The Mental Workload of People Who Invent New Languages

Creating a language from scratch sounds like the ultimate creative challenge. It is. But what most people don’t realize is the sheer cognitive load involved. Language inventors, called conlangers, aren’t just making up words. They’re building entire systematic frameworks with thousands of interrelated rules, all while keeping track of phonological constraints, grammatical patterns, semantic relationships, and cultural context. It’s like constructing a massive, intricate machine where every component must work with every other component, and nothing can contradict anything else.

The mental demands are staggering. Professional conlangers like David Peterson, who created Dothraki and Valyrian for Game of Thrones, or Paul Frommer, who invented Na’vi for Avatar, maintain massive mental databases of linguistic information. One inconsistency can break the entire system. Understanding what their brains handle reveals something profound about human cognitive capacity and the architecture of language itself.

The Foundation: Building a Sound System

Every language starts with phonology, the system of sounds. Natural languages typically use 20-40 distinct phonemes. Conlangers must decide which sounds to include, which combinations are allowed, and how syllables can be structured. These aren’t arbitrary choices. Each decision creates ripples throughout the entire language.

Phonotactic Rules and Mental Tracking

If you decide that your language allows consonant clusters at the beginning of words, you need to specify which clusters work. Can you have “str” like English “street”? What about “spr”? The cognitive load comes from tracking hundreds of these rules simultaneously while ensuring they create aesthetically pleasing, speakable combinations.

Conlangers hold vast phonological inventories in working memory while testing new words. They mentally simulate pronunciation, checking whether combinations feel natural and remain distinguishable from similar words. This constant auditory processing and rule-checking requires sustained attention and exceptional working memory capacity.

Grammar: The Cognitive Complexity Multiplies

Grammar is where the mental workload becomes truly intense. You’re not just inventing rules; you’re creating an entire logical system that must remain internally consistent across thousands of potential applications. How do you mark tense? Case? Aspect? Mood? Each grammatical choice interacts with every other choice.

Managing Systematic Relationships

Consider verb conjugation. If you decide verbs change based on tense, person, and aspect, you’ve just created a system with potentially dozens of forms per verb. Every verb you add must follow this pattern consistently. Your brain needs to track not just the pattern but every exception, every irregular form, and how these interact with other grammatical structures.

Natural language speakers learn these patterns gradually over years. Conlangers must design, implement, and remember them consciously and deliberately. They’re essentially doing what a child’s brain does unconsciously over a decade, but compressed into focused creative sessions. Some language creators maintain such demanding cognitive work that they explore cognitive support strategies, from structured documentation systems to optimal mental performance practices, with some even considering nootropics to sustain the intense focus required for maintaining systematic consistency.

The Agreement Problem

Many languages feature grammatical agreement, where different parts of sentences must match. Adjectives might agree with nouns in gender, number, and case. That’s three dimensions of agreement to track for every adjective-noun pair. Now multiply that across an entire vocabulary. The mental bookkeeping becomes exponential.

Vocabulary Development and Semantic Networks

Creating words isn’t just combining sounds randomly. Each word exists in a web of semantic relationships with other words. The word for “hot” relates to “cold,” “warm,” “temperature,” “fire,” and dozens of other concepts. Conlangers must consciously design these networks that native speakers acquire unconsciously.

Derivational Morphology

Efficient languages use derivational patterns. In English, “teach” becomes “teacher” with a suffix, “unteachable” with prefixes and suffixes. Conlangers create similar systems, designing how roots transform into related words. This requires visualizing entire word families before any individual word exists.

The cognitive challenge is maintaining consistency. If you have a suffix that creates agent nouns (doer of an action), it must work predictably across all verbs. Your brain tracks the base form, the derived form, any sound changes that occur during derivation, and exceptions to the rule. For a vocabulary of thousands of words, this becomes a massive mental database.

The Documentation Challenge

Unlike natural language speakers who can consult native intuition, conlangers must externalize everything. They write extensive documentation, create dictionaries, and maintain grammar references. But here’s the catch: they need to remember these rules well enough to apply them consistently while simultaneously creating new material.

