Constructed Languages and the Sociolinguistics of Language Making

Constructed Languages and the Sociolinguistics of Language Making examines so-called "constructed" languages from the French Revolution to the present, challenging the assumption that they are linguistic curiosities or exceptions. Instead, the contributors approach them as no more artificial, and no less natural, than any other language. Read in their social and political contexts, constructed languages emerge as revealing efforts to negotiate historical tensions through language itself: tensions surrounding revolutionary ideals, the limits and injustices of the nation-state, and industrial capitalism, debates over socialism and liberal democracy, and the legacies of colonialism. Usually tied to modernist assumptions about achieving progress through technology and rational thought, they allow for the expression of sociopolitical visions of alternative, possibly better, worlds.