Interview with CD Covington
Today, I’m talking with CD Covington, who is just about to launch her Kickstarter for A Writer’s Guide to Linguistic Worldbuilding! Keep reading for more on the Kickstarter, CD’s work, and linguistic nerdery!
DV: Tell me a little about yourself and your linguistics background.
CD: My name is CD Covington, and I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. I first learned about linguistics in my year studying abroad in Marburg, Germany, when I took a class in it. My little private college didn’t have a linguistics department, and I’d never heard of it before, so I was fascinated. But since I didn’t know what I could do with it, and I was focused on chemistry at the time, I set it aside for 10 years or so, when I decided I wasn’t happy with my career choices and went back to grad school for MAs in German and linguistics. I’ve got a fascination with language change and how language is used in society, and when I got my MA, I wrote my thesis on a very specific change in the German language that’s still ongoing today. (If I went into detail about it, we’d be here all day. I’m not kidding.)
DV: What was the inspiration for your linguistic worldbuilding Kickstarter project?
CD: Around the time I was finishing my thesis, I had the idea to write about how language and linguistics are portrayed in SF/F. It was 2019, the movie Arrival had recently come out, and Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet had hit the shelves. The first few seasons of The Expanse were out on SyFy. There was a lot to write about! So I pitched a column to tor.com, and after I wrote a few columns, I noticed some patterns in them, and they boiled down to linguistic worldbuilding. I initially started it with a Patreon, which was a mistake, because I never got enough subscribers to let me focus on the linguistics stuff. But I have a draft of the first quarter or so of the book ready to go and an outline for the rest.
DV: What is one tip regarding linguistics and worldbuilding that you think is critical for authors to know?
CD: If I had to pick just one that I can summarize in a paragraph or two, I’d say figure out what sounds (phonetics) belong in your language, whether it’s a secondary world or the future or past of this one, and how they can be put together into words. Your character or place names will sound like they belong to the same language, even if it’s not something the average reader will probably notice. Even if your cultures borrow words from each other, they’ll modify them to fit the sound pattern of the language they speak. We adapted borrowed words in (US) English to fit the sound combinations that are allowed: czar/tsar, (“zar”), or tsunami (“soonami”), or psychology.
DV: What authors and/or books or stories do you recommend for doing amazing things with language and linguistics?
CD: The first author I always think of for this is CJ Cherryh, especially her Foreigner series, but so many of her books do it very well. She’s very good at making non-human cultures that aren’t just humans with pointy ears, and one piece of that is reflected in the way their languages work and frequently reflect their (non-human) psychology. Foreigner is about translation and intercultural communication (and how it can go wrong), and the main character is a linguist-diplomat, so it’s got a special place in my heart.
DV: What are you working on next (aside from writing your linguistics worldbuilding book)?
CD: I have a draft of an asexual lesbian SF romance and a stack of critique notes that I can work through when I finish the linguistic worldbuilding book (or when I need a break from the semi-academic grind). It’s the one I sometimes refer to as “Legends and Lattes in space.” I have a completed novel that I want to rewrite from a different character’s perspective, which will take a lot more work, and I have an idea for a third novel. All three are set in the same world, but at different points in the timeline.
DV: Where else can people find you?
CD: The Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/
tor.com column: https://www.tor.com/author/cd-
Website: https://www.cdcovington.com
Mastodon: @exaggerated@wandering.shop
Twitter (rarely): @exaggerated
Tumblr: http://cd-covington.tumblr.com
Instagram (mostly random pics): feuervogel42
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/
Thank you so much for stopping by, CD!
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