What is an "artistic language"?

Posted On: 29 Sep 2024, 08:01 PM
Posted By: fragmented_imagination

An artistic language is a constructed language that serves an artistic purpose. Such a language is made to simply be, not like auxiliary languages meant to foster international communication or engineered languages which are used academically to experiment with language use and logical function.

The first known artistic language is "Utopian", featured in the Latin satire book Utopia by Thomas More with Peter Giles in 1516. It featured as an addendum at the end of the book. It was written in a 22-letter alphabet corresponding to the then-contemporary Roman alphabet (minus 'z'). Its only known use is a quatrain found in the addendum, written with a Latin translation.

One of the first to develop an extensive language family (as opposed to just a language) was J. R. R. Tolkien, whose work on his Middle-Earth series began about as far back as 1910 before the publication of his first Middle-Earth book, The Hobbit in 1937. His languages Sindarin, Quenya, and Khuzdul are some of the most well-known artistic languages because of the time, work, and intelligence Tolkien placed in creating these languages. Not only are these languages quite extensive, but Tolkien wrote them with the notion that language changes and thereby gave them an internal evolution as well as developed dialects. Tolkien not only featured snippets of the languages but constructed complete grammars for the ones with the greatest influence.

Artistic languages have been popping up quite a lot since Tolkien. The Adventures of Tintin feature two based on Central European languages: Syldavian (1938-39) and Bordurian (1954-56). M. A. R. Barker developed the Tsolyáni language as far back as the 1940's, which was used for the world of Tékumel first featured in the Empire of the Petal Throne roleplaying game, published in 1974. The first artistic languages used on television or movies started with the occasional word of the Vulcan language in Star Trek in 1966 and the more extensively-built Pakuni language in Land of the Lost in 1974 until Marc Okrand took off with the Klingon language in the Star Trek films, starting with regular use of the language in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock in 1984. Christian Vander created a language called Kobaïan for use in the music of the band Magma, first appearing in 1969. All of these languages have just a few features in common: they didn't need to be created, they were created anyway, they were intended to be used by worlds that do not exist, and they have no relationship with one another.

So. How many artistic languages can you name?