Press member?
We welcome members of the press and will actively assist you in researching a story about conlangs or conlangers. You are welcome to attend the LCC; registration is the same as any other attendee, but we ask that you identify yourself publicly.
We maintain a list of diverse people within the community who are interested in being press contacts, whom you can contact for interviews on the record. Just let us know who you are and what you want to talk to them about, and we will send them your information as a heads up, then send you theirs.
For any of this, to be added to our mailing list to receive updates about the status of the LCC or other LCS projects, or to ask any other questions we can help with, please email at .
For urgent inquiries, call Sai at 650 575 2552 (cell).
Thanks!
Links & Press - LCC2
The Cleveland Public Library, courtesy of Donald Boozer, is holding a major exhibit May-August 2008 about conlangs entitled "Esperanto, Elvish, and Beyond: The World of Constructed Languages". You can see photos of the exhibit here. Donald can be contacted at .
In
their own words -- literally by Amber Dance - front page article in the LA Times, 24 August 2007
Listen to an interview (local copy) with Sai, Jeff, & Kodé on Usual Suspects Radio. The interview is from approx 11-32 minutes in. Some people have reported issues with sound quality; try downloading it entirely before you play, or go to irc.2600.net #ca2600 and talk to @gid (the show producer).
Links & Press - LCC1
Miniseries
Footage from the first LCC was broadcast as a miniseries on the Hawaiian 'Olelo TV channel 56, starting July 29th 2006, courtesy of Hokulani from the ZBB. The website for the miniseries is here.
Press Release
May 5, 2006 - UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA
The results are in, and the First Language Creation Conference was a great success.
You may ask, here, what is the LCC? For that matter, what is language creation?
Language creation -- or 'conlanging' (short for "constructed language") is the art, science, and hobby of creating new languages. People do it for a wide variety of reasons -- everything from fleshing out a fictional work, aiming towards world peace and mutual communication, trying to create an ideal language, testing linguistic theories, having a secret langauge to use in their diary or share with a close friend or sibling, testing out the boundaries of what language can do, or simply as good fun!
While conlanging has been a famously closeted hobby for centuries now, it is beginning to emerge into the mainstream. There are several hundred conlangers who talk together online on various mailing lists and bulletin boards, hundreds or thousands more who don't know that they're not the only ones in the world who do this, and many thousands of languages that have been created since the first one known of today was made in 1150 AD.
The First Language Creation Conference, held April 23 2006 on the UC Berkeley campus, was the very first serious conference ever to be held on the subject, drawing conlangers from all over the United States, and with hundreds more watching both nationally and internationally, through the recorded videos available online. It was also the largest gathering of conlangers to have ever been held - three times larger than the next largest known.
Conlanging has been increasingly featured in the media and popular culture. It has been featured prominently in interviews on NPR with linguists Mark Okrand and Sarah Higley, popular movies such as Lord of the Rings and the Star Trek series, music from artists such as Sigur Ros and many books -- not all of which acknowledge the extent to which the author may have fleshed out their created languages.
Next year's conference is already being planned, and is expected to be yet bigger and to draw more people, this time internationally.
For more info, videos, audio interviews, reviews, photos, supplements, and other material, please visit http://conlangs.berkeley.edu/.
Fiat lingua.
Other Press
"The invented languages that proliferate on the Internet are a remarkable
phenomenon of a very natural creative instinct. Inventing languages is not new,
nor is it pathological as so many people claim: from Hildegard of Bingen in the
twelfth century to John Dee and Edward Kelley of the sixteenth, to Dr.
Psalmanazar and Helene Smith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to
Tolkien in the twentieth, the inspiration for sustained language creation has
been shaped by various complex philosophies and media. The Internet has
provided a way for like-minded people to share their inventions in ways never
before seen. This understudied Internet phenomenon is finally getting some
press in the Language Creation Conference, headed by Sai Emrys, at the
University of California, Berkeley."
Sarah L. Higley, professor of medieval studies and language creator is currently
at work on a scholarly book on the subject with a focus on Hildegard of Bingen.
Links
Conference Reviews and Discussions
Suzette Haden Elgin
Chip
Douglas Nerad
David Peterson
ZBB Post-LCC1 thread, The Inevitable Post-LCC2 Thread
CONLANG list: LCC1 thread one, thread two, LCC2: Meeting our Community
Matthew Haupt
Resources/General Links
Langmaker:Resources
alt.language.artificial on Google Groups
Sai's NLF2DWS Manifesto draft
CONLANG mailing list
Zompist Bulletin Board (ZBB)
LJ conlangs community
CONLANG archives: search subject keyword conlangs-conf for all organizational & related emails about this and future conferences