Novel linguistics: Portraits of the field and practitioners in English long fiction

Abstract

Folk linguistics properly encompasses not only popular ideas about language itself, but also opinions about the nature of linguistics itself and what a linguist does. In this study, I investigate portrayals of linguistics, linguistic topics, and linguists in ~100 English-language novels published over the last ~100 years. These depictions offer a window into the public’s understanding of the field, while also shedding light on which linguistic topics capture the interest and imagination of writers and readers. The corpus reveals an overall increase in the number of linguistics-relevant works, which fall into the main categories of those involving signed languages and deafness, having a linguist protagonist, animal language, xenolinguistics and alien languages, lexicography, and language disorders. Observed changes within the categories track societal trends, starting from Cold War era interests in political control plus Space Race-driven interest in inter-species communication, and shifting in our current age of social media and AI hype to language commodification, control, and truth values.