by It’s called xenolinguistics: Looking at the science of foreign language.
Biologists, anthropologists, linguists and other experts specializing in language and communication have begun to explore what a non-human, extraterrestrial language might look like.
It could be argued, such an idea sparks an idea of the fabricated Klingon languagethe cosmic “Klingonese” conversation spoken by one of the alien species on “Trek star.” There’s even a thriving Klingon Language Institute, founded in 1992.
But you can put sci-fi aside, because scientists around the world are investigating the possible forms alien languages could take – and whether we could understand them.
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Extraterrestrial information
Astrobiologist Douglas Vakoch is president of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI International) in San Francisco. He is co-editor of a new volume with Jeffrey Punske, “Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Foreign Language” (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group (2023).
The book is anchored in what is known about human language and animal communication systems, but offers suggestions about what we might find if we come across non-Earth information.
For more than six decades, researchers have been engaged in the search for extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), listening for signals with radio telescopes – and they may succeed tomorrow, Vakoch told Space.com. (METI, as its name suggests, is about the possibility of communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence – making meaningful contact.)
“We may need to understand a message from an unknown civilization, and linguists may provide the key to crack the code,” Vakoch said. “The recommendations coming out of our new book are shaping exactly how we say ‘Hello, globe.'”
Vakoch emphasized the importance of communicating our intentions as a hallmark and rationale for METI’s messages. “Another central question is whether there is a universal grammar of the kind we see across languages World it will also be true across the globe,” he says.
As mentioned in the volume, one big point is that communication is about more than getting the content of your message across. “You also want to express your intention,” said Vakoch.
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Start a conversation
One of the common protests against METIsaid Vakoch, that we could warn hostile aliens about our lives and encourage them foreign invasion.
“Actually, any civilization that has the ability to travel between the stars it also has the technology to pick up the accidental radio and television signals that have been leaking into space for the past century,” Vakoch said.
So any aliens picking up our targeted messages won’t be surprised that we know we’re there, Vakoch said. “But what will surprise them is that we’re trying to start a conversation. That’s the whole point of METI – to make our intentions known first contact.”
Universal principles
Vakoch said that the aliens he is most interested in are the ones we can contact.
“Those are the aliens who developed the technology to transmit and receive radio signals. In the past, when scientists were sent interstellar messagesthis shared technology has provided the basis for framing the messages.”
The messages we’ve sent into space so far have relied on perhaps universal principles of mathematics and science as a starting point, Vakoch said. “But maybe there’s something more fundamental. Long before humans had math and science, we had language. Maybe the same is true of planets orbiting other stars.”
In the end, according to Vakoch, the idea that we have to choose between mathematics and science, on the one hand, or language, on the other, is too simple in itself.
Core of language
Jeffrey Punske, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in linguistics at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, is co-editor of the new xenolinguistics book.
What we define as the core of language may be fundamentally constrained by external considerations. If so, it is almost certain that non-human linguistic intelligence would have the same linguistic core, according to Punske.
“However, there are many aspects of language that are universal to human language that cannot be attributed to outsiders alone,” he said. “Those features are probably products of the structure of human cognition. There is certainly no guarantee that non-human intelligence would share our cognitive systems. So, while the basic structure of the language may be the same, the message may not be to interpret.”
A new perspective
Bridget Samuels from the University of Southern California (USC) is excited that scientists are starting to take paleontology seriously.
Samuels is researching two areas that address where universal grammar might fit in the universe: How did language evolve in our species, and what are the limits to the diversity of human language?
“The study of animal communication has grown in recent years, giving us a new perspective on how human language is, and is not, unique,” said Samuels, project director at the USC Center for Molecular Biology. Craniofacial, by Space.com . “Also, how communication systems are shaped by the unique cognitive abilities of the organisms that use them, as well as the environmental niches they inhabit.”
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The changing laws of physics
Those lines of inquiry, along with a “third factor” in language design—language-shaping factors outside of our genetic endowment and experience—have begun to theorize in whole new ways about universal grammar, Samuels said.
That theorizing helped Samuels formulate a prediction and share it with Punske: “Some aspects of syntax and language externalization may be shared even by alien languages, as they are constrained by the changing laws of physics.”
By thinking about language and animal communication in a cosmic context, Vakoch said, we are forced to rethink how unique language is, even on our own planet — whether we come into contact with aliens or not.
“Xenolinguistics shows that human language may not always have the privileged position we have assumed,” he said.
