Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Playing with Language: Three Language Games in the Gulf of Guinea (Agostinho & de Araujo)
This week's paper was submitted by fellow mod u/roipoiboy and discusses language games in the gulf of Guinea. While this is not really a typological paper, it'll definitely be nice inspiration for all you conlangers out there! Language games are "the result of a transformation or series of transformations acting regularly on an ordinary language text, with the intent of altering the form but not the content of the original message, for purposes of concealment or comic effect". You might be familiar with Pig Latin: that is a language game in English! Now it's your turn. Let's move onto the prompts:
- Does your language have language games?
- How do they work? How do they manifest in everyday life?
- What are the phonological processes that produce the game's surface forms?
- In what social contexts does the game appear? Is it exclusively spoken by children?
- What are some other interesting speech types in your language? Any genderlects, or maybe animal speech?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!