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Description: What constitutes a language? Natural languages share some features with other domains: from math, to logic, to music, to gesture. However, the brain mechanisms that process linguistic input have been shown to be highly specialized, showing little or no response to diverse non-linguistic tasks. Here, we examine a class of stimuli that have not been previously investigated with neuroscientific methods—constructed languages, or conlangs, like Esperanto and Klingon—to ask whether they draw on the same neural mechanisms as natural languages, or whether they instead pattern with domains like math and logic. Using individual-subject fMRI analyses, we show that understanding conlangs recruits the same brain areas as natural language comprehension. This result holds for Esperanto (n=19 speakers)—a conlang that was created to resemble natural languages—and fictional conlangs (Klingon (n=10), Na’vi (n=9), High Valyrian (n=3), and Dothraki (n=3)), which were created to differ from natural languages, and suggests that a) conlangs and natural languages share critical features, including an ability to express a wide range of meanings related to the external and internal worlds, and b) the notable differences between (even fictional) conlangs and natural language are not consequential for the cognitive and neural mechanisms that they engage.