Parent Tips: Inventing a language

Inventing a new language is an effective and fun tool for getting kids to think deeply about how languages work. Your child will be asked to dissect the intricacies of words and writing conventions to create logic in their invented language, all while having fun. (Yes, if your child is fluent in multiple languages, they will already have great insight into these underlying concepts.) The practice also makes writing in English feel much easier than it ordinarily might, even if English isn’t your child’s first or only language. So please let your kid’s invented language rules follow their logic, even if you’re a linguistics Ph.D. and have thoughts.

In some practices, we ask kids to think about whether they like their sentences in English or their invented language more because it prompts them to think about the inherent power of language: What works and why? Some kids may need help thinking about this question. They may observe that they of course prefer English because it’s easier to write at this point—a wholly reasonable observation. We nonetheless encourage you to ask them to go further and think about which sentence best conveys the meaning of their sentence and why. Does that vary by audience? Is one better for some occasions but not others?

Note that working on an invented language will be a thread in many practices, and we also connect this work to your child’s ideas for an invented country in Level 2. Those practices are an entry point into the study of other areas of the humanities, including politics and culture.