World Building and Language Invention In Focus
"Mythology is Language and Language is Mythology" Listening to Future Voices: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Kesh Language.
Language Invention in Always Coming Home
In my first instalment of what I intend to be an ongoing series examining authors who, like J.R.R. Tolkien, integrated language invention into their world-building, I turn to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home (1985)—a work that remains as radical and relevant today as when it first appeared. It has been recently republished in an expanded Library of America edition (2019) edited by Brian Attebery and prepared in close consultation with Le Guin shortly before her death. This definitive volume includes previously unpublished material and offers invaluable insight into Le Guin’s creative process.
The Genesis: Returning to Kishmish
In 1983, Ursula K. Le Guin took a sabbatical from teaching and returned to her family’s ranch in California, “Kishmish,” located in the Napa Valley. This was no ordinary homecoming. Le Guin had spent the summers of her childhood there with her brother Karl and parents Alfred Louis and Theodora Kroeber, both distinguished anthropologists. The young Ursula was exposed to Native American culture through two Native American friends of her father’s who spent time with the family, providing her with deep awareness of California’s indigenous history and the richness of its native cultures—knowledge her father had documented in his seminal 1925 work Handbook of the Indians of California.
This sabbatical would prove transformative. During this return to her childhood valley, Le Guin wrote what is arguably one of her most interesting and unconventional works—Always Coming Home, published in October 1985 in an unusual slipcased edition that included a cassette tape of Kesh music and poetry.
An Anthropological Artifact from the Future
Upon reading Always Coming Home, one feels as though you are entering an anthropological museum filled with artifacts from a past civilization. The reader discovers all the tropes of literary world-building: maps, drawings and descriptions of plants, trees and rivers; collections of recipes and descriptions of clothing; detailed notes explaining society, kinship, sexuality, medicine and funerary rites; folk tales, plays, poems, stories and descriptions of rites and rituals, with detailed descriptions of musical instruments—all given voice through the art of language invention.
In the diegetic story, the character Pandora serves as the archaeologist, historian and anthropologist who provides an ethnographic account of Le Guin’s invented Kesh civilisation. For both readers and Pandora (also called the Editor), these people exist in the future, in a post-apocalyptic California—a land ravaged by war and ecological disasters. Le Guin’s note at the beginning employs a complex use of verbal tenses: “The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California.”
Looking Backward to Look Forward
Le Guin’s ambition for Always Coming Home parallels that of another myth-maker and world-builder—J.R.R. Tolkien, who expressed to a would-be publisher his desire to create a mythology “which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country”. Like Tolkien, Le Guin lamented the loss of voices from the past inhabitants of her childhood valley. However, where Tolkien looked back into the mists of lost English mythology, Le Guin characterized her motivation with the Cree phrase “Usa puyew usu wapiw”—”He goes backward, looks forward.”
This temporal inversion is crucial. Le Guin looked forward to look backward, creating a world where her people would live after a series of disasters that created an inland sea east of the Valley, still dealing with the legacy of chemical wastes left by a long-gone civilisation as she sketched in this map of the Kesh country:
As Le Guin explained:
I started with the place…the people had to be the people who belonged to that place. Their stories would be the stories of that place, their legends would be the meaning of that place, their songs would be the voices of that place…
Later, discussing these voices, Le Guin emphasized the importance of listening:
I listened, not trying to imitate Native American usages or forms or artistic patterns, because I had no right and no business to do so, but supported in what I was trying to do by these stories and myths and rituals and poems from the great oral literature of America, validated by them, given strength by them. Listening, not understanding much, but hearing; how the legend must grow out of the land like a Valley oak, must walk on the land quietly, like a coyote, must be awfully smart, like water, when it’s out of sight it’s on its way home.
The Birth of the Kesh language: From Necessity to Sophistication
The genesis of Le Guin’s language invention grew from her desire to give her people voice. She called them “Kesh”—possibly inspired by the first syllables of her family ranch “Kishmish”—which would signify the valley, its people, and their language:
Kesh - 1. valley, esp. the Valley of the Na River; variants: keshheya, amakesh, rrukesh, keshnav. 2. Person, people, inhabitant of the Valley of the Na; variant: keshivshe 3. The language of the human inhabitants of the Valley of the Na; variants: arrakeshiv, arraweksh.
