While browsing the gritty underbelly of ancient Yahoo! e-mails, I discovered many of my old college papers and projects, including several drafts of my undergraduate research project on constructed languages. Here is the thesis of that project:
Constructed languages have the potential to explore currently held theories of linguistic phenomena and challenge, affirm, or present new evidence for these theories. Constructed Languages offer alternative definitions of Linguistic systems, and sometimes even alternative systems, which are helpful to achieving greater understanding of both natural languages and our classification of them.
Eight years and a Linguistics MA later, I think I would still agree with this thesis for the most part. It is certainly part of why I have begun this blog. Given the education and experience I have gained since then, I don't know that the original project proved this thesis as strongly as I would like. Then again, I'm not sure it's possible to prove this point as strongly as I would like. I think there is much more work to be done on the question of whether there is value to constructed languages as a valid field of inquiry, but I hope that the increasingly popular appeal of and presence of these languages thanks to films like James Cameron's Avatar and television shows like Game of Thrones will inspire more scholars to consider them as a serious field.
