A Network Analysis Approach to Conlang Research Literature

TL;DR

This study uses bibliometric and network analysis to map the landscape of conlang research literature, revealing key trends, influential authors, and predominant methodologies over nearly a century.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive, data-driven overview of conlang research publications, highlighting influential works, authors, and methodological trends in the field.

Findings

Esperanto is the most documented conlang.

Key authors include García R., Fiedler S., and Blanke D.

Main research decades are the 1970s and 1980s.

Abstract

The field of conlang has evidenced an important growth in the last decades. This has been the product of a wide interest in the use and study of conlangs for artistic purposes. However, one important question is what it is happening with conlang in the academic world. This paper aims to have an overall understanding of the literature on conlang research. With this we aim to give a realistic picture of the field in present days. We have implemented a computational linguistic approach, combining bibliometrics and network analysis to examine all publications available in the Scopus database. Analysing over 2300 academic publications since 1927 until 2022, we have found that Esperanto is by far the most documented conlang. Three main authors have contributed to this: Garv\'ia R., Fiedler S., and Blanke D. The 1970s and 1980s have been the decades where the foundations of current research have been built. In terms of methodologies, language learning and experimental linguistics are the ones contributing to most to the preferred approaches of study in the field. We present the results and discuss our limitations and future work.