LINGUISTICS

   Linguistics is the study of language, how languages work, what their function is, how they are constructed and whence they are derived. As a discipline it has leapt to academic prominence since the 1960s. Languages play a surprisingly important role in sf, and many stories turn on linguistic issues. The theme overlaps, naturally, with that of COMMUNICATIONS, and also to some extent with those of ANTHROPOLOGY andPERCEPTION, inasmuch as a language tells us a great deal about the culture that uses it and the way that culture perceives the world. This entry concentrates primarily on verbal languages in sf. Other ways of giving information are dealt with under COMMUNICATIONS, and two examples will suffice here. Terry CARR's "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" (1968) is set on an alien planet whose natives are energy forms; their language is dancing; for no clear reason they destroy many humans for whom they seem to feel no enmity, and survival depends on the correct reading of the dance. John VARLEY invents a nonverbal linguistic UTOPIA in the 1978 title story of THE PERSISTENCE OF VISION (coll 1978), in which a sighted man enters a community of people who are blind and deaf; they communicate through touch (and sex) in a language more subtle and immediate than he can at first grasp.Much earlier C.S. LEWIS and J.R.R. TOLKIEN both used their considerable philological expertise in their fictions. The former's OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938) speaks interestingly of the differentgrammars and vocabularies of the three Martian languages, and plays some rather facile linguistic tricks to show up what Lewis regarded as the arrogance of humanistic SCIENTISTS. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (3 vols 1954-5; omni 1968) is unusual in that its very genesis was largely linguistic: Tolkien invented his imaginary languages (carefully glossed and explained in the many appendices) before he wrote the books. If we accept linguistics as a science - it is arguably the "hardest" (or "most scientific") of the SOFT SCIENCES-then we might argue that the fiction of Tolkien, usually regarded as FANTASY, at least approaches sf in itslinguistic aspects.Sf stories in which linguistics plays a subsidiary role are very much more common than sf stories actually about linguistics. Most writers who set stories in the future (or in the past, if it comes to that) ignore the problem of language-change, but some have confronted the problem, with various degrees of success; many of these attempts are discussed by Walter E. MEYERS in what is by far the best study of the topic, Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction (1980). Although sf writers normally realize that their craft requires a goodunderstanding of the hard sciences (physics, etc.), many have no training in nor understanding of linguistics; and nor, very often, do they seem to feel this as a lack. Thus stories turning on points of ALIEN or future language are often patchy; the ways in which grammar, vocabulary and speech-sounds evolve do not seem to be widely understood.Examples of sf stories demonstrating linguistic change, whether fanciful or plausible, are: Alfred BESTER's "Of Time and Third Avenue" (1951), Bester being generally very much alive to the forms of language; Robert A. HEINLEIN's "Gulf" (1949), with its future speedtalk; Anthony BURGESS's A CLOCKWORKORANGE (1962), with its NEAR FUTURE Russian-derived Nadsat slang; George ORWELL's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949), with its Newspeak, designed to reinforce "proper" social attitudes; Poul ANDERSON's "Time Heals" (1949), with a futurified pronunciation; Felix C. GOTSCHALK's Growing Up in Tier 3000 (1975), where a great variety of future colloquialisms are evoked;and Michael FRAYN's A Very Private Life (1968), whose future languages are more lively than plausible. A more generalized linguistic gusto is displayed in, for example, Benjamin APPEL's The Funhouse (1959), Arthur Byron COVER's Autumn Angels (1975) and much of the output of R.A.LAFFERTY.A GENRE-SF writer who is always aware of linguistic problems is L. Sprague DE CAMP; his article "Language for Time Travelers" (1938) - similar material is incorporated into his Science-Fiction Handbook (1953; rev 1975) - was probably the first account of linguistic problems in sf. His stories, sometimes rather ploddingly, reflect this interest, as in"The Wheels of If" (1940), set in an ALTERNATE WORLD where the Norman Conquest did not take place and so English has never been Frenchified (although here De Camp gets Grimm's Law of sound-changes quite wrong, in terms of both its effect and the historical period to which it refers), and in the Viagens Interplanetarias series, in which the space pidgin Intermundos is heavily influenced by Brazilian space crews.Orwell'sNewspeak, although the most celebrated example of language-control being used by the state to impose social conformity and an unthinking acceptance of the way things are, was by no means the first. Yevgeny ZAMIATIN's We (trans 1924) has a heavily conformist, mechanical