Arika Okrent, critically acclaimed author and member of the Carleton College Class of 1992, will present “MAN VS. LANGUAGE! LANGUAGE WINS!: How Language Inventors Turned the Enemy Into a Muse” on Wednesday, Oct. 28 at 4:30 p.m. in the College’s Language and Dining Center, room 104, followed by a reception with refreshments. Okrent’s lecture will cover topics from her recently published book In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language (Spiegel & Grau, 2009). Drawing on invented languages like the Klingon jargon of Star Trek and the international speech of Esperanto, Okrent artfully analyzes the themes and shortcomings of 900 years of man’s quest to design a better language. Okrent’s appearance is free and open to the public.

As a linguistics major and graduate of the Carleton College Class of 1992, Okrent was drawn to language at a very young age. She earned an M.A. in Linguistics at Gallaudet, the world’s only university for the deaf, and began a Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago. She developed a fascination with psycholinguistics and worked in gesture and brain research labs before earning a joint degree in the Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology’s Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program in 2004.  During this time, Okrent focused her linguistic affinity on the art and history of invented languages, which eventually inspired the creation of In the Land of Invented Languages.  This critically acclaimed history of artificial language has been deemed “a must-have on the shelves of all world freaks, grammar geeks, and plain old language lovers.”

The Carleton College Language and Dining Center is accessible from First and Maple Streets in Northfield. For more information regarding the lecture, please contact Liz Evison at evisonl@carleton.edu.