What Are Conlangs and What Do They Reveal About Human Language?
You’re probably familiar with pop culture conlangs like Klingon from the Star Trek universe, Na’avi of Avatar, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish languages of Middle Earth, Dothraki and High Valyrian from Game of Thrones, or the Fremen language Chakobsa of the classic space opera Dune. Sci-fi and fantasy storytelling — whether through books, movies, or TV — lend themselves well to conlang creation. But a closer look at the world of conlangs reveals a much more diverse story behind the art and science of conlanging. What’s more, they might even help us uncover some of the mysteries of natlangs — that is, natural languages.
So let’s dive in to learn more about why people create conlangs:
- What are they?
- What are they used for?
- And what can they tell us about natural language?
Trying to Define Human Language
Before looking at conlangs, we should establish a few things about natural language:
- Number 1: Language is notoriously difficult to define. It’s a messy, dynamic, ever-changing thing that likes to do its own thing. Yes, languages are made up of rules, a.k.a. grammars, but they are in constant flux and cannot be told what to do. And there are a lot of working definitions that have been proposed by linguists. More on tackling this definition in a moment.
- Number 2: We know that human language is different from other types of “language,” like music, computer programming, and non-human communication. For example, while some animals communicate in certain ways that are human-like, such as bee dancing, ape signing, and bird mimicry, they don’t come close to meeting the full spectrum of abilities that human language has. In other words, their language isn’t languaging.
- Number 3: Usually, language is thought of in terms of its communicative, social function. This is obviously a major function of language, but it’s also used to think, play, express emotion, and convey identity. This point will be important for many of the conlangs we’re going to explore.
Alright, let’s make an attempt at defining this thing. In general, linguists characterize language as a system of arbitrary but conventional symbols, spoken or signed, that humans use to communicate and express themselves. Well that seems fairly straightforward. But not so fast…when we get into the nitty gritty, complex aspects that make human language unique, the definition gets a bit more nebulous. According to the MIT Press’s Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, what makes human language special is the combination of the following features:
- It’s communicative.
- It’s abstract.
- It’s conventional.
- It’s combinatorial.
- It’s cultural.
- And it’s dynamic.
What else makes human language pretty cool? It has “infinite productivity and creativity,” meaning there are virtually no limits to what we can talk about.
So we know that language is unique to humans and has a range of functions. We’ve developed a fuzzy understanding of this hard-to-define thing, but what’s perhaps even fuzzier is how language works in the brain. This is where research into conlangs might provide a clue. But for that, we need to establish the basics of conlangs: What are they, and what’s their origin story?
Getting to Know Conlangs: Tracing Their History to Understand Their Many Purposes
Unlike natural languages (natlangs, for short), constructed languages (conlangs) don’t develop naturally. They’re completely made up. Go figure.
Some other terms for them are artificial languages, invented languages, planned languages, or model languages…you get the idea.
The conlanger experts at conlang.org note other abbreviations with more nuanced meanings that you might hear, such as:
- Artlang (artistic language): designed to be artistic or aesthetic. Think creative spaces like fiction and music.
- Auxlang (auxiliary language): invented to facilitate international communication. These are basically constructed lingua francas.
- Loglang (logical language): constructed with philosophical and/or logical parameters.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines a conlang as “an artificial language, for example one invented for a movie, TV series, or book,” but this is a somewhat narrow description that only highlights their literary and pop culture uses.
Merriam-Webster does a better job at capturing the essence of conlangs with their definition: “an invented language intended for human communication that has planned and cohesive phonological, grammatical, and syntactical systems.”
It specifies that conlangs have a function (human communication, although not all conlangs serve this purpose) and that they are planned systems of arbitrary but conventional symbols. It also doesn’t forefront their use in fiction and pop culture, which could be a bit misleading because conlangs have many more purposes — something we can see by tracing their history. So let’s go back in time to see where conlanging began and what people have used it for throughout the ages.
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(Research gap alert: This is a very Western-centric historical accounting of conlangs. More work in the history of conlangs from other cultures is sorely needed.)
Philosophical Investigations 1.0
One of the earliest documented examples of conlanging goes back to Ancient Greece, sometime around 360–399 BCE, where we meet the philosopher Plato. In his work the Cratylus, a dialogue between three philosophers, Plato lays out a debate about naming conventions and the “correctness of names.” (Note that the Greek meaning of the word “names” extends to common nouns as well as adjectives and some types of verbs, so we’ll think of this as “wording conventions.”) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives the following snippet from their debate:
“Socrates conjectures that a correct name needs to be a portmanteau: Like the name ‘shepherd’ (from ‘sheep’ and ‘herder’), it needs to be composed of other names in a way that ensures that it encapsulates a description of what its referents are (390e–394e).”
