first time in preparation for this article, I wasn’t overly surprised.

Spanish came first, with 26.2 million learners, driven mostly by learners in the US. French, Japanese and German followed shortly after, with several million users each.

But get a bit further down the list, and you’ll see some languages you might not expect. Hawaiian has 556,000 learners, more than a third of the population of Hawaii, and Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Yiddish all have impressive uptake as well. There are unique challenges to overcome not just for the learners of these languages, but also for their extant communities.

As I discussed with my friend Mollie in an article for our blog last year, people tend to learn some of these languages for a variety of reasons, in particular ‘soul reasons’ — wanting to connect to the language, culture, and perhaps their heritage.

So with all that in mind, what am I meant to think when I find Esperanto, High Valyrian, and Klingon near the bottom of that list?

Launched in 2015, 2017 and 2018 respectively, each language has quite a staggering number of learners on Duolingo, with High Valyrian having more than Czech, and Klingon boasting almost 300,000.

People striving to learn constructed languages (or conlangs) is nothing new: Esperanto has been around since 1887, far longer than anyone reading this, and people have been devoted to learning Tolkien’s Elvish languages for more than half a century. But this wasn’t just a few die-hard fanatics, this was hundreds of thousands of people. I wanted to know more, so I started looking at the basics of each language to understand the history, learning process, and what drives learners to work on it.

I started with High Valyrian, the most frequently learned of the conlangs on Duolingo and by far the most recently created. I did a placement test to see how much I knew already (spoiler alert: I failed).

Whilst I initially thought the rather stern-looking bear probably represented the Starks, it turns out that this is the standard interface for Duolingo. Everything is more or less the same as with any other language, but with one crucial difference: the vocabulary is considerably less varied than that of Spanish or German.

So that, in addition to its limited real-world utility, might put you off learning it. Plus, if you’re at all like me, you’ll probably find yourself arguing with the app quite a lot over things that have been marked wrong. In that case, though, your worries would be ill-founded; the person who wrote the course is the highest possible authority on the subject — David Peterson, its creator (if you’ve ever wondered how this is done, check out https://conlang.org/).

Far from being a purist, in fact, Peterson says that he intends his language to expand as people coin new words for it, and says that while he knows the grammar he created very well, he’s not sure he could navigate a conversation in High Valyrian. The Duolingo course, though, will start people off and get them familiar with the grammar and the vocabulary (which at the moment stands at around 2,000 words — still a formidable number, and one that’s similar to a lot of other Duolingo courses), and from there they can develop the language from its original starting point.

So what’s the motivation for learning these languages? Well, according to Myra Awodey, Duolingo’s Lead Community Specialist, it’s not necessarily about getting a job, but about “[letting] fans connect with each other and with the show and its characters on an entirely new level”. Duolingo also think that it could prove to be a gateway to learning more traditional languages: “Maybe you pick up Italian, maybe you decide you’d like to learn French, or brush up on your Spanish that you haven’t used from high school.”

I can’t say I know anyone taking any of these courses, but I do know someone who devoted a fair bit of time to learning Esperanto: my late grandmother. Created in the late 19th century in an attempt to forge a new world of global cooperation with Esperanto as its lingua franca, Esperanto has been written off as naive and unrealistic since its inception — yet here we are in 2021, in the midst of a global pandemic, with 240,000 people learning it on an app on the internet. I remember when my grandma revealed this (she had a habit of dropping odd facts about her fascinating life into mundane conversations), and when I asked her why she had spent her time doing it, she told me that she wasn’t trying to change the world, she’d just joined a club at school in the late 1940s and thought it was a load of fun.

And even as I’ve been writing this article, I’ve realised that it actually doesn’t really matter what you’re learning, just so long as you’re happy. And sure, High Valyrian isn’t going to help you work in the UN just yet, but maybe that’s not what language learning should be about. As Chiara told me in our interview at the end of last year, “it’s about the joy”. And whether or not it leads you to learn a more established language, if what brings you joy is really nailing the pronunciation of valar morghulis, then it seems to me that it’s every bit as valuable as ordering in a restaurant in Spain.

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Have you dabbled with Dothraki? Can you eavesdrop in Elvish? Tell us in the comments below.