On exploitative, egocentric stuff that people do in order to design exoticizing languages that obviously bear no trace of anyone’s respect for colonized and marginalized ways of speaking

Abstract

It is always good to have a title for a paper that makes clear what it is about. In the wide and fascinating field of invented languages this is not always the case, which more often than not might have the unfortunate effect of many linguists being unaware of relevant publications they would have otherwise loved to read. Two of the most misleading titles that come to my mind here are Umberto Eco’s La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (‘The search for the perfect language in European culture’; 1994) and Clemens J. Setz’ Die Bienen und das Unsichtbare (‘The bees and the invisible’; 2020). Setz’ book is not at all about bees, and Eco misses a perfect language when he sees one, just on one of the last pages of the book. However, both books are about the invention of languages, offering rich and original analyses of the structures and intellectual history of numerous artificial languages of the Global West, often using a hospitable anecdotal approach. Furthermore, Setz’ book is a literary masterpiece for which the author was awarded the prestigious Georg Büchner prize.