This is one of the easier-to-grasp examples from the famously tricky work; even scholars have different interpretations of the debate. As a whole, it’s a sort of etymology meets orthography meets phonology kind of a thought experiment. Nonetheless, we see from this snapshot of history, a philosophical investigation into the idea of language experimentation.
Mystical Conlanging
Okay, fast forward to the Middle Ages. This one is much closer to an actual conlang. In fact, it might be one of the first ever conlangs that we have documentation for. In the 12th century, German Abbess St. Hildegard of Bingen created Lingua Ignota, which is Latin for “Unknown Language.” In terms of form, Hilde developed a glossary of around a thousand words, which have German and Latin influences, as well as an alphabet, which may have Greek, possibly Cyrillic, Roman, and even zodiac (yes, astrological sign) influences. And the last two syllables of some words were designed with a particular syllable stress pattern that gives the conlang a euphonic sing-song ring. In terms of purpose, “It is likely that the Benedictine Abbess was trying to leave behind the constraints of everyday language to reach transcendence, and become closer to God,” notes linguist Carolina González in a Cambridge University Press blog post. The University of Notre Dame Medieval Institute adds,
“Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota thus may be an attempt to redeem our fallen language so that in the world it shapes, the natural holiness of all things (even urine and drunkards) will be manifest.”
Philosophical Investigations 2.0
A few centuries later, in the 1600s, we see a spike of philosophical languages in the West, not unlike Plato’s attempt at a lingui-philosophical investigation. These languages sought to represent the reality of our world and our existence in a logical, precise way. The best way to think of them is as language schemes. One critic-turned-dabbler in this area was the philosopher René Descartes. We can also look to the work of English philosopher, author, and bishop John Wilkins, who tried to work out a classification system that could be used to talk about anything in the universe, in a supposedly clear and efficient way, using just 40 semantic categories…yep, you read that right: 40.
This type of ontology project is quite the lofty goal. As linguist Grant Goodall summarizes in a 2023 Annual Review of Linguistics article, “Wilkins’s work is mainly discussed today in the context of the history of linguistic ideas or the history of philosophy.” It was an interesting but problematic endeavor.
Conlangs as Lingua Francas
From the mid-19th century into the early 20th century, international auxlangs were all the rage. Goodall explains that
“the increasing ease of international travel and communication (due to railroads, telegraph, international postal service, a growing middle class with the means to travel, etc.) was running up against the fact that there was no recognized lingua franca in [Europe] at the time.”
By the way, a lingua franca is a commonly used language that facilitates communication between people who speak different languages. There’s no single language that’s used as a lingua franca universally, but the following natlangs are official lingua francas for the United Nations: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.
Some examples of auxlangs are Esperanto, Ido (which is derived from Esperanto), Interlingua, Interslavic (which is a semi-constructed auxlang), and Volapük, with Esperanto being arguably the most successful. While the popularity of auxlangs petered out for the most part, Esperanto is still spoken around the globe today. Speaker estimates range from as low as 100 thousand to as high as 2 million people. It even has some native speakers now that it’s had a strong user base for more than a century. For a conlang, that kind of continuity is pretty wild. Languages need speakers to stay alive, and as you can imagine, it’s exponentially more difficult for conlangs to gain the speaker traction needed for them to survive.
Poppin’ Conlangs
It’s not until the mid-20th century that the fictional conlangs of books, movies, and TV begin to skyrocket in popularity. J.R.R. Tolkien is often famously credited for triggering this cascade of activity thanks to his invention of the Elvish languages for The [epic] Lord of the Rings. A few decades later, we see conlangs on TV, with Pakuni in the 1970s series Land of the Lost and Klingon in Star Trek. Conlangs really start to pop off from the ’90s onwards , and those are just the tip of the iceberg. In this vast and ever-growing land of creativity, we also see conlangs in music, like the artlang Loxian, created by poet and lyricist Roma Ryan and sung by her long-time collaborator Enya. As Goodall highlights, what’s important about this trend of creating conlangs for storytelling and artistry is that people are using them not for so-called practical purposes, but for fictional world-building, aesthetics, and pure enjoyment.
