This is called xenolinguistics: looking at the science of extraterrestrial linguistics.
Biologists, anthropologists, linguists, and other experts who specialize in language and communication have begun to explore what non-human, extraterrestrial language might look like.
Possibly such thinking has led to fabricated thoughts. Klingon languagecosmic “Klingon” chatter spoken by one of the alien speciesStar wars.” There is even a successful Klingon Language Institute, founded in 1992.
But you can put science fiction aside, because real-world scientists are investigating the possible forms that alien languages can take and whether we can understand them.
Relating to: Search for alien life
extraterrestrial intelligence
astrobiologist Douglas Vakoch He is the head of Extraterrestrial Messaging Intelligence (METI International) in San Francisco. Co-editor of a new volume with Jeffrey Punske, “Alien Linguistics: Towards Extraterrestrial Linguistics” (Routledge Taylor and Francis Group (2023).
The book builds on what is known about human language and animal communication systems, but offers suggestions for what we might find when we encounter extraterrestrial intelligence.
For more than sixty years, researchers have been interested in this issue. search for extraterrestrial intelligence Vakoch told Space.com that people listening for signals with radio telescopes (SETI) could be successful tomorrow. (METI, as the name suggests, is about the possibility of communicating, that is, making meaningful contact, with alien intelligence.)
“We may be faced with the problem of understanding a message from an unknown civilization, and linguists may provide the key to cracking this code,” Vakoch said. “The suggestions from our new book directly shape the way we say ‘Hello.’ Universe.”
Vakoch emphasized the importance of communicating our intentions as the hallmark and justification of METI messages. “Another important question is whether there is a universal grammar of the kind we see in languages. Soil “It will also apply to the universe more broadly.”
As stated in the volume, one of the important points is that communication involves more than conveying the content of your message. “You also want to convey your intent,” Vakoch said.
Relating to: If aliens visited the solar system, here’s how to find the clues they left behind
start a conversation
One of the common Objections to METIAs Vakoch points out, we can warn hostile extraterrestrials of our presence and provoke them. alien invasion.
“In reality, any civilization capable of traveling between two worlds stars It also has the technology to detect accidental radio and television signals leaked into space over the past century,” Vakoch said.
So he wouldn’t be surprised if any aliens who received our targeted messages knew we existed, Vakoch added. “But what will surprise them is that we’re trying to start a conversation. That’s what METI is all about; getting our intentions across.” first contact“
universal principles
Vakoch said the aliens he is most interested in are the aliens we can make contact with.
“These are aliens who have developed technology to transmit and receive radio signals. In the past, scientists sent interstellar messagesThis shared technology formed the basis for crafting messages.”
The messages we’ve sent into space so far have likely relied on universal principles of mathematics and science as a starting point, Vakoch said. “But perhaps there is something more fundamental. We had language long before humans had math and science. Perhaps the same is true of planets orbiting other stars.”
Ultimately, Vakoch thinks, the idea that we have to choose between math and science on the one hand, or language on the other, is too simplistic.
essence of language
The co-editor of the new foreign linguistics book is Jeffrey Punske, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in linguistics at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.
What we define as the essence of language can be fundamentally constrained by external factors. If so, then a linguistic, nonhuman intelligence would almost certainly have the same linguistic essence, Punske says.
“But there are many aspects of language that are universal to human language and cannot be attributed solely to such external factors,” he said. “These aspects are likely products of the structure of human cognition. There is absolutely no guarantee that a non-human intelligence would share our cognitive systems. Therefore, even if the underlying structure of the language is the same, the message may not be interpreted.”
A new perspective
Bridget Samuels of the University of Southern California (USC), who is excited that scholars are starting to think seriously about foreign linguistics.
Samuels conducts research in two areas that consider where universal grammar might fit in the universe: How did language arise in our species, and what are the limits to human language diversity?
“Studies of animal communication have exploded in recent years, and this has given us a new perspective on how unique human language is and is not unique,” Samuels, project director at the USC Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology, told Space.com. . “And also how communication systems are shaped by the unique cognitive abilities of the organisms that use them and the environmental environments in which they live.”
RELATED STORIES:
— Can AI find alien life faster than humans and tell us?
— If aliens visited the solar system, here’s how to find the clues they left behind
— Finding intelligent alien life may require humans to start thinking like an extraterrestrial
Immutable laws of physics
These lines of research, combined with a “third factor” in language design—factors that shape language beyond our genetic endowment and experience—are paving the way for theorizing about universal grammar in entirely new ways, Samuels said.
This theorizing helped Samuels shape and share a prediction with Punske: “Some aspects of language syntax and externalization may even be shared by extraterrestrial languages because they are constrained by immutable laws of physics.”
Vakoch said that by considering language and animal communication in a cosmic context, whether we come into contact with extraterrestrials or not, we are forced to rethink how unique language is, even on our own planet.
“Zenolinguistics shows that human language may not always have the privileged position we assume,” he said.