18 articles
Abracadabra
Abracadabra: ancient magic word first recorded in the 2nd-century Liber Medicinalis of Serenus Sammonicus as a triangular fever amulet; etymology unknown; now a conjurer's incantation and word for gibberish.
Adamic language
The Adamic language, also called lingua adamica, is the mythic pristine language Adam spoke in Eden, whose names expressed each thing's essence and which was lost at the Tower of Babel.
Black Speech
Black Speech (Black Speech of Mordor): fictional language created by Sauron in the Second Age to unify his servants; attested mainly through the One Ring inscription and an orc curse; extremely sparsely developed by Tolkien, unlike Qenya and Sindarin.
Elvish Linguistic Fellowship
Elvish Linguistic Fellowship (E.L.F.), international Tolkien-language scholarly organization, Special Interest Group of the Mythopoeic Society founded 1988 by Jorge Quiñonez, headed by Carl F. Hostetter; publishes Vinyar Tengwar, Parma Eldalamberon, and Tengwestië and edits Tolkien's linguistic manuscripts.
Enochian
Enochian, also known as the Enochian language or Celestial speech, is an angelic language and script that John Dee and Edward Kelley recorded as angelic revelations in the 1580s.
Enochian magic
Enochian magic, also called Enochian occultism, is a system of ceremonial magic for contacting angels and demons, developed by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the late sixteenth century.
Klaatu barada nikto
Klaatu barada nikto is a command spoken in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which it stops the robot Gort from destroying Earth.
Klingon grammar
Klingon grammar: the grammatical system of tlhIngan Hol, created by linguist Marc Okrand in 1984 for Star Trek, with OVS word order, prefixed verbs, and five fixed-order noun suffix classes described in The Klingon Dictionary.
Klingon Language Institute
The Klingon Language Institute (KLI), founded by Lawrence Schoen in 1992, is a nonprofit promoting the Klingon language; it published HolQeD, runs the KLCP certification and the annual qep'a' conference, and issues Klingon translations.
Languages in Star Wars
Languages in Star Wars: Galactic Basic, Huttese, Ewokese, Shyriiwook, Mando'a, droid Binary, and the Aurebesh script. Mostly sonic pastiche from real languages and animal sounds, not full conlangs like Klingon.
Learnability of fictional languages
The learnability of fictional languages is the study of how well invented languages such as Klingon and Na'vi can be acquired, with roughly 100 fluent Klingon speakers.
Linguistic realism in fictional languages
Linguistic realism in fictional languages is the degree to which an invented language behaves like a natural human language in its sounds, grammar, and social use.
Marc Okrand
Marc Okrand (born 1948) is the American linguist, UC Berkeley PhD in Native American languages, who created Klingon for Star Trek III (1984), wrote The Klingon Dictionary, and later devised Vulcan dialogue for Star Trek II.
Nadsat
Nadsat, also called the Nadsat argot, is the invented Russian-based teenage slang Anthony Burgess created for A Clockwork Orange (1962), spoken by Alex and his droogs; named from the Russian suffix for 11–19, meaning '-teen'.
Newspeak
Newspeak is the fictional controlled language of Oceania in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), with A, B, and C vocabularies, affixes like ungood and doublepluscold, designed to make heretical thought inexpressible; also a general term for deceptive political jargon.
Quenya
Quenya (earlier Qenya) is J.R.R. Tolkien's constructed High-elven language, begun around 1915, agglutinating and Finnish-influenced, with ten noun cases, a Latin-like ceremonial role in Middle-earth, and no definitive grammar.
Sindarin
Sindarin, or Grey-elven, is one of J.R.R. Tolkien's two chief invented Elvish languages for Middle-earth, alongside Quenya. Modeled on Welsh phonology and mutation grammar, it evolved through Gnomish and Noldorin stages and remains incomplete.
Toki Pona
Toki Pona (toki pona), a minimalist constructed language created by Canadian linguist Sonja Lang in 2001, has about 120-140 words, isolating SVO grammar, the sitelen pona script, ISO 639-3 code tok, and an active global community.