It is with a heavy heart that we note the death of Richard Adams, author of the seminal Watership Down, with its wonderful act of imagination, the invention of a Lapine language.

As one critic noted, Watership Down “is much more like A Clockwork Orange: a book so confidently lodged in an alternative universe with its own rules and conventions that it even has its own language.”

As interest in ecologically informed literature continues to grow, Richard Adams’s achievements are likely to swell similarly in stature over time.

We were consulted today by BBC’s ‘The One Show’, the midday magazine programme, which will be doing a slot on invented languages on tomorrow’s show.

This relates to the release of the new ‘BFG’ movie, based on the book by Roald Dahl, in which the titular friendly giant speaks in his own language, ‘Gobblefunk’, entirely invented by Dahl.

There is a brief Gobblefunk dictionary here, but viewers of tomorrow’s programme will no doubt get to see an exclusive excerpt of the BFG speaking, taken straight from the new film.

Regrettably, this programme will be for domestic UK viewers only.

We’ll be speaking about the Ponying the Slovos conference, and our plans for the future tomorrow at Coventry University at 12.25pm in the Engineering building, EC1-03.

You’ll need to register to attend at https://cuacdev.wordpress.com/portfolio/cucbf/, or follow the hashtag at #CUcbf.

Once the presentation is over, it should be available on the Coventry University website in the future, and we’re hoping to make an announcement about the project’s future shortly.

Please get in touch with us at jim.clarke@coventry.ac.uk if you want to know more.