Living in Two Languages

Professional conlangers often work on multiple languages simultaneously. David Peterson has created over a dozen languages. Each requires maintaining a separate mental model with distinct phonology, grammar, and vocabulary. The cognitive switching costs are enormous. Moving between languages means reloading different rule systems, different sound aesthetics, and different grammatical logics.

This is fundamentally different from speaking multiple natural languages. Natural languages were learned through immersion and practice. Constructed languages exist primarily as explicit rules in the creator’s mind, requiring conscious retrieval and application rather than intuitive production.

Maintaining Internal Consistency

The hardest part of language creation is ensuring nothing contradicts anything else. Every new rule must be compatible with existing rules. Every new word must fit established phonological and morphological patterns. As the language grows, the consistency check becomes increasingly complex.

The Ripple Effect

Change one rule and you might need to revise dozens of related elements. Decide that your language lacks a particular sound? Now you need to revise every word containing that sound. Alter a grammatical pattern? Check every example sentence you’ve created. This requires maintaining a mental map of the entire language system and all its interdependencies.

Some conlangers describe this as mental juggling. You’re keeping multiple systems active in working memory while simultaneously being creative and analytical. It’s both artistic and mathematical, requiring right-brain creativity and left-brain logical precision operating together at high intensity.

The Creative Versus Systematic Balance

Language creation demands both wild creativity and rigid systematization. You need to invent novel concepts, interesting grammatical features, and aesthetically pleasing sound patterns. But every creative choice must fit within the systematic framework you’re building.

Cognitive Flexibility Under Constraint

This creates unique cognitive demands. You’re simultaneously divergent thinking (generating possibilities) and convergent thinking (testing them against constraints). Most creative tasks emphasize one or the other. Language creation requires both, constantly switching between modes while holding the entire system in mind.

The mental fatigue is real. Conlangers report that after intensive creation sessions, they feel mentally exhausted in ways distinct from other intellectual work. It’s not just concentration but the specific load of maintaining massive, interconnected systems while being creative within strict constraints.

Learning From Conlangers

Studying language inventors reveals insights about human cognitive architecture. The fact that individuals can build functional language systems demonstrates remarkable mental capacity for systematic thinking. It also shows the importance of external documentation; even the most gifted conlangers can’t hold everything in working memory.

Strategies for Managing Complexity

Successful conlangers develop strategies for managing cognitive load. They build languages incrementally, establishing core systems before adding complexity. They create extensive notes and reference materials to offload memory demands. They test their languages by translating texts, which reveals inconsistencies and gaps.

Many also work within communities, getting feedback from other conlangers who can spot issues the creator missed. This external perspective acts as cognitive support, catching errors that tunnel vision might overlook.

The Psychological Rewards

Despite the mental demands, people create languages for deep satisfaction. Building a functioning communication system from nothing provides a sense of accomplishment few other creative endeavors match. You’re not just making art; you’re creating a tool that could theoretically allow human communication.

The Flow State Challenge

Interestingly, many conlangers report difficulty achieving flow states. The constant rule-checking and consistency maintenance interrupts the smooth immersion characteristic of flow. Language creation is more like solving an infinitely complex puzzle where you’re also designing the pieces as you go.

Yet the work remains deeply engaging. The intellectual challenge, the creative freedom within constraints, and the satisfaction of systematic completion drive conlangers to invest hundreds or thousands of hours into their languages.

What This Reveals About Language

The cognitive workload of conlanging highlights how extraordinary natural languages are. They evolved over millennia through the collective cognitive work of millions of speakers. No individual designed them, yet they possess elegant, functional systems as complex as anything conlangers create.

This also reveals how much linguistic knowledge native speakers possess unconsciously. When conlangers make explicit what natural language speakers know implicitly, the sheer volume of systematic information is staggering. Your brain contains an intricate linguistic database you access effortlessly, without conscious awareness of the complexity involved.

Language inventors make visible the invisible architecture of human communication. By shouldering the cognitive load of conscious language creation, they demonstrate both the remarkable capacity of individual human minds and the even more remarkable achievement of natural languages shaped by countless minds across generations. Whether creating languages for fiction, experimentation, or artistic expression, conlangers engage in one of the most cognitively demanding creative pursuits humans attempt, building systematic complexity from pure imagination while keeping thousands of interrelated rules simultaneously active in their working minds.