The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each workshop, what to prepare, and what you complete each week.
Two hours on a Thursday, every week of semester. You arrive having watched the film and attended the lecture, and you leave with one subsystem of your language built and written down. Bring a printed IPA chart to the first four workshops.
The design brief
The first workshop — you leave with one page describing a language that does not exist yet, and at least one fixed constraint to design around
Week 1 · 25 February 2027
Choosing your sounds
The workshop where your language stops being an idea — you fix an inventory in IPA, then pronounce every sound in it to the group
Week 2 · 4 March 2027
Building words
You pick a morphological type, commit to it, and build ten words that obey rules you wrote down before you started
Week 3 · 11 March 2027
Ordering the sentence
Fix your word order, then work out what follows from it — questions, negation, and the first sentence of your language anybody can read
Week 4 · 18 March 2027
What your actors can say
You write your syllable structure as a formula, then read twenty of your own words aloud and fix any you cannot pronounce consistently
Week 5 · 25 March 2027
The first hundred words
A hundred words by the end of the day, at least twenty of them generated by rules rather than invented, and a written record of everything you borrowed
Week 6 · 1 April 2027
Who speaks it badly
Your language gains a second register and a population of imperfect speakers, so that it reads as a language people actually use
Week 7 · 8 April 2027
Writing it down
You design a script and then test it by hand — writing the same sentence three times, at speed
Week 8 · 15 April 2027
What words do to thought
An essay workshop — you leave with a thesis you can defend and one experimental paper you have actually read
Week 9 · 22 April 2027
Teaching it to someone
You teach a fragment of your language to somebody outside this course, watch what breaks, and change your language because of it
Week 10 · 29 April 2027
What goes without saying
The last building workshop. Context-dependent meaning, one thing your language cannot express without a paraphrase, and the first read-through of your crit text
Week 11 · 6 May 2027
Fifteen minutes each
Twelve lines, read aloud, in a language you built. Then somebody who has never seen it reads a sentence back to you
Week 12 · 13 May 2027