Klingon and other "crazy ideas" in book about invented tongues

Arika Okrent was studying languages at the University of Chicago. The languages people use and how they work. The rules, the changes, the charts. She was in the library, poking around.

"And then," says Okrent, relaxing in her Germantown home recently, "I drifted down to the shelves with all the books on invented languages. It was a sad little collection. I felt sorry for it."

But something called to her. Tales of made-up languages and their makers. Esperanto, the most widely spoken of all; Volapük, once the most popular; Klingon, the bark of space invaders.

She learned artificial tongues, then wrote about going to a 2003 Esperanto conference for the American Scholar - and the seed of a book was planted.

That book is the delightful In the Land of Invented Languages (published last month in paperback), which tells tales - often sad, often hilarious - of made-up tongues, Okrent's forays into the realms of Esperanto, Klingon, and Blissymbolics, and the personalities, political battles, and fates of linguistic makers-up.

Niece of the journalist Daniel Okrent, Arika met her husband, research linguist Derrick Higgins, at Chicago. They came east when Higgins got a job at Educational Testing Service in Princeton. Okrent says, "I did almost all the research for the book before I had kids" - Leo, 5, and Louisa, 1.

"As I got further and further into this world," says Okrent, 40, "at first, I'd say, 'Look at all these crazy ideas,' but I'd also find touching clues about the lives of the inventors." Her book "reflects the humor and the craziness, but also has compassion and understanding, since I'm a language person myself."

A graveyard of flops

Land of Invented Languages is a history of a "vast graveyard," brilliant projects that failed. Some inventors, such as James Cooke Brown, become famous for other things (he created the board game Careers), but not for their pet languages. We meet Suzette Haden Elgin, who in the early 1980s created Láadan, a "woman's language" ("the only language textbook I know of," Okrent writes, "that gives the word for menstruate in Lesson 1"). We visit the nutty, simpatico world of Esperanto, and the gestural world of sign languages.