Off the Beaten Course: LING 243

Off the Beaten Course is a series that delves into SDSU's course catalog to share unique and non-traditional classes.

Course title: LING 243 — Invented Languages: Klingon and Beyond
Professor’s name: Douglas S. Bigham

1) What inspired you to create this course?

I'm a linguist and a nerd. But seriously, the act of creating a language — and looking at how people have gone about creating and inventing languages for different purposes — is a great way to teach people the fundamentals of linguistic theory and really think about how natural language works. It's a way of "hacking language," and viewing it as an object that can be manipulated.

2) What can students expect to learn from this course?

In my course, students can expect to learn a bit about linguistic theory and a bit about the history of constructed languages. We start from the private "God spoke to me in a dream" languages of the 13th century, then move through the auxiliary world language movement of the 19th and 20th centuries and end with the world-building languages of film and fiction, such as Tolkien's Elvish languages, Klingon from Star Trek, and now, Dothraki in Game of Thrones.

3) What makes this course different from similar courses?

Linguistics as a discipline has always been a mix of humanities and social science. This course shows how those two approaches work nicely with each other, even though we're clearly coming from a more humanities-centric approach in this class.

4) Is there one day on the syllabus for this course you most look forward to? If yes, why?

My favorite day definitely has to be presentation day. A big part of the grade for this course is based on a final project which I tell students should be "some creative use of language" and at the end of the semester, everyone presents what they've been working on.

I've had people write poetry in Khuzdul (a Dwarf language from Tolkien), translate songs into Klingon, make visual poetry using a language called SolReSol and create a language for whales if whales had a human-type language. It's always really amazing to see what students come up with. And then all of the projects go up online on my Tumblr page.

5) What’s your favorite thing about teaching this course?

This course draws in a lot of science. technology, engineering and mathematics majors that might not take many humanities courses otherwise, so I like seeing how they come to understand this very different way of viewing the world, of understanding knowledge production. Watching them learn to see the world critically and subjectively in a way that usually isn't encouraged in STEM fields.