Filling Your Worlds With Words: 04/09/25

Filling Your Worlds With Words by C. D. Covington and Clarissa C. S. Ryan (Illustrator) (2025) is a short book about human language and how our understanding of it can help authors create their own conlangs (constructed languages) for their fictional worlds. The book includes annotated samples from a few of the author's favorite speculative fiction pieces.

The book is 218 pages, of which about 180 pages are an introduction to linguistics. The author majored in linguistics around the same time I was in college. What that means for this book is much of the cited material is thirty years old or older. There, unfortunately, isn't much from more recent texts.

As linguistics isn't my field beyond the one class I took plus a couple semantics classes I took in college and grad school, I don't know if the age of the author's references is a problem or not. I can say that I was surprised to not see Dr. Geoff Linsey not mentioned at all.

I read this book (and backed it on Kickstarter) because I have a conlang of my own. I was curious to see if there was anything I was missing. After reading through the book I guess the answer is, no but—

Beyond the introduction to linguistics sections there are some interesting side discussions of culture, gesture, code switching, swearing, and euphemism. The one area I've not given much thought to is gesture.

As someone coming to this book already with a lexicon I wish there were more examples of conlangs, including sample lists of words and maybe some discussion of how the creator of those words made them up. I wish there was more discussion of regional dialects, writing systems, and transliteration.

The short version is: it's a good start but I want more.

Four stars

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