Overview

Reading Fictional Languages brings together scholars, creators, designers and speakers of fictional languages from across the world in a unique book that explores the imagined languages of fantasy, science fiction, dystopia and alternate realities. It explores the role of invented languages in world-building, characterisation, and the feeling of authentic immersion in the forms of thought of aliens, animals, machines, and the people who inhabit alternative worlds from our own.

Full Product Details

Author:   Israel Noletto (Professor of English Language and Literature, Piauí Federal Institute, Brazil) ,  Jessica Norledge (Assistant Professor in Stylistics, University of Nottingham, UK) ,  Peter Stockwell (Professor of Literary Linguistics, University of Nottingham)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399529150

ISBN 10:   1399529153
Pages:   248
Publication Date:   31 August 2025
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: reading fictional languages, Israel Noletto, Jessica Norledge, and Peter Stockwell PART I: Design 2. Conlanging with non-conlangers: the art of language invention in television and media, David J. Peterson and Jessie Sams 3. On the inner workings of language creation, BenJamin Johnson, Anthony Gutierrez and Nicolás Matias Campi 4. Dialects in constructed languages, Harry Cook 5. Alien typographies in sf and the influence of Asian languages, Victor Fernandes Andrade and Sebastião Alves Teixeira Lopes 6. Design intentions and actual perception of fictional languages: Quenya, Sindarin and Na’vi, Bettina Beinhoff 7. Phonaesthetics of constructed languages: results from an online rating experiment, Christine Mooshammer, Dominique Bobeck, Henrik Hornecker, Kierán Meinhardt, Olga Olina, Marie Christin Walch, and Qiang Xia PART II: Interpretation 8. Tolkien’s use of invented languages in The Lord of the Rings, James K. Tauber 9. Changing tastes: reading the cannibalese of Charles Dickens’ Holiday Romance and nineteenth-century popular culture, Katie Wales 10. Dialectal extrapolation as a literary experiment in Aldiss’ ‘A spot of Konfrontation’, Israel Noletto 11. Women, fire, and dystopian things, Jessica Norledge 12. Building the conomasticon: names and naming in fictional worlds, Rebecca Gregory 13. The language of Lapine in Watership Down, Kimberley Pager-McClymont 14. Unspeakable languages, Peter Stockwell Index

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Author Information

Israel A.C. Noletto is Professor of English Language and Literature at the Federal Institute of Piauí (IFPI), Brazil. He holds a PhD in Language and Literature from the Federal University of Piauí and has been a CAPES fellow at the University of Nottingham. He is interested in literary stylistics, narrative theory and fictional languages in science fiction as a literary phenomenon and has authored several scholarly articles on glossopoesis in writers ranging from George Orwell to Ted Chiang, Jonathan Swift to Anthony Burgess, Thomas More to Suzette Haden Elgin. He has co-edited Literatura, Memória e Cultura (2021), and Ensaios sobre teoria e crítica literária (Essays on Literary Theory and Criticism) (2020), a collection of papers on literary criticism by scholars from Brazil, Nigeria and Nepal. Jessica Norledge is Assistant Professor in Stylistics at the University of Nottingham. She is a stylistician and discourse analyst with a particular expertise in the cognitive poetics of emotion, and worlds theories in dystopian fiction. She is the author of The Language of Dystopia (2022), and co-author of Digital Pedagogies for Linguistics (2022). She has co-edited Reading Fictional Languages (2024), and is currently working on a book on Contemporary Feminist Stylistics. Peter Stockwell is Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, and a Fellow of the English Association. He has published 20 books and 100 articles in stylistics, sociolinguistics, science fiction and applied linguistics, including Cognitive Poetics (2020), The Language of Surrealism (2017), Texture: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Reading (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and The Poetics of Science Fiction (2000). He co-edited The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics (2014), The Language and Literature Reader (2008), Contemporary Stylistics (2007) and Impossibility Fiction (1996). His work in cognitive poetics has been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Persian, Russian and Arabic.

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