Playing About, Through and With Language: Two Educational Games to Explore Endangered Languages and Language Change

This paper argues that linguistics is an underexplored domain for game-based learning and proposes a functional framework for understanding how games relate to language. Drawing on systemic functional linguistics, the authors distinguish three dimensions: experiential (whether language is thematised explicitly or metaphorically), interpersonal (whether games draw on players' existing language skills or require them to create novel linguistic forms), and textual (whether language is incidental or instrumental to game mechanics). The paper is a design rationale rather than an empirical study, and neither proposed game has yet been play-tested, so no player data are reported.

To ground the framework, the authors surveyed BoardGameGeek manually, noting that of over 166,400 tabletop titles only 42 hits surfaced for language-related search terms, and that just 15 games carry the "Language / Linguistics" family tag. Most language-oriented titles were quizzes, educational games teaching specific languages, or negotiation and social deduction games that build conversation into their mechanics. Only a small subset, such as Gibberers, Nomic, Dialect, and Sign, simulates the invention or change of linguistic forms, drawing on Halliday's concepts of instantiation and semogenesis.

The paper then presents two educational designs under development. Phonetics Pursuit is a Trivial Pursuit-style quiz on endangered Sino-Tibetan languages, covering phonetics, typology, geography, and language endangerment through multimodal tasks such as auditory discrimination. Ludolecte is a card-based role-playing game for university language students, in which players invent and negotiate neologisms within domain-specific scenarios, tracking the intermediate forms of each lexical item. Together, the authors argue, the two designs show how abstract linguistic concepts can become coherent game mechanics without sacrificing scientific accuracy, with future work planned to evaluate them experimentally.