[UPDATE 23/08/2021 10:23 - This article has been modified from its original version to more accurately represent real-world constructed languages.]
Constructed languages have been a corner-stone of many science fiction and fantasy settings – the Klingon language from the Star Trek universe and the languages from The Lord Of The Rings being notable examples. The following tabletop games - RPGs, card games, and more - have gameplay centered around the creation of made-up languages, giving non-linguist players the guidelines, tools, and structures needed for them to engage in and enjoy the art of crafting new words and new ways of organizing thoughts.
"Conlang," short for "Constructed Language," has been a hobby of both educated linguists and tight-knit communities for quite a long time. Sometimes people create brand new languages like "Esperanto" to serve as a "Lingua Franca" – a new shared language made to foster trade, build group identities, or unite the world in universal harmony. Some linguists have created scientific/artistic languages such as "Loglan" or "Toki Pona" to test out the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis," the idea that new ways of communicating can alter or expand the way people think. And then there are some who create constructed languages solely for the purpose of having fun or giving a fictional setting more verisimilitude – the alien languages seen in Star Wars and Star Trek for instance, or the Elvish languages and writing systems created by philologist J.R.R. Tolkien for The Lord Of The Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion.
Three out of four of the tabletop games listed below were designed by "Thorny Games," a two-person studio in Washington D.C. with a love for designing games that explore the process of creating a language and how the personalities of the speaker shape said language. The other creator, Joshua A.C. Newman, is a very under-rated designer of science-fiction and fantasy tabletop RPGs, their gameplay and artwork frequently themed not just around the mysteries of language and culture, but the evolution of writing systems and styles of calligraphy.
Sign: A Game About Being Understood
Sign: A Game About Being Understood, a storytelling card game made by Thorny Games, was inspired by the real-life origins of Nicaraguan Sign Language, an intricate form of sign language spontaneously created by a group of deaf adolescents in a Nicaraguan vocational school during the 1980s. The game box of Sign: A Game About Being Understood contains cards with character backstories, conversational topics, and personal motivations players can use to craft interesting (and silent) narratives. An article from Bell Of Lost Souls describes how over the course of various rounds in a game session, players try to create their own sign gestures for words, actions, and other key concepts, tallying up the moments where they do and don't understand each other.
Dialect: A Game About Language And How It Dies
Dialect: A Game About Language And How It Dies is another linguistic tabletop card game from Thorny Games, this one focused focused on the growth and evolution of languages in isolated communities and how the usage of those languages are imperiled by globalization, disaster, and other forms of social upheaval. In the first phase of a Dialect game session, players collaborate to tell a story of an isolated community – a cloistered village, space colony, slum neighborhood, or fantasy kingdom – and the words they create describe the most important ideas in their lives. In the second phase, the community's isolation ends, and the players tell a story of how outside cultures and pressures threaten to extinguish the languages they've made.
Xenolanguage: A Game About First Contact
Xenolanguage: A Game About First Contact is the newest upcoming linguistic storytelling card game from Thorny Games, recently funded on Kickstarter. Heavily inspired by first-contact science fiction films like Arrival, Xenolanguage: A Game About First Contact is about a team of scientists and academics with interwoven backstories, coming to terms with their personal struggles while trying to decipher the messages sent by an alien species.
Using a game mat strangely similar to an Ouija Board, cards with narrative scenarios, and a series of tokens with alien glyphs, players create a fictional alien language and a fictional narrative about people decrypting said language.
Shock: Human Contact
Shock: Human Contact is a science fiction roleplaying game that reinterprets/reimagines the narratives of exploration and first contact seen in shows like Star Trek, with a far-future Earth society of academics venturing out in ice-covered starships to re-contact the long-lost interstellar colonies of humanity. Said human worlds and societies are frequently alien in physiology, foreign in culture, and distinct in their language and writing systems. For this reason, a good chunk of the Shock: Human Contact sourcebook discusses how to create made-up languages and writing systems for players to engage with, complete with a fictional script and glossary of terms for the language the Academy (the futuristic society player characters hail from) speaks.
Sources: Bell Of Lost Souls, Thorny Games, Kickstarter