language that reflectsthe regimentation of society. Anthony BOUCHER's interesting TIME-TRAVEL story "Barrier" (1942) likewise features such a language, along with a daffy collocation of future linguists all researching via TIME MACHINES. A tour de force of conformist-language creation is the story told by the Ascian prisoner-of-war in Gene WOLFE's The Citadel of the Autarch (1983),expressing entirely in patriotic slogans a tale of the individual spirit. The whole of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, indeed, is alive with linguisticinvention, not least in its use of words from the classical Greek to express concepts at once futuristic and archaic.Language is an important aspect of the above stories, but is not their raison d'etre. Three kinds of story in which linguistics becomes central are those where humans communicate with animals (1) or with aliens (2), or endeavour to translate dead alien languages (3).Two good examples in the first group are Un animal doue de raison (1967; trans as The Day of the Dolphin 1969) by Robert MERLE and Slave Ship by Frederik POHL, in both of which animals whomust be spoken to are used as military weapons. Ursula K. LE GUIN's amusing spoof scientific paper, based on the idea that animals and insects have not only languages but also artforms, "The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from The Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics" (1974), is probably not intended entirely as a joke.Many stories other than Merle's have looked at cetacean-human communication, a subject popularized from 1961 in a series of nonfiction books by the experimental psychologist John C. Lilly. Among such stories are those in David BRIN's Uplift War sequence, particularly STARTIDE RISING (1983; rev 1985), whose advanced dolphins have undergone GENETICENGINEERING, and Ted MOONEY's Easy Travel to Other Planets (1981), in which a love story between woman and dolphin, to which linguistic questions are central, takes place against a backdrop of global Information Sickness.First Contact stories (ALIENS; ANTHROPOLOGY)necessarily involve linguistics unless, as once was frequent, the issue is dodged by the use of some kind of magical translation box. However, there are many such stories that do involve linguistic questions, notably including the series about galactic intelligence agent Coyote Jones by Suzette Haden ELGIN, who spent a decade as a professor of linguistics.John BERRYMAN's "Berom" (1951) has an amusing variant on the theme, in which incomprehensible visiting aliens turn out to be speaking in a UK commercial cable code of the 1920s that they have picked up by radio. The Hoka series by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. DICKSON features aliens whounderstand language quite literally, with sometimes comic results. Frank HERBERT's Whipping Star (1970) conjures up, in a story of humans makingcontact with aliens who turn out to be STARS, so intense a miasma of semantic confusions (as recurs regularly in his work) that the narrative structure and human interest of the story are very nearly overwhelmed. Roger ZELAZNY's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" (1963), a verbally brilliantstory with a depth of feeling seldom found in sf, has a poet-linguist chosen to attempt contact with the few remaining Martians, and to translate their high language and their holy texts; his complacency is punctured. Chad OLIVER's The Winds of Time (1957) has some expertly worked-out descriptive field linguistics in operation in a story of interstellar aliens waking from SUSPENDED ANIMATION on Earth. Edward LLEWELLYN's Word-Bringer (1986) is another First Contact story (about analien ROBOT emissary to Earth) with linguistic ramifications. The film CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) ends with a prolonged epiphanywhen the occupants of a flying saucer () finally consent to make contact, communication being initiated through a linguistic code of flickering lights and a sequence of crashing chords. Another film, ICEMAN (1984), has a prolongedly earnest linguistic sequence about attempted contact with a resuscitated Neanderthal (APES AND CAVEMEN). David I. MASSON, a devoted student of linguistics, may have written the First Contact story with the best-informed linguistic detail in "Not So Certain" (1967), which shows one kind of problem that may bedevil the most well intentioned exo-culture specialists. This was republished in his The Caltraps of Time (coll 1968), which also contains the amusing "A Two-Timer" (1966), in which an inadvertent time traveller from the 17th century describes in his own English what he finds in the 20th - not least, semantic bafflement.Storiesof archaeological linguistics are less common. H. Beam PIPER's "Omnilingual" (1957), probably his best story, has a woman seeking aRosetta Stone with which to interpret the writings of a dead Martian civilization; she ultimately finds it in the periodic table of the elements.Other sf works focusing strongly on linguistics include Hunter of Worlds (1977) by C.J. CHERRYH, herself a linguist; and the Cuckoo series -The