In a Tolkienian manner, Le Guin’s language invention was inextricably linked to the land and people. Initially, Le Guin thought “a few dozen words of the language of the Kesh people would suffice to suggest their key concepts.” However, when she decided to include music and song as world-building elements, working with composer Todd Barton to create the music for what would become the cassette Music and Poetry of the Kesh, the project expanded dramatically. Barton not only composed music but built Kesh instruments to Le Guin’s design, including the seven-foot horn called the Houmbúta—from HOUM (big, large, wide) and BUTA (horn) seen in this photo with Le Guin and Barton).
In her 2006 preface to Conley and Cain’s Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages, Le Guin contrasted her process with Tolkien’s:
In the beginning is the word: one may imagine a language before imagining who speaks it. This is how it was, evidently, with Tolkien. A linguist playing with language for the joy of it, he found his invented languages bringing to life the mythology of a people and thence an anthropology, a history, a typography. It can also happen the other way around; the development of an imagined world beyond a certain point demands the development of a language to suit it. This was the case with my Always Coming Home. I thought a few dozen words of the language of the Kesh people would suffice to suggest their key concepts and had already blithely written that “the difficulty of translation from a language that doesn’t exist yet is considerable, but there’s no need to exaggerate it.” But when Todd Barton began to write the music of the Valley for the songs, I had to be an honest woman, sit down, and invent Kesh—at least enough of the grammar and syntax and vocabulary to get me through writing poems that I had pretended to translate into English before they existed in Kesh.
The Architecture of Kesh: Methodology and Influences
The Tolkienian Lineage
Le Guin explicitly acknowledges Tolkien’s influence in the glossary’s introduction, referring to “an illustrious predecessor” and the “Secret Vice” referring to Tolkien’s November 1931 talk on language invention to the Samuel Johnson Society at Pembroke College, Oxford. Le Guin likely encountered this reference in Christopher Tolkien’s The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays which included Tolkien’s “A Secret Vice” talk (1983).
Tolkien’s methodology is evident in Le Guin’s word-building. Like Tolkien, she starts with a root and uses prefixes and suffixes to create related words, establishing consistency and coherency. For example, her use of the root HWA:
- hwai – time (time of day at which event occurs)
- hwan – yellow, golden
- hwapeweyo – the dry season (approx. May-October)
- hwavgediu – morning
- hwavgodiu – noon
- hwavgemalo – afternoon
Similarly, she creates animal groups from roots:
Galik (Deer)
ogalik– doe
galika – buck
galikaiha – fawn
Hwerin (Horse)
ohwerin – mare
tahwerin, hwerina – stallion
pehwerin– gelding
Tolkien believed this methodology created consistency and helped illustrate rootedness and historicity in language invention—qualities Le Guin clearly sought to replicate.
The Islandian Connection: Austin Tappan Wright
Another direct influence appears in a document titled “Love” in the “Back of the Book,” written by the Kesh character Pandora:
There are six words which can be translated as ‘love’ or conversely one can say that there is no Kesh word for love—but there are six words for different kinds of love. At first I thought the Kesh distinctions were similar to the Islandian—that subtle and useful trilogy of “ania, apia, alia”—but the overlap of meaning is only partial.
This passage references Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia (1942), a utopian novel set on an imaginary continent in the South Pacific. Wright (1883-1931), a lawyer and teacher, spent his life world-building his private utopia, creating maps, charts, and an invented language. After his death in a car accident, his widow typed and organized a two-thousand-page novel from his papers.
Wright’s Islandian language featured three words for different aspects of love: apia, alia, and ania (corresponding roughly to eros, love of place, and the mature love of closest marriage). Le Guin’s language invention expands on these distinctions, using language to give more texture to how different forms of love were expressed among the Kesh peoples. Wright’s complete papers, including extensive linguistic materials, remain at the Houghton Library at Harvard University—a testament to the depth of his world-building that rivals Tolkien’s in scope - we will explore the language invention and world-building of Islandia in a future substack.
The Laadan Dialogue: Suzette Haden Elgin
While not overtly cited, Le Guin may have been in dialogue with another contemporary language inventor. In 1981, Suzette Haden Elgin (born Patricia Anne Suzette Wilkins), an American experimental linguist and science fiction writer, invented Láadan to explore how language shapes thought and culture, reflecting Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity theories. She incorporated this language into her dystopian science fiction series Native Tongue (1984), describing it as depicting “a future America in which the women’s language has been constructed and was in use.”
