Invented Languages, from Elvish to Esperanto, LING 80K

Considers invented languages, including Elvish and Klingon, as well as lesser-known ones that tackle ethical, social, or cognitive concerns. Students learn tools from contemporary linguistics to analyze language structures and understand how they relate to creator intentions.

Key Information

Spring Quarter 2020

Instruction start date: March 30, 2020

Instruction end date: June 5, 2020

Credit: 5 quarter units / 3.33 semester units credit

UC Santa Cruz, Linguistics

Course Credit: Upon successful completion, all online courses offered through cross-enrollment provide UC unit credit. Some courses are approved for GE, major preparation and/or, major credit or can be used as a substitute for a course at your campus.



If "unit credit" is listed by your campus, consult your department, academic adviser or Student Affairs division to inquire about the petition process for more than unit credit for the course.



UC Berkeley:

Unit Credit



Other UCs



UC Davis:

Unit Credit



UC Irvine:

Unit Credit



UC Los Angeles:

Unit Credit



UC Merced:

Unit Credit



UC Riverside:

General Education : LING Elective units



UC San Diego:

General Education : Revelle one course towards Social Science; TMC 1 course toward lower division disciplinary breadth if noncontiguous to major; Warren - may also be used for PofC depending on major/PofC/AS;



UC San Francisco:

Unit Credit



UC Santa Barbara:

General Education : This course will apply to Area E automatically upon completion



UC Santa Cruz:

General Education : TA (Textual Analysis & Interpretation)

Upon successful completion, all online courses offered through cross-enrollment provide UC unit credit. Some courses are approved for GE, major preparation and/or, major credit or can be used as a substitute for a course at your campus.If "unit credit" is listed by your campus, consult your department, academic adviser or Student Affairs division to inquire about the petition process for more than unit credit for the course.Unit Credit

Course Meeting Requirements

This course is conducted entirely online, and asynchronously. Students will be asked to virtually attend one of four live online sessions (with dates and times scheduled during the quarter); if that is impossible, there will be an optional written assignment.

More About The Course

This is a course about constructed languages, the languages that people deliberately devise, and the way those languages relate to (or differ from) natural languages, the languages that arise from the self-organizing nature of human communities. Constructed languages are well-known in science fiction and fantasy literature as ways of contributing to the fleshing out of a novel world, but the history and purposes of constructed languages is much more complex. Part of this courses goal is to chart the various creations of these languages and understand what may unite and divide these forms of creation. We will focus on making clear in what ways the form of the language reflects the aesthetic, political, ethical, or interpretive intentions of the creators.



Our analysis of the form of these languages will be that of contemporary mainstream generative linguistics, the modern science of language, which focuses on describing and explaining patterns of variation in languages of the world. Using the tools of modern linguistics, we will analyze the properties of various constructed languages, and use that analysis to make clearer the form-intention connection.

We will look at several extant examples of constructed languages, but, in addition, we as a class will collaboratively build our own language (a “classlang”) to more fully understand the kinds of decisions language creators face and how they go about making them.



No previous work in linguistics is presupposed.

Additional Course Information

Exam Info

There is a final project for the course (no final exam), which involves reflecting on our class-created language.