Once ridiculed for their nerdy pursuits, the inventors of ‘conlangs’ are coming out – and linguistic enthusiasts are joining them

For most language-learning software companies, Spanish is bread and butter.

But at least one company is obliging fans’ desire to be subsumed into the world of Game of Thrones. Living Language has released a comprehensive course on Dothraki, an invented tongue belonging to the show’s nomadic, horseback warriors sometimes called the “blood riders”.

The interest in invented languages, like Klingon and Elvish, appears a fanciful, if fruitless, pursuit to most. But to those who spend their time engineering aesthetic languages, recent interest has been nothing short of a coming-out party.

Even Apple is providing for invented languages. Apple’s top software engineer, Craig Federighi, touted the Klingon keyboard available for iOS 8 at Thursday’s product launch.

“More and more people are willing to publicly talk about this hobby,” said Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets, president of the Language Creation Society , via email. “Do not forget that up until a few years ago, language creation was viewed with suspicion or at best was ridiculed as a useless hobby, and many older [language inventors] (myself included) didn’t dare ‘come out’ as language creators due to the fear of being ridiculed.”

Even the grandfather of constructed languages, or “conlangs”, guarded his activities. JRR Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and creator of Middle-earth languages such as Entish and Goldogrin, kept secret his penchant for language creation until a 1931 speech he called A Secret Vice. More.

See: The Guardian

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