[Conlangs-Conf] Press release

Any comments / edits before I broad-cast this to news sources?

Also, any suggestions (emails/names/programs) for whom to send it to
to get airtime / printspace?

 - Sai

May 5, 2006 - UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

The results are in, and the First Language Creation Conference was a
great success.

You may ask, here, what is the LCC? For that matter, what is language creation?

Language creation - or 'conlanging' (short for "constructed language")
is the art, science, and hobby of creating new languages. People do it
for a wide variety of reasons - everything from fleshing out a
fictional work, aiming towards world peace and mutual communication,
trying to create an ideal language, testing linguistic theories,
having a secret langauge to use in their diary or share with a close
friend or sibling, testing out the boundaries of what language can do,
or simply as good fun!

While conlanging has been a famously closeted hobby for centuries now,
it is beginning to emerge into the mainstream. There are several
hundred conlangers who talk together online on various mailing lists
and bulletin boards, hundreds or thousands more who don't know that
they're not the only ones in the world who do this, and many thousands
of languages that have been created since the first was made in 1150
AD.

The First Language Creation Conference, held April 23 2006 on the UC
Berkeley campus, was the very first serious conference ever to be held
on the subject, drawing conlangers from all over the United States,
and with hundreds more watching both nationally and internationally,
through the recorded videos available online. It was also the largest
gathering of conlangers to have ever been held - three times larger
than the next largest known.

Conlanging has been increasingly featured in the media and popular
culture. It has been featured prominently in interviews on NPR with
linguists Mark Okrand
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3925273) and
Sarah Higley (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1126975),
popular movies such as Lord of the Rings and the Star Trek series,
music from artists such as Sigur Ros  and many books - not all of
which acknowledge the extent to which the author may have fleshed out
their created languages.

Next year's conference is already being planned, and is expected to be
yet bigger and to draw more people, this time internationally.

For more info, videos, audio interviews, reviews, photos, supplements,
and other material, please visit http://conlangs.berkeley.edu

Fiat lingua.

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