It turns out your brain does not care if a language is thousands of years old or freshly invented for a TV show. If it carries meaning about the world and the speaker’s thoughts, the brain’s language network treats it like the real deal. That is what researchers at MIT discovered after studying how brains are capable of language recognition, even with constructed languages, or “conlangs.”
Conlangs are languages that have been intentionally designed rather than naturally evolved. Some, like Esperanto, were created to promote international communication. Others, like Klingon from Star Trek or High Valyrian from Game of Thrones, were made for fictional worlds. These languages often attract dedicated learners who can speak them fluently.
For the study, nearly 50 conlang speakers gathered at MIT for a weekend event. The group represented languages including Esperanto, Klingon, Na’vi from Avatar, and Dothraki and High Valyrian from Game of Thrones. Participants entered an fMRI scanner and listened to sentences in their chosen conlang, as well as sentences in their native language. They also completed unrelated mental tasks for comparison.
The scans showed something striking. When participants listened to a conlang they knew well, the same regions lit up as when they heard their native language. These brain areas did not respond the same way to computer programming languages or to other symbolic systems that lack direct connections to human experience.
The key factor appears to be meaning. Natural languages and conlangs both describe the world, events, objects, and personal thoughts. Programming languages, while capable of expressing complex relationships, exist in an abstract space that does not interact with daily life.
The findings suggest that age, cultural history, and community size are not essential for language recognition in the brain’s network. Even new languages with small followings can do it, as long as they communicate about real or imagined worlds in a human-like way.
The researchers are now turning their attention to Lojban, a language designed in the 1990s to eliminate ambiguity. Its unique structure could reveal even more about how our brains define “language.”
Tags: brain, communication, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), language, linguistics, neuroscienceCategorised in: Uncategorized
This post was written by Christine Rizk