Playing About, Through and with Language. Two Educational Games to Explore Endangered Languages and Language Change: Phonetics Pursuit and Ludolecte

Abstract

There has been some research on language skills from the point of view of games-based learning (GBL) (Hung et al. 2018; Xu et al. 2020). However, there are very few studies in GBL on linguistics, and very few educational games that focus on the language sciences. In this paper, we argue that this is a missed opportunity. There are many linguistic topics that would benefit from the GBL approach: Where do individual accents come from? What are the different ways in which words change meanings? What happens to the language system when it comes into contact with other languages or becomes endangered? In the first part of this paper, we present a survey of linguistics-oriented games on BoardGameGeek (BGG). We then propose a framework for analysing the semiotic relationship between games and language, based on systemic functional linguistics (Martin & Rose 2008). In the final part of this paper, we present two game designs that harness the different dimensions of this framework to teach different linguistic concepts: (i) Phonetics Pursuit, a quiz game on endangered Sino-Tibetan languages with a focus on phonetics, linguistic typology, and geography, and (ii) Ludolecte, a card-based role-playing game in which an isolated community creates neologisms and imagines different semantic trajectories for them. These games have yet to be play-tested, so we cannot present any evaluation data. Instead, this is a design rationale paper which discusses how technical concepts in linguistics can be translated into coherent game mechanics while remaining faithful to the epistemological requirements of game-based learning (Reinhardt & Thorne 2020; Sorrentino 2025).