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Antiquity, 2025. DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2025.37 (About DOIs).
This is your brain on Esperanto and Klingon
The character Worf, son of Mogh, expresses astonishment at the insights from a recent fMRI study.
Throughout literary and cinematic history, constructed languages, or conlangs, have captured the imagination of fans. J.R.R. Tolkien developed Quenya and Sindarin for his epic work, The Lord of the Rings. The iconic Star Trek series features Klingon, while the Avatar franchise introduces audiences to the language of Na’vi. Similarly, the fantasy world of Game of Thrones brings to life Dothraki and High Valyrian. Many dedicated enthusiasts have dedicated their time to mastering these fictional languages. Fascinatingly, a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that conlangs interact with the brain in much the same way as native languages do.
MIT neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko has previously explored how the brain engages with various stimuli that share characteristics of language—such as music, gestures, and even programming languages like Python. However, these did not activate the brain’s language-processing centers. Intrigued by what distinguishes natural languages, Fedorenko and her team decided to investigate conlangs. They hosted a weekend conference with prominent conlang creators and invited fluent speakers of languages like Esperanto, Klingon, Na’vi, Dothraki, and High Valyrian. During this event, they conducted fMRI scans on 44 conlang speakers as they listened to sentences in both their conlangs and their native languages while performing nonlinguistic tasks as a benchmark.
The findings revealed that activation in the brain’s language regions occurred consistently, whether participants were responding to their chosen conlangs or their natural languages. This suggests that the brain’s language processing is fundamentally linked to how these languages convey meaning about both our internal thoughts and the external world—encompassing objects, their properties, events, and more. In sharp contrast, a programming language like Python relies heavily on abstract symbolism, which may not correlate with our experiential understanding of reality. The researchers plan to further investigate the brain’s response to another conlang, Lojban, created during the 1990s, to deepen their understanding of which language attributes effectively stimulate the brain’s language networks.
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arstechnica.com