DOI: 10.1111/josl.12636 BOOK REVIEW The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines. Piers Kelly, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2022. 328 pp. 47 illustrations. Hardback (9780197509913) 99.00 USD, Paperback (9780197509920) 39.95 USD Courtney Handman University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, USA Email: chandman@austin.utexas.edu Invented languages remain something of a linguistic side-show, novelties that are at best exceptions that prove the rule that “true” languages must be unconscious, unplanned, and collectively constituted. Identified most closely with rabid Klingon-speaking Star Trek fans or head-in-the-clouds Esperanto- speaking political idealists, invented languages have largely been kept quarantined in a separate realm of study from “real” or “proper” or “natural” languages. For a linguist to call something an invented language is often tantamount to saying that it does not deserve full linguistic or sociolinguistic attention. Of course, many card-carrying linguists are themselves constructed language hobbyists, but they tend to keep this avocation separate from their professional identities. This lack of attention to invented or constructed languages is especially strange given the ways that sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology have shown the important role that conscious, planned linguistic performances and attitudes have on languages and their speakers (Fleming, 2017; Joseph, 2000). Sociolinguistic analyses frequently examine the conscious choices speakers make in register- or code-switching as they attempt to manage the indexical signs others find in their speech. For example, Alim and Smitherman (2012) discuss moments when Black English speakers choose to use a “white voice” on the phone in order to anticipate the potential forms of implicit or explicit racism that their addressees may hold. Research focused on language ideologies likewise tends to emphasize the role that explicit, conscious beliefs about language have on languages themselves. Ethnolinguistic nation- alist ideologies often demand a linguistic purism that prunes what appear to be “foreign” influences from national Standard languages, or at least the varieties of them taught in schools and sanctioned by dictionaries and grammars. National standard languages—Bahasa Indonesia, for example, which underwent intense regimentation and transformation during Indonesia’s independence—are hard to describe as sociolinguistic entities if one is going to ignore the kinds of conscious, planned interven- tions by particular individuals or groups that have kept invented languages at the margins of linguistic and sociolinguistic study. This kind of artificial/natural opposition has been the primary framework through which scholars and members of the public have discussed Eskayan, the language that is the focus of The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines. Eskayan is a language and writing system that its speakers claim was invented in the pre-colonial era by an ancestor known as Pinay, hidden at some Journal of Sociolinguistics. 2023;1–3. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 1 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/josl