Anyway, although he's very good at it, it seems to me to be a complete waste of time. There are small groups on the Internet that also do this, but I can't see any way for him to make a living. Currently he is suffering in college going after a science degree, but his heart isn't in it.
Are there any jobs out there that could use skills like this that I can't think of?
One of my first jobs out-of-college involved making a small language for loan origination. And a few years ago, I got an offer to design a language for a quantum computing company!
Even if your son doesn't get a job designing languages, programming really scratches the reading/writing/lexical itch. I suspect that he would be a very happy developer :)
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I guess the only lucrative thing I can think of would be marketing, but getting high enough on the marketing ladder to be in charge of naming stuff and making choices about how to describe products is a career nightmare imo.
I agree with the potential for programming research stuff, but if he's like me he probably won't really feel like learning enough programming to make it useful until he's like 30. I think a big thing for me was thinking about all the different interests I have, and the fact that my biggest interests aren't going to be my career... and then learning that my career is only part of my identity, and it's actually ok to identify more strongly with your hobbies (I'm a guitarist/writer/conlanger) than your career. Growing up academically gifted and then putting so much into college really pushes people into making their career their whole personality, and I think that's something that stresses a lot of people in education and entry-level situations.
The only conlanger I know of who makes a decent living creating languages is David J Peterson. He created the GoT languages, the grounder language in The 100, the various languages of Defiance, and the Dark Elf language in Thor the dark world among others. As this is the most financially successful conlanger whom I know, I am not too certain how much call there really is for language construction. Still, joing the Language Creation Society will at least put him in the running the next time there's a contest to create a language for HBO.
EDIT: I keep building languages as a hobby, and learning human languages when time allows, but ultimately as I grew older it became necessary to pour my efforts into my other love: technology. Life is expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_language#Commercial_...:
“While some languages are created purely from the desire of the creator, language creation can be a profession. In 1974, Victoria Fromkin was the first person hired to create a language (Land of the Lost's Paku). Since then, notable professional language creators have included Marc Okrand (Klingon), David Peterson (Dothraki and others in Game of Thrones), and Paul Frommer (Na'vi).”
However, it's a small tool in a larger tool set.
Let him have some fun. Instead maybe try to find famous people that made their own languages. You know, support your child.