I feel, with many fantasy nerds, that there is something magical about language. The proliferation of arcane scripts, eldritch tongues, indecipherable hieroglyphs in a huge number of books, movies, video games, comic books testifies to an inherent magical attractiveness to language. I mean, there’s got to be some reason why Tolkien, for one, took the time to devise entire languages and language histories for the peoples of Middle Earth. There’s got to be some reason why it’s just so much cooler to say Avada Kedavra, instead of “death-blast,” to strike your adversary down. We all recognize the value and appeal of magical languages--but what is that appeal?
Let’s take a step back and ask that same question about fantasy fiction. What is the broad appeal of a fantasy story, a fantasy world? Why do we read fantastic tales; sink hours into our favorite games, learn to wear the mask of our favorite characters; obsess over the architecture, clothing, cuisine, and culture of our favorite fantasy folk?
A convincing world doesn’t just suspend disbelief: it compels belief through immersion. Immersion is achieved when all the components of a fantasy world reinforce each other in projecting a story-based justification for their existence. Take respawning after death in video games, for example, a necessary mechanic whose realization is often immersion-breaking. In games like Skyrim, death is simply the end. There’s no afterlife available to the player; there’s no way to cheat dying. The only way the game can continue after a player death is by reloading a previous save like nothing happened. This mechanic, although widespread across many games, is still ever so slightly immersion breaking, as there’s no in-world reason why your character would be coming back to a previous save. In games like Nier:Automata, however, player death is interpreted in-world as catastrophic damage to your automaton, and player respawning after death is interpreted as incarnating into a new body, so immersion is not broken by dying. You can even find your carcass at the site of your previous death.
Fantasy languages are can be considered elaborate mechanics fully integrated with the story, deployed to enchance immersion to the maximum. All that is needed to begin appreciating constructed languages, or natural language for that matter, is to realize that languages are broadly studied under two heads: 1) as communication systems with people who use them, and 2) as mathematical-logical systems that combine parts together according to precise rules. In brief, languages have people who speak them, and those languages are made up from combinations of different linguistic Lego pieces.
In brief, conlangs enchance immersion by specially highlighting some aspect of the world, and making it seem justified by developpping it under those two heads. In my next post, I will further elaborate on how in-world immersion works within conlanging.