While media production companies today hire linguists and professional conlangers to invent languages for their stories, anyone can invent a conlang!
And with that, it looks like we’ve caught back up to the present! Based on our time travels, we’ve seen that conlangs have been created for all sorts of purposes. People play with conlangs to perform thought experiments, explore spirituality, develop semantic taxonomies, communicate with people who speak other languages, and bring fictional worlds to life. Despite some of these more serious purposes, it’s important to reiterate the fact that humans also use language to play: just as people play with natlangs, they also create conlangs just for fun. That’s a pretty cool way to exercise your free will.
Developing Conlangs for Psycholinguistic Research
More recently, conlangs are being developed for psycholinguistic research. This is not technically new, as it can be traced to even the 1920s (see Esper, 1925), but it’s much more common in the research sphere than it used to be, mostly in terms of studying language learning. Conlangs allow researchers to better isolate and control for certain features of language acquisition. However, some understandable criticisms are that they’re too simplistic compared to natlangs and that they don’t reflect the complex environments and dynamics of real-world learning. But conlangs are not confined to studying language learning. This leads into our final leg of this journey: what do conlangs reveal about human language? Cutting edge research might give us a clue…
So What Is Language Exactly?
In November 2022, conlangers descended on MIT’s McGovern Institute to hobnob with other speakers of Esperanto, Klingon, Na’vi, High Valyrian, and Dothraki — and have their brains scanned. Okay this is beginning to sound like some kind of meta, mad-scientist, sci-fi story. Fun and games aside, a serious research study was underway.
Remember earlier when we talked about language being notoriously difficult to define? A lot of linguistic theories aiming to answer this question fall into the armchair bucket. They sound like interesting ideas if you’re sitting in an armchair, with your thinker cap on, pondering life’s mysteries, perhaps with a cat in your lap, but where’s the empirical evidence? Can we prove how we define human language, or at least nail down one of its defining factors?
As it turns out, yes. The team behind the study, Saima Malik-Moraleda and colleagues, set out to test what features define language based on whether conlangs activate the same brain networks that natlangs do. They designed an experiment using fMRI scans to see what parts of the brain show activity when participants processed a conlang versus a natlang. In the study, “processing” referred to listening to audio, writing a few sentences about specified topics, and making vocabulary decisions — in addition to other control tasks. In a 2022 article for the McGovern Institute, Jennifer Michalowski explains that the study’s fMRI images showed that the same areas of the brain that light up when processing natlangs, which “evolved naturally over millions of years,” also light up when processing conlangs.
Take a look at these images from their results. The colored topography — green, red, blue, yellow, and orange — reflects conlang processing, compared to grey which showed processing of a natural language (for example, English).
Here’s another example of this pattern between Klingon and English. The parallels are hard to ignore.
Thanks to the scientific method and modern technology, we can finally start the work of proving (or disproving) our armchair theories. In Malik-Moraleda and her team’s words, the big takeaway here is:
“an ability for a symbolic system to express diverse meanings about the world — but not the recency, manner, and purpose of its creation, or a large user base — is a defining characteristic of a language.”
In other words, language is a system of symbols that helps us talk about our surroundings, our experiences, our reality. Other factors — how long a language has been spoken, how it arranges sounds, why it’s spoken, how many speakers it has — are examples of things we look at to describe differences between languages but not to determine the legitimacy of a language.
Not only did this study help move the needle on figuring out what language is, but it also lends legitimacy to conlangs. Whether designed for practical purposes or pure pleasure, conlangs help us talk about our world — real or fantasy — in virtually infinite and creative ways.
References 📚
Esper, E. A. (1925). A technique for the experimental investigation of associative interference in artificial linguistic material. Language Monographs, 1. https://archive.org/details/techniqueforexpe00espe
Goodall, G. (2023). Constructed Languages. Annual Review Linguistics, 9, 419–437. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-030421-064707
Malik-Moraleda, S., Taliaferro, M., Shannon, S., Jhingan, N., Swords, S., Peterson, D.J., Frommer, P., Okrand, M., Peterson, J., Cardwell, R., Freeman, C., & Fedorenko, E. (2025). Constructed languages are processed by the same brain mechanisms as natural languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(12), Article e2313473122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2313473122
Michalowski, J. (2022, December 12). Brains on conlangs. MIT McGovern Institute. https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2022/12/12/brains-on-conlangs/
