How sociolinguistics can help you!

I've talked about sociolinguistics here before, in the context of accents. It's essentially about how language differs across social boundaries, and how it is used to indicate membership in various kinds of social groups. These can be class groups, interest-related groups, regional groups, etc.

This is extremely useful for writing about science fiction and fantasy worlds.

As you put your world together, ask yourself how your people divide themselves up. Is it by town? By side of town (other side of the tracks, etc.)? Is it by larger geographical region? Is it by profession? By upper and lower class?

Once you've decided on the divisions, think through how these divisions might be linguistically indicated. Is there a pattern of speech that is considered particularly sophisticated? One that is very lowbrow? Is there a group, such as traders or port workers, whose language mixes with other languages from the nearby regions? How would that influence their speech, and how would such speech be regarded by those around them?

I'm not talking about slang, necessarily, though slang can be one of your tools. Pidgin/creole languages can also help you. You can also choose phonological differences, like the dropping of a final consonant on some kinds of words, to indicate the speech of a social group. Keep in mind that the social divisions you create can be distinguished by virtually any of the various measures I've been discussing here over the last month: phonology, morphology, syntax, vocabulary use, pragmatics (!) etc.

Drawing linguistic distinctions between social groups is one of the best ways to help a created society take on extra dimension. So do give this some thought as you go forward.

How linguistics can help you!

As a lead-in to my language design workshop, I'm going to do a little sequence of "How ____ can help you!" pieces concerning various areas of linguistics. These aren't intended to be technical, or even introductory discussions of linguistics itself. I'm going to try to make them short, practical pieces which relate linguistics topics to the use of created languages in science fiction and fantasy. Certainly they will be useful for people who are digging into creating an entire language that penetrates an SF/F world. I hope they can also be helpful for those who are using minimal-penetration languages in SF/F - languages that consist mostly of names for people and places.

Here are some of the upcoming topics:

Articulatory phonetics, a.k.a. how to match sounds to an alien physiology
(I've discussed this a bit before, but I'll try to take it a bit further)

Morphology, a.k.a. how words are broken into smaller pieces of meaning

Syntax, a.k.a. how sentences are put together

Semantics, a.k.a. how meanings are structured

Pragmatics, a.k.a. how language implies more than it "means"; how people define insincerity vs. politeness

Sociolinguistics, a.k.a. how people use language for social purposes including drawing distinctions between social groups


FYI I seem to be having internet problems again, this time intermittent ones that make me go argh! but don't keep me off for entire days. I think this neighborhood must be cursed by the internet gods or something. Anyway, I'll try to address the problem and hope it doesn't get any worse.