IEEE Spectrum AI
2026-06-27 13:00 UTC
Score 59.0
AI-019-20260627-global-ai-ne-764e05ee
Full article
There are over 7,000 natural languages today, but that doesn’t stop people from occasionally making up completely new ones. These constructed languages, or conlangs , include Dothraki , Klingon , and various Elvish languages . Now, an AI model called ConlangCrafter is also capable of generating new languages—and it is particularly good at it. In a paper published 27 June in the Proceedings of the Association of Computational Linguists, researchers analyzed ConlangCrafter’s language-generation abilities, reporting that it can develop a diverse array of novel languages that consistently abide by their rules. How ConlangCrafter Creates New Languages In previous work, Gašper Beguš , an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, showed how large language models (LLMs) can analyze languages to the same extent as most humans. In his most recent endeavor, he set out to push the language boundaries of AI models even further. “Creating an entire language is not an easy task at all,” Beguš says, noting that some people have dedicated their careers to creating conlangs for movies, books, and video games. But Beguš sees additional value in making AI models capable of creating truly novel languages beyond what humans could imagine. “[Models] are able to imagine or come up with things that we might not, and we can learn so much from that,” he says. For example, ConlangCrafter can create new languages with unconventional communication systems, such as a la…