5 Science Fiction Novels with Constructed Language

This is a collection of science fiction novels that incorporate language construction or creation to build the worlds within the story. Some works have fully fleshed-out languages with sounds, lexicons, and models, but others merely created a list of words or blended other languages to indicate something about the story. However, as Ria Cheyne suggested…

“I propose that a science-fictional created language exists and is complete in the totality of information given about a language in the text in which it appears.”

Cheyne, 390

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin

The first novel is widely considered a masterpiece of Social Science Fiction. The author has layered in intricacies of sociological norms into her alien world. It’s a fascinating read, and the fact that she could speak in the language created is quite the accomplishment. Tolkienesque, I’d venture.

“I knew enough Karhidish, when I was writing The Left Hand of Darkness, to write a couple of short poems. I couldn’t do so now. I made no methodical lexicon or grammar, only a word list for my own reference.”

~Ursula K. Le Guin, Cheyne, 386

1984

George Orwell

Honestly, 1984 isn’t one of my favorite reads. But when evaluating constructed languages in literature, it is worth taking a look at. Oceania’s totalitarian government created the language, Newspeak. It represents a way to suppress freedoms that we often take for granted.

Dune Messiah

Frank Herbert

Herbert’s Fremen language is a derivative of Arabic. Cheyne suggests in her essay that this gives the reader clues about the culture based on the language’s origin. One of the words Herbert used, “mirabhasa” means “Death Language” when you analyze it. This doesn’t mean that you must deconstruct the language in a book to uncover all the meaning. Nevertheless, even knowing or inferring the origin of the language gives the reader a feeling of who the people speaking the language really are.

Solaris

Stanislaw Lem

I haven’t read this book, but simply reading the summary on Wikipedia was fascinating:

“Solaris chronicles the ultimate futility of attempted communications with the extraterrestrial life inhabiting a distant alien planet named Solaris.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)

What I find amazing in this case is that it seems that Lem has used language itself as a mean to add conflict to his writing. I just added this book to my TBR pile.

The Languages of Pao

Jack Vance

The concept behind Languages of PAO truly trips my trigger. It focuses on a hypothesis that language(s) spoken by a person affect the speaker’s understanding of the world. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis revolves around the concept of linguistic relativity. Over the years, some scientists have argued that language entirely determines how one thinks while others contend that it only provides some constraints.

This becomes wrapped up in sociology, but let’s face it…

If you’re building a world for your own novels–like I have done with The Caeteran Tales–the sociology is what brings reality into your fantasies (or science fiction).

References

• Cheyne, Ria. “Created Languages in Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 35, no. 3 (2008): 386-403. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475175.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)
• If you’re really into the theories of Language and Thought, check out this article: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/language-and-thought