Week 7 Workshop: 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

8 April 2027

Before the session#

Watch Blade Runner. The Cityspeak arrives early and is not subtitled; that is deliberate, so watch it without looking up a translation first.

In the session#

We start with the sentence you glossed in week four, and you write it again as somebody casual would say it. Things drop out. Endings erode, words contract, something gets left implied. Which things erode is not random, and the first half of the session is about why the same kinds of material get lost across unrelated languages.

Then errors. You decide who learns your language as an adult and what they reliably get wrong — the sound they substitute, the ending they forget, the construction they calque from their own grammar. This is more revealing than it sounds: the errors learners make show what is difficult about your language to someone encountering it for the first time, which is hard to judge after six weeks of working on it yourself.

Afterwards#

A language with two registers implies a society. Note who decides which form counts as correct, because in week eleven that turns out to be the same question as who decides what can be left unsaid.