“The Art of Language Invention,” David J. Peterson, from Penguin Books, out on September 29, 2015.

People who have been inventing languages for more than about ten years find themselves in unusual times. Invented languages — also known as constructed languages, or conlangs — are all over the place: in movies, in television, in video games. And though we’ve had books about invented languages and their creators before, for the first time a publisher in the English-speaking market is coming out with a book devoted entirely to making such languages.

Anyone following David Peterson on social media will be familiar with the writing style in this book. There’s an unexpected paragraph on why onions are evil. Werewolves are used to explain allophony. These asides help to lighten a topic than can quickly turn fiercely technical, and, frankly, the book wouldn’t seem like it was written by him without some of this. Strongly held opinions about onions are matched by equally strong opinions about some matters of conlanging art. The book isn’t polemical it does have an agenda.

The brief introductory chapter covers the history of conlanging, broadly conceived, as well as taking a closer look at the use and abuse of invented languages in popular media. In this chapter Peterson also begins his engagement with the question of whether or not conlanging is an art, in what ways it is an art, and how the art might be advanced.

Chapter One, “Sounds,” tackles the tricky problem of introducing phonology - the sounds of a language - through the medium of print. English has a large enough sound system to guide the way in many parts of the phonetic space, but as a practical matter phonemes outside the European norm don’t get too much discussion. He then proceeds to dig into the many other phonetic considerations that come after you’ve picked your sound inventory: syllable shape, phonotactics, intonation, stress, tone. There are even sections on sign language and alien phonetics. This wide coverage of topics is one of the greatest strengths of the book’s main chapters. Any single topic on which he spends a few pages is the subject of entire books by linguists. By giving a broad overview, the novice conlanger gets a much better feel for what’s involved in serious thinking about language construction.

After each chapter is a case study, where one of his television languages is used to illustrate some linguistic issue from the previous chapter. The Dothraki (Game of Thrones) case study after the “Sounds” chapter looks at how you go about looking at a small, author-created vocabulary (mostly Dothraki names) to guide the creation of an entire sound system.

Chapter Two, “Words” covers much of the material most of us find so irritating about learning a foreign language: noun gender and declensions, verb conjugation, etc. This is followed by a case study on Irathient (Defiance) nouns, in particuar its extravagant, 18-class gender system.

Chapter Three, “Evolution,” covers phonological evolution, the way sounds of words change over time; lexical evolution, the way words’ meanings drift; and grammatical evolution, which also rejoices in the horrible name “grammaticalization,” about how everyday vocabulary slowly takes on purely grammatical jobs. This chapter is central to his historical approach to naturalistic conlanging. The case study for this chapter is the verb system of Valyrian, another language from Game of Thrones.

Chapter four is “the Written Word,” about writing systems. Considering how many requests Peterson gets on his blog for names written in his various scripts, it’s not at all surprising writing systems get their own chapter. The case study for chapter four is the writing system for Castithan (Defiance).

The strangest omission from this book is a chapter on syntax, how words and phrases are joined together into clauses and sentences. Granted, some of that material can be smuggled in under discussions from the first two chapters, but other aspects of sentences — clause nominalizations, conjunction reduction, etc. — are usefully talked about on their own.

So, who should read this book? Novice conlangers should definitely get it. While no single book can teach you everything you need to know to create a convincing language, this book will give you a foundation that also allows you to ask people (or search engines) the right questions to learn more. The book also has plenty of little details which more advanced conlangers can add to their toolbox. In particular, experienced conlangers who have not previously done much historical conlanging will find this a digestible introduction. Fans of Peterson’s languages in TV and film are also well-served, with some information about those laid out publicly for the first time.

Authors of SF and fantasy would also do well to read it at least once, especially if they get the urge to create names like Hr'avglp, G'Kar, or Hziulquoigmnzhah. In the postscript Peterson makes a plea to science fiction and fantasy authors to consider consulting with practicing conlangers for any languages they might need, offering some guidance on how that might work for both the author and the conlanger.

In the postscript Peterson comes back to the question of whether or not creating languages is an art. Thankfully, he chucks two and a half millennia of theorizing about the nature of art out the window on the assumption that most people will recognize “something original and creative that requires some specific set of skills to create that has been produced by a human” as a reasonable definition for the purposes of argument. By this definition conlanging is an art, though there remain interesting questions about appreciating this particular art. Do we attend only to the sound? Or do we look for finesse in a particular grammatical construction? Maybe thoughtful and comprehensive documentation is the standard? He also spends a moment wondering what conlang impressionism or conlang surrealism might look like. Perhaps a novice conlanger, after finishing the book, can get to work on that.

(August 2015, Madison, WI, based on an advance galley copy sent to me for review.)