If it's an existing language, companies may be employing people to work on it. E.g. if you want to work on Swift, go talk to Apple. Lots of people contribute to

If it's an existing language, companies may be employing people to work on it. E.g. if you want to work on Swift, go talk to Apple. Lots of people contribute to LLVM and GCC while being paid to do so. Search "company name" + "compiler". If it's a language which doesn't exist yet that you want someone else to pay for, it's on you to make the case. In academia there's some funding game to play. In industry you probably have to build the thing first, at least to prototype level, then persuade people it's a good idea. You'll probably also find cases where people do their day job for the first 40 hours of the week and their passion project for the next 40 hours, but ymmv maintaining that workload. Remote / office tradeoffs as usual.