A University of Miami computer scientist has built an AI-powered system that can generate entirely new languages, complete with sounds, grammar and vocabulary.
Professor set out to test AI's language-building limits
Morris Alper, an assistant professor of computer science on the Coral Gables campus, developed the framework called ConlangCrafter. The tool breaks language creation into modular stages: phonology, morphology, syntax, a lexicon and translation capabilities. Alper told NBC Miami he had been interested in inventing languages since childhood and grew curious whether AI tools like ChatGPT could handle the job.
"I saw sparks of it being able to do this but not completely," Alper said.
How the pipeline turns sounds into a language
So he built his own. Alper said existing AI models couldn't handle the full task, so he and three co-authors created a pipeline that walks a large language model through roughly three steps: defining a language's sounds, setting its grammar rules and generating words. The result is a constructed language, or conlang, with a consistent rule set that could hypothetically be taught and spoken.
Tool has already produced "impossible" languages
The tool has already produced what Alper calls "impossible" languages. One communicates entirely through vowel sounds, with no consonants at all. Another was built for octopuses, using color and movement instead of sound. Both follow internal rules detailed enough to be learned or used in a TV show.
System could help preserve endangered languages
ConlangCrafter also has a practical side. The system can take a linguist's written description of an endangered language and guide an AI to follow its rules and translate, even when no large digital dataset exists. As of 2026, 3,226 languages are endangered worldwide, according to Ethnologue, a language-research organization published by SIL Global. That figure represents about 44% of the world's languages. Many lack written dictionaries or formal grammars.
Research earned a spot at a major conference
Alper, who holds a dual bachelor's degree in mathematics and linguistics from MIT and a Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University, co-authored the ConlangCrafter paper with Moran Yanuka, Raja Giryes and Gašper Beguš. The research was accepted as an oral presentation at the Association for Computational Linguistics' 64th Annual Meeting, known as ACL 2026. The code is publicly available on GitHub.
The project's sample phrase captures its ambition in miniature: "Every language is a world," rendered in one generated conlang as "pʰán dzáwali-li a-ga-galúnta-mi áta-li."
Coral Gables events
The city has a full September calendar, including festivals, book events and theater performances. For details, see our September events roundup. For University of Miami public lectures and events, visit the university's events calendar.
