I’ve got photos of student work open on my computer. The first photo is two pages of words the student made up, the second photo is a poem using those words, presumably with a bit of newly created grammar to stitch the words together, and the third photo is a poem written in the invented script of that invented language. I took the photos at the end of the third and final class I had with this student and her peers. She was the last one to leave. At the door she turned to me and said, with a wave of her notebook, “Thank you for introducing me to this.”

“This” is the hobby of making up new languages. I call them constructed languages, real insiders call them conlangs. 

Making up languages? In French and Spanish class?

Last week I agreed to be a substitute teacher for French and Spanish classes. Five classes that each met three times during the week. Although I’m an intermediate French and Spanish speaker, in hindsight I think it’s fair to say that I could have created a unit that focused on the language by which the course is named, like one usually does in a world language class. But I didn’t, and I’m glad I didn’t, because I had a really interesting week and now I get to share my experience here, with you.

I knew I would have a variety of students, ages 12-16, from all sorts of interesting places in the world, almost all of them multilingual. And of course all of them would be differently motivated, so to speak. Some were going to jump in, some weren’t. So I decided to create multiple 3-day projects from which they could choose, some easy projects, some hard. Each project would require listening to a podcast or a video and completing some language exercises in Duolingo. All of them would create a bit of a new language – simple words and grammar of their choice. And with that little bit of new language they might write a poem, a short dialogue, or a little story. 

One easier project suggested that the students simply mix three languages. A podcast introduced them to this phenomenon in Singapore and the local language, Singlish. Another suggested they “fix” the difficult-to-learn spelling of English or French. A third challenged them to create a new script for a language of their choice – new letters, syllabaries, characters, or whatever – and the fourth project was full on: make up a new language. The poem I mentioned at the top? She created a new language and a new script for that language, effectively doing two of the four projects. And she wasn’t the only one, I’ve got a poem written in a nice new set of Rune-like letters among my photos of student work, too.  

I got started on the first day by asking them to invent a small set of nouns and verbs, which they then put into their first simple sentences. Bingo, we had our first grammar decision: should the noun come first or the verb? Is this language more like French and Spanish or Irish and Welsh? I write:

S V and V S on the board. Just two choices. But then it gets a little more complicated, of course. Even a simple sentence is often more along the lines of Maria has the apple, which is S – Subject, V – Verb, and O – Object (although I called it “other” or “everything else” in class). When the students write sentences that are a bit more complicated, they’ll have to think more about word order. Will they stick with SVO (think English and over 40% of known languages) or will they go with SOV (think Japanese, Korean, and Turkish and also more than 40% of known languages). I ask them how many possible combinations there are of SVO, they come up with “6” pretty readily. I ask them if, among the world’s approximate 6,000 languages, they think that the six possible orders are each represented by about 1,000 languages. That could make sense, everything else being equal. But there is something that constrains human languaging, and this is cool, I tell them. It shows that there might be something universal going on with human language processing. We just don’t take too easily to putting the O before the S … [pregnant pause] … Why? 

I try to find the right moments for deeper questions for the next three days while the students work out a little bit of their language, do a little language learning with the Duolingo app, and listen to podcasts. Haitian Creole was popular – a French-like spelling system without so many ways to spell the same sounds! Also popular was a woman speaking the constructed language Esperanto as a native speaker. Native speaker of a made up language? Yep! I ask them along the way what I hope is the right question to get them thinking deeper about language. To unseat them a little bit, or to get underneath the assumptions about language that they didn’t know they were making. 

Language is massively cool, is my message, and I get through to some of them, maybe even most of them. The one that wrote in her feedback to me that the week was a complete waste of time, well, I didn’t get my message through to her. And the one that complained that his Italian was all messed up now with Spanish and his mom was suggesting he needed Italian tutoring after school, well, I’m not sure what to think about that. Nor what I’ll tell his mom if she contacts me.

I called the unit this past week DIY Language. I’ve done similar units from middle school age through graduate students, both in person and online. I’ve run across other syllabi (e.g. at MIT) that use constructed languages, either as an intro to linguistics (a way to pique student interest) or simply in their own right because creating languages is just as worthy a human endeavor as knitting, or Fortnight, or Wordl. It is a do-it-yourself language, experience, but it’s really about increasing one’s awareness about language. It’s not just learning a bit more French and Spanish, the thing these students signed up for originally, but learning about “Big L” Language, that thing that we humans can do, that miraculous emergent phenomenon of homo sapiens. 

So a little about the Why. Sometimes being interesting, puzzling, and creative isn’t enough to justify inclusion in the curriculum. And for sure, constructed languages is not part of the French and Spanish curriculum at my school, nor probably yours. It crept in through the back door because someone was needed to cover for the week, and that someone was me, and I agreed to be the cover if I could teach this particular curriculum. But I have believed for decades that it should be part of the curriculum. Here’s my argument, then we are done.

Students often spend just a few years in a required language class. The expected outcome is some degree of ability to communicate in the language. While some classes and some students can really move the needle toward communicative competence, many classes and I think most students finish a language requirement without gaining a whole lot of ability to really use the language. I would hazard the guess that they are the folks who say, five or ten years after graduating high school, something like, “I had two years of French, but I don’t remember a thing,” or they express this rather sad sentiment: “I’m just not good at languages.” If that’s what is left when the instruction and learning is over, well, I’m not sure we can be happy about that.

If, however, we include units of constructed language (or other interesting treatments about language instead of trying to stay in the language – just the opposite of where language education programs for teachers place their focus), the learning that lasts might be an association with language that includes a good dose of wonder about what an absolute miracle language is, or a curiosity that might spark further learning in the future, or perhaps even tolerance for non-native speaking colleagues and friends who are making their way as best as possible through the mosaic of languages they carry in their minds.
Maybe, just maybe. Mi volas kredi ke tio eblas, like we might say in Esperanto. I want to believe that the world language curriculum can make us wildly curious about language, that this, too, is a possible outcome for French and Spanish 101. I want students to leave the classroom, and their language learning requirement, saying: “Thank you for introducing me to this.”