Extraterrestrial tongues

Extraterrestrial tongues

Nikhil Mahant

...Even outside fiction, imaginations are rather impoverished. The development of constructed languages (referred to as ‘conlangs’) for fictional and other purposes draws primarily from linguistics. But, as a science, linguistics generally focuses on discovering the general rules governing actual, observable human languages – their sounds, symbols or gestures, their grammar, the elements and structure of their sentences, the meanings of their expressions, etc. And while conlangs may have unique vocabularies or flout one or more rules of human languages, the formula for creating one essentially involves adapting familiar elements from how Earthlings communicate.

As a philosopher of language, I find this unsatisfying. The space of possible languages is vast, and full of exotic languages that are much weirder and stranger than any we have yet imagined. We should explore what those might be – and for more than intellectual curiosity alone. If we one day encounter aliens through first contact or a signal sent across the galaxy, their language might be nothing like ours. After all, humans have evolved with certain cognitive abilities and limitations. Expecting intelligent beings with alternative origins to use languages like ours betrays an anthropocentric view of the cosmos. If we want to move beyond exchanging prime number sequences to figuring out what the extraterrestrials are actually saying, we need to be prepared...