Farthest Star (fixup 1975) and Wall Around a Star (1983) - by Frederik Pohl and Jack WILLIAMSON. These are recent and quite sophisticated, but one of the best sf books about linguistic problems was much earlier: Jack VANCE's The Languages of Pao (1958) is one of the most intelligent uses ingenre sf of the idea that the perception of reality by different races is reflected in, and to a degree actually determined by, the languages they speak; hence CULTURAL ENGINEERING can be carried out by the teaching of new languages. In real-life linguistics this view is strongly identified with the writings of Dr Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) in his studies of Native American languages. Whorf's theories of linguistic relativity aremost obviously reflected in sf terms in Samuel R. DELANY's BABEL-17 (1966), a complexly structured novel about communication which takeslanguage itself as the central image; a web of different languages is threaded through the spy-story plot, in which an alien code turns out to be only paradoxically alien. It is Babel-17, a perfect analytical language which has no word for "I"; this absence Delany sees as its strength and also its weakness. (Meyers, in his book cited above, admonishes Delany for not then knowing as much about linguistics as the confident tone of BABEL-17 might suggest.) Delany's interest in language and linguisticphilosophy has continued, and is reflected in much of his work, including the curious dialects he created in NOVA (1968) and also his critical book, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (coll1977).The use of linguistic devices in the actual telling of a story, to reflect along Whorfian lines the nature of the human or alien cultures described, is a difficult narrative skill. Suzette Haden Elgin attempts it only occasionally in her series Native Tongue (1984) and The Judas Rose (1987), but there is considerable interest in her account of the creationof the secret language Womanspeak (or "La'Adan") used by a disempowered female underclass as one weapon in their struggle to subvert the self-satisfied world of men. The film MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985), a post- HOLOCAUST exploitation thriller, is the last place one might have expected to find a linguistic thesis, but the devolved language of an isolated community of children is presented with considerable imagination (and a not inconsiderable beauty). The linguistic tour de force of the1980s, however, was RIDDLEY WALKER (1980) by Russell HOBAN, a story of a post-holocaust England actually told in the devolved but vivid language of its inhabitants; the astonishing thing is not so much the attempt - many sf writers have done the same thing on a smaller scale - but its success at novel length. Other sf writers may have had much to say about linguistic concepts, but none has ever so sustainedly shown such a language in action, nor so successfully - and movingly - revealed the culture of its speakers in so doing.If Whorf has been the one powerful influence on sf linguistic scenarios, another may come to be Noam Chomsky (1928-), whose view that all human languages share a deep structure whichis perhaps genetically determined is to some extent at odds with Whorf's view that our conceptual categorization of the world is determined by our native language; where Whorf stressed diversity, Chomsky stresses unity. Sf had added little to this debate, nor seemed very conscious of it, until1973, when the ideationally exuberant Ian WATSON first attracted the attention of the sf readership. Most of his novels feature linguistic thought somewhere in their usually complex structure, and his first, THE EMBEDDING (1973), is certainly the sf linguistics novel par excellence,with all three of its subplots linking language and PERCEPTION in interweaving stories of alien, South American Indian and computer-imposed languages, and the differing subjective realities they may or may not succeed in generating. An important essay by Watson is "Towards an Alien Linguistics" (1975 Vector), reprinted in The Book of Ian Watson (coll 1985US), in which he considers questions of epistemology and hazards the thought that there may be "a topological grammar of the universe, which reflects itself in the grammars of actual languages" - Chomsky writ very large indeed. Watson is one of those theorists who have used arguments from quantum mechanics to support the solipsistic view that the Universe exists as an external structure only through the consciousnesses of its participants and observers; language, in Watson's scheme, is reflexive, Nature sending a message to itself - an intellectual position that, ifcorrect, would place linguistics as the scientific discipline right at the heart of sf.

   PN

   Further reading: Aside from those cited above, two useful texts about linguistics in sf are Linguistics and Language in Science Fiction-Fantasy (1975) by Myra Edwards BARNES and an interesting essay onthe popular subject of word-coinage by sf writers, "The Words in Science Fiction" by Larry NIVEN in The Craft of Science Fiction (anth 1976) edReginald BRETNOR.