An exploration of the practice of inventing languages from speaking in tongues to utopian
schemes of universality to the discoveries of modern linguistics. In Imaginary Languages
Marina Yaguello explores the history and practice of inventing languages from religious
speaking in tongues to politically utopian schemes of universality to the discoveries of modern
linguistics. She looks for imagined languages that are autonomous systems complete unto
themselves and meant for communal use imaginary and therefore unlike both natural languages
and historically attested languages and products of an individual effort to lay hold of
language. Inventors of languages Yaguello writes are madly in love: they love an object that
belongs to them only to the extent that they also share it with a community. Yaguello
investigates the sources of imaginary languages in myths dreams and utopias. She takes
readers on a tour of languages invented in literature from the sixteenth to the twentieth
century including that in More’s Utopia Leibniz’s algebra of thought ” and Bulwer-Lytton’s
linguistic fiction. She examines the linguistic fantasies (or madness) of Georgian linguist
Nikolai Marr and Swiss medium Hélène Smith and considers the quest for the true philosophical
language. Yaguello finds two abiding (and somewhat contradictory) forces: the diversity of
linguistic experience which stands opposed to unifying endeavors and on the other hand
features shared by all languages (natural or not) and their users which justifies the
universalist hypothesis. Recent years have seen something of a boom in invented languages
whether artificial languages meant to facilitate international communication or imagined
languages constructed as part of science fiction worlds. In Imaginary Languages (an updated and
expanded version of the earlier Les Fous du langage published in English as Lunatic Lovers of
Language) Yaguello shows that the invention of language is above all a passionate dizzying
labor of love.
