Yeah, but ... it's fake

[Shelob]

I always reckoned that "real" languages were those which were not created by any one person. Languages spoken daily by people everywhere mostly evolved on their own, over time, have roots somewhere in the unknowable past, and are either dying out or continuing to evolve. Quenya, Esperanto, and others didn't evolve naturally this way, some person, somewhere, sat down and said "I feel like creating a language today".

The other thing I've always assumed made a language "real" was if people, somewhere, learn it as their mother tongue. I grew up in a house that speaks English, so before I'm really aware of the world around me and able to reason things out I am able to speak English. Others are born to Spanish, or French or what-have-you this way. But to my knoweldge no one's mother tongue is Quenya, people have to learn Quenya and don't grow up speaking it. As with any language you learn later in life it, therefore, is not as natural for you -- true after years and years of speaking Spanish it would become naturaler for me but it would never be as natural as English. It's because the section of our brains which learns languages is most malleable when we're really young, by the time we're really old enough to sit down and study a language that part of our brain has become fairly set in its ways and we have to force it to learn something new. A language which no one knows naturally (grew up speaking) can never be quite as "real" as a language people have learned naturally. Spanish isn't as real to me as English, it's real to natural Spanish speakers though...but there are no natural Quenya speakers (yet) and so it's not really "real" to anyone.