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Although sf writers normally realize that their craft requires a good understanding of the hard sciences (physics, etc.), many have no training in nor understanding of linguistics and nor, very often, do they seem to feel this as a lack. Most writers who set stories in the future (or in the past, if it comes to that) ignore the problem of language-change, but some have confronted the problem, with various degrees of success many of these attempts are discussed by Walter E Meyers in what is by far the best study of the topic, Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction ( 1980). Sf stories in which linguistics plays a subsidiary role are very much more common than sf stories actually about linguistics. If we accept linguistics as a science – it is arguably the "hardest" (or "most scientific") of the Soft Sciences – then we might argue that the fiction of Tolkien, usually regarded as Fantasy, at least approaches sf in its linguistic aspects. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings ( 1954-1955 3vols omni 1968) is unusual in that its very genesis was largely linguistic: Tolkien invented his imaginary languages (carefully glossed and explained in the many appendices) before he wrote the books.
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The former's Out of the Silent Planet ( 1938) speaks interestingly of the different grammars and vocabularies of the three Martian languages, and plays some rather facile linguistic tricks to show up what Lewis regarded as the arrogance of humanistic Scientists whose high-flown rhetoric is deflated by translation into pidgin-Martian. Much earlier, C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien both used their considerable philological expertise in their fictions. John Varley invents a nonverbal linguistic Utopia in "The Persistence of Vision" (March 1978 F&SF), in which a sighted man enters a community of people who are blind and deaf they communicate through touch (and sex) in a language more subtle and immediate than he can at first grasp. Terry Carr's "The Dance of the Changer and the Three" (in The Farthest Reaches, anth 1968, ed Joseph Elder) is set on an alien planet whose natives are energy forms their language is dancing for no clear reason they destroy many humans for whom they seem to feel no enmity, and survival depends on the correct reading of the dance. Other ways of giving information are dealt with under Communications, and two examples will suffice here.
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This entry concentrates primarily on verbal languages in sf. The theme overlaps, naturally, with that of Communications, and also to some extent with those of Anthropology and Perception, inasmuch as a language tells us a great deal about the culture that uses it and the way that culture perceives the world.
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Languages play a surprisingly important role in sf, and many stories turn on linguistic issues. As a discipline it has leapt to academic prominence since the 1960s. Linguistics is the study of language, how languages work, what their function is, how they are constructed and whence they are derived.