The narrators of my novel Dark Eden use a version of English that differs slightly from standard English as spoken now on Earth. They come from a small community which has been cut off for the rest of the human race for 160 years, and it seemed to me that this needed to be reflected in the language, for we know that new human communities always do quite quickly develop a distinctive way of speaking, even when not completely cut off. In the case of Eden, the differences are not great — the most immediately noticeable one is that characters double adjectives for emphasis rather than using “very” — but we are finely tuned to pick up linguistic clues and, to the pleasure of many but to the irritation of some, readers notice them at once.

All writers play with language in one way or another, but this business of inventing imaginary dialects is a particular kind of game which can be played by writers attempting to imagine, not just the feelings and relationships of characters, but the development of whole societies.

Inventing new languages, or variants of existing languages, can help build a sense of differentness, but there’s much more to it than that. One of the things it can do is to foreground the nature of language itself and how it both reflects and shapes our thinking. Imagining different languages, like imagining characters and situations, then becomes yet another way in which making stuff up helps us to notice what is really here.

1. A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess, 1962)
2. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein, 1966)
3. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1948)
4. Ancillary Justice (Ann Leckie, 2013)
5. Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban, 1980)
6. Embassytown (China Miéville, 2011)
7. The Dispossessed (Ursula Le Guin, 1974)
8. The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R.Tolkein, 1955)
9. Dark Eden (Chris Beckett, 2014)

Read the full article in The Huffington Post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-beckett/9-madeup-languages-from-b_b_5249052.html

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