What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
One lecture a week, and each one names the film you are required to have seen before you walk in. From week two onwards, every lecture builds on topics covered in earlier weeks, and each week’s page lists which ones.
Starting with the language, not the story
Tolkien built his languages first and the world afterwards. What that order of work asks of you, and the four questions your design brief has to answer
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
The sound inventory
Every language uses a small subset of the sounds a human can make. Choosing yours, in IPA, and living with the consequences
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
Words that carry their own grammar
Morphology — the smallest pieces that mean anything, and three different ways of gluing them into words. Okrand's Klingon as the worked example
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Word order is a decision
Six possible orders, two of which cover most of the world's languages. What yours predicts about the rest of your grammar, whether you meant it to or not
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Which sounds can sit together
Phonotactics — the rules about which sounds can follow which. Frommer built Na'vi for actors who had to learn it quickly and pronounce it accurately on camera
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Where words come from
Building a lexicon — core vocabulary, derivation, and getting a thousand words out of two hundred roots. Herbert borrowed heavily, and it is worth asking how
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Variation and register
Pidgins, creoles and register. A language with only one way of saying something is not finished yet
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
Writing it down
Five ways to write a language, and what a script tells you about who could read it, what they wrote on, and how quickly they worked
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
Language and thought
The film makes a strong claim about language and thought. The evidence supports a much weaker version of it, which is the more useful claim to examine
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
Learning it from strangers
Comprehensible input, the critical period, and one of the few scenes in cinema that depicts language acquisition roughly correctly
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Pragmatics — you can know every word in a sentence and still not know what it means. The final subsystem your language needs, and the hardest to set down
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
The crit
No screening this week. You read a text aloud in a language that did not exist in February, and somebody who has never seen it reads a sentence back
Week 12 · 10 May 2027