Elgin believed Western languages were better suited for expressing what men think than what women think. She created Láadan to make it easier for women to express their experiences, including many nuanced ways to frame various aspects of love—interestingly, most beginning with /a/, perhaps nodding to Wright:
- aayaa – mysterious love, not yet known to be welcome or unwelcome
- aazh – love for one sexually desired at one time, but not now
- ab – love for one liked, but not respected
-ad – love for one respected but not liked
- am – love for one related by blood
- ashon – love for one not related by blood but kin of heart
- aye – love that is unwelcome or a burden
- azh – love for one sexually desired now
- eeme – love for one neither liked nor respected
- oham – love for that which is holy
- sham – love for the child of one’s body
Le Guin was aware of Elgin’s work and provided a supportive quote when Native Tongue was published in 1984. However, Elgin later considered her linguistic experiment unsuccessful, noting in a 1999 essay that Láadan “got very little attention” and observing with some bitterness that “the Klingon language, which is as ‘masculine’ as you could possibly get, has had a tremendous impact on popular culture.” Elgin is referring to Marc Okrand’s invented language of Klingon for the Star Trek story-world. Recent scholarship has examined Elgin’s project more sympathetically. Karen Leigh Bruce’s 2008 article “A Woman-Made Language: Suzette Haden Elgin’s Láadan and the Native Tongue Trilogy as Thought Experiment in Feminist Linguistics” analyzes Láadan as a serious exploration of linguistic relativity and feminist theory, while noting that some women criticised the language for its limitations, including insufficient vocabulary for lesbian culture and its arguably essentialist assumptions about women’s experiences.
Language as Environmental Warning
Le Guin also uses language invention to reflect the ecological dangers facing the Kesh (and us!). A striking example is the Kesh word fumo:
Fumo – a substance, apparently a residue of industrial products or byproducts, perhaps of petroleum-based plastics, which occurs in small whitish grains or larger concretions, covering regions of the ocean surface and found on beaches and tidal flats, often to a depth of several feet, useless, indestructible, and poisonous while burning.
This prophetic invention anticipates contemporary concerns about microplastics and oceanic pollution, demonstrating how constructed languages can serve as vehicles for environmental critique.
“The Back of the Book”: Respecting Reader Choice
Aware that not every reader would be interested in linguistic specifics, Le Guin—perhaps taking a cue from Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings—created “The Back of the Book”:
Coming at my work as a novelist, I thought it best to put many of the explanatory descriptive pieces into a section called “The Back of the Book” where those who want narrative can ignore them and those who enjoy explanation can find them.
This section includes information on Written Kesh, the Kesh Alphabet, Spoken and Written Literature, and an extensive glossary of over 500 words through which readers can learn elements of Kesh grammar and syntax. The 2019 Library of America expanded edition includes additional material on Kesh syntax in “Le Guin’s Expanded Material.” Interestingly, recent scholarship on the Constructed Languages Stack Exchange has explored the linguistic plausibility of Kesh, noting its feature of “alloglottography”—where written and spoken languages are completely separate—a phenomenon common in the Ancient Near East but difficult to maintain in Le Guin’s described society.
Music and Voice: The Cassette and Its Revival
The original 1985 publication included a cassette titled Music and Poetry of the Kesh, which has since become a cult artifact - here is my treasured copy!
In 2018, Freedom To Spend reissued it on vinyl for the first time, with new liner notes by Moe Bowstern, a friend of Le Guin’s. The reissue renewed interest in this remarkable collaboration between author and composer. According to a 2018 interview with Todd Barton in Inverted Audio, the partnership was deeply collaborative and imaginative:
It [the record] was built around imagination and curiosity. Ursula framed our work as being archaeologists of the imagination, we would independently go on “digs” and show each other what we discovered. I would discover instruments, melodies, sounds etc. And she would bring lyrics, rituals, descriptions of dances, plays etc. Some of the music I brought she would evaluate and let me know that it was “authentic” Kesh or, in some instances not Kesh at all or “pre-Kesh”. All of this feedback helped me refine the music and sonic environment of the Kesh.
Twilight Song: “Goutun Onkama”
To understand how all these elements—language invention, music, cultural world-building—come together, consider one of the songs from the cassette, “Twilight Song” or in Kesh, “Goutun Onkama.” The liner notes indicate it should be performed “in the twilight of the evening in the summer down by Sinshan Creek.” It tells of a *bu* (great horned owl) hunting for a very brave and defiant small frog!
