Elvish, Klingon and Pig Latin: what can invented languages teach us about the human brain?
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A manuscript in Elvish written on silk parchment. The Elvish language was created by Tolkien for The Lord of the Rings.<br>Luca Lorenzelli/Shutterstock
https://theconversation.com/elvish-klingon-and-pig-latin-what-can-invented-languages-teach-us-about-the-human-brain-288629
https://theconversation.com/elvish-klingon-and-pig-latin-what-can-invented-languages-teach-us-about-the-human-brain-288629
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Invented languages tend to be the stuff of fantasy or science fiction worlds. But as a child, you may have made one up yourself.
Take Pig Latin, which involves moving the starting consonant of a word to the end and adding an “-ay” sound. “Pig Latin” thus becomes “ig-pay atin-lay”, while words beginning with a vowel have a “-way” at the end. With a little practice, you can hold entire conversations in Pig Latin.
However, creating new forms of communication goes far beyond children’s games or brain exercises. Throughout history, people have invented or adapted languages – whether out of necessity, creativity, or scientific interest.
The process of creating a language can also offer a window onto how our brains work. From the code-speak of children’s games to “miniature” languages designed in laboratories, all new forms of communication reveal something about our ability to learn and adopt new rules.
Pidgins: languages born of necessity
Many novel languages are not born in offices or laboratories, but at points where multiple cultures meet. When two communities with different languages need to communicate in order to trade or simply coexist, a simplified version of language emerges known as a pidgin.
The word pidgin is thought to have emerged from the Chinese pronunciation of the English word business. These “contact languages”, as they are known, draw much of their vocabulary from the language that dominates social and economic dealings, but reduce and reorganise its grammar to make communication easy. This means they often share certain rules.
Read more:<br>Why West Africa’s pidgins deserve full recognition as official languages
Planned languages
Not all artificial languages are improvised. Some are designed from the ground up, with all the structural planning of an engineering or architectural project. And structure matters, because a new language needs more than just new words – it also needs rules to combine them, and a community of speakers.
One such example is the Elvish languages created by Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit author JRR Tolkien. Before writing his novels and making his characters speak, Tolkien – a trained linguist – developed the grammar, history and sounds of their languages. And he wanted these to be just as consistent as any natural language.
Something similar happened with Esperanto, a language created in 1887 by LL Zamenhof. He aimed to create an international second language that would be easy to learn, with clear rules and no exceptions. Today, there is a global community of Esperanto speakers.
Klingon is quite the opposite. Created by linguist Mark Okrand in the 1980s for the TV series Star Trek, it was deliberately designed to sound like an alien language. To do this, Okrand used unusual sounds and a confusing object–verb–subject sentence structure.
Klingon is particularly interesting because, unlike Esperanto, it was created for a specific fictional story, based on the requirements of the script. It goes to show that made-up languages can have very different purposes, ranging from enabling international communication to building a rich, believable imaginary world.
Read more:<br>How to build a ‘perfect’ language
The neuroscience of constructed languages
For many years, it was not clear how the brain responds to invented languages. To address this, a 2025 study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took functional magnetic resonance images of brain activity in people who spoke them.
The results were clear. When fluent speakers used invented languages (such as Esperanto, Klingon, the Na’vi language from Avatar, and High Valyrian or Dothraki from Game of Thrones), the brain activated the same neural networks as for a natural language. In other words, there was no difference in how the brain processed natural and invented languages.
But for the brain to perceive these languages as a real language, they have to express meaning about the world, other people, and our own mental states. For this reason, programming languages do not – despite their clear rules and structure – activate the same brain areas.
Read more:<br>Why children learn English more easily with the help of their home language – Namibian study
Lab-grown ‘miniature’ languages
Our ability to learn new languages is not just a product of curiosity, it is also a...