How a Harvard Grad Went Viral for Inventing a Dolphin Language
There are a lot of words that can be used to describe Adam Aleksic: frenetic, energetic, curious, smart, clever, obsessed. Above all else, he’s restless. During our conversation via Zoom, the recent Harvard University grad never sat still for more than a few minutes before getting up to grab something across the room or simply pace with laptop in hand—all the while expounding on a topic that has been his life for years: language.
Aleksic goes by EtymologyNerd on Instagram and TikTok, the latter of which has amassed a healthy following since he began posting in March 2023. While much of his early videos focused mostly on the etymology of words—the development and evolution of a word’s semantic meaning over time—he’s since hit his stride by taking his viewers into the world of constructed languages, also known as conlang, the practice of creating a language out of whole cloth.
Think The Lord of the Rings’ Elvish, Game of Thrones’ Dothraki, or Star Trek’s Klingon. Rather than building a language for a fantastical, fictional world, though, Aleksic takes a more offbeat approach to conlanging.