Aó ta búv The male of the great horned owl
úm bodan han gehwol in a voice like blowing into a hollow jar
chemheya sosonkama sings the five note heya
hwavgediúv goupraguan in the twilight of the morning
hú, hú-u, hú, hú hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo
Inye opal dut rechav búya The small frog who he is hunting
óganaian vón oudan in the creek bottom among shadows
kicheya sosonkama sing the four note heya
sóya haitropoud gotomhoi in a fearless and contented voice
kaa-rigk kaa-rigk kaa-rigk kaa-rigk
The lyrics include *hwavgediuv* (”of the morning,” using the genitive ending /-iuv/), demonstrating the grammatical sophistication Le Guin achieved. The song repeatedly uses heya and heyiya—core words in Kesh vocabulary. Heya is glossed as an untranslatable statement of praise/greeting/holiness/being sacred, used to build many Kesh words like heyimas (building, sacred space). The element -iya means “a hinge, the center of the spiral, the source of motion and change—iya is the eternal beginning, the process of energy arising and continuing,” and is also the word for energy. Thus hanheyiya means “in a sacred manner.” These concepts reflect Taoist influences that scholars have identified throughout the work. The heyiya-if symbol resembles the taijitu (yin-yang symbol), and its hollow center (the “hinge”) echoes the hub of the wheel as described in the Tao Te Ching—fitting for an author who described herself “as an inconsistent Taoist and a consistent un-Christian.”
Here is a recording of Le Guin performing “Goutun Onkama” we hear Le Guin speaking in Kesh. Behind her voice, there’s suddenly depth — crickets, a babbling brook, and a breeze (which were all recorded on Le Guin’s ranch in the Napa Valley)
Reception and Legacy
When Always Coming Home was published in 1985, it received mixed reviews. Samuel R. Delany, writing in The New York Times, called it “a slow, rich read...her most satisfying text among a set of texts that have provided much imaginative pleasure.” However, many critics faulted its length and unconventional narrative technique. The book has aged remarkably well. Recent assessments, including from The Millions, describe it as “one of [Le Guin’s] most radical novels...a study in what a complete and utter rejection of capitalism and patriarchy might look like—for society and for the art of storytelling.” John Scalzi, former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, wrote in his introduction to a 2016 edition that he discovered the book as a teenager and calls it “a formative book...sunk deep in [his] bones,” one to endlessly return to—”always coming home.” The 2019 Library of America edition and 2023 Harper Perennial reissue have sparked renewed scholarly and popular interest. The inclusion of the complete text of the novella-within-the-novel “Dangerous People” (two chapters of which had never been published) provides new material for scholars to analyze.
Conclusion: Inventing Future Voices
Always Coming Home represents a unique approach to world-building through language invention. Le Guin began with a place and its people, then developed language as their authentic voice. Where Wright created Islandia as a lifelong private utopia and Elgin constructed Láadan as a deliberate linguistic experiment, Le Guin positioned herself as an archaeologist of a future culture, listening to voices not yet born.
Her methodology synthesizes Tolkienian linguistic rigor, Wright’s expansion of the vocabulary of love, and perhaps Elgin’s feminist linguistic consciousness, while maintaining scrupulous respect for the indigenous cultures that inspired her. The result is a work that transcends genre boundaries—part novel, part anthropological document, part musical composition—unified by its invented language.
As we face our own ecological crises and cultural dislocations, Le Guin’s vision of a post-apocalyptic people who have learned to live sustainably, who have multiple words for love and sacred energy, who bury their dead in the fields they loved, resonates with renewed urgency. The Kesh language serves not merely as world-building decoration but as a vehicle for imagining alternative ways of being in the world.
The voices Le Guin heard in her childhood valley, the voices she mourned as lost, found new expression in the Kesh—a people who “might be going to have lived” in a future we can choose to shape. In this sense, Always Coming Home is not just backward-looking archaeology but forward-looking prophecy, demonstrating the power of language invention to illuminate both what we have lost and what we might yet become.
Namárië and Heya for now!
Conley, Tim, and Stephen Cain. Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages. Greenwood Press, 2006.
Delany, Samuel R. “Always Coming Home.” The New York Times Book Review, 1985.
Elgin, Suzette Haden. Native Tongue 1984. Reprint, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2019.
Erlich, Richard. Studies on Always Coming Home in relation to A.L. Kroeber’s Handbook of the Indians of California, 1997
Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home: Author’s Expanded Edition. Ed. Brian Attebery. Library of America, 2019.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “A Secret Vice.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. George Allen & Unwin, 1983.
Tolkien, J.R.R. A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Language Invention edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins, HarperCollins, 2020.
Wright, Austin Tappan. Islandia. Overlook Press, 2013.