In the 2016 movie Arrival, water-dwelling extraterrestrials make an appearance on Earth. The main human character’s job is to learn how to communicate with the seven-tentacled extraterrestrials before tensions escalate into war. This character, played by Amy Adams, is a linguist, and she uses her earthly expertise to decode the language of and communicate back to the “heptapods.” Ultimately, she learns that their language is richer than it seemed and includes an embedded experience of time that is different from that of humans.
Obviously, Arrival is a fictional movie, and Adams hasn’t studied actual alien syntax (that we know of), though she did work with a linguist to prepare for the role. But there are researchers who are trying to prepare for the kind of scenario Adams’s character finds herself in: investigating, ahead of any cosmic contact, how hypothetical space aliens and humans might someday understand one another. They’re part of a field called xenolinguistics.
The field isn’t large, with just 20 or 30 scholars participating in research, but it was the subject of a November 2024 workshop entitled Exploring Xenolinguistics: Next Steps in Exploring the Nature of Language and the Potential of Extraterrestrial Communication.
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Workshop participants homed in on a key question relevant to life on Earth and communication with life beyond: What is the point of language—here and out there? Investigating why aliens might communicate can also help scientists consider why humans, and the other animals on Earth, keep speaking to one another. But that’s a difficult line of inquiry—scientists don’t even know if aliens exist, let alone how they might talk to one another—or to us.
Douglas Vakoch, president of METI International, an organization dedicated to messaging extraterrestrial intelligence (METI), has been pushing that line forward, though. He’s one of xenolinguistics’ biggest proponents and co-editor of the 2023 bookXenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language.
Vakoch didn’t initially think that linguistics had much place in the astro-xeno world at all. “I assumed, like other SETI [search for extraterrestrial intelligence] people, that language was really kind of irrelevant to communicating with aliens,” he says. Our languages, he thought, were specific and contingent on our biology and history. The communications of beings born and raised in a different cosmic environment might not resemble language in the traditional sense at all.
But as Vakoch, whose background is in clinical psychology, got deeper into METI, his mental orbit shifted: thinking about alien language was actually a catalyst for challenging our assumptions—about what ETs may or may not have in common with us, yes, but also about what we have in common with one another, as well as the important ways we diverge. “I have no clue if there are aliens out there,” Vakoch says. “I am confident—I have already experienced—that when we ask these questions, they transform how we view ourselves, and they help us clarify what’s valuable.”
That happens in part because a key xenolinguistic goal, according to philosopher of science Matthew Brown of Southern Illinois University, is Earth-centric: to improve terrestrial fields such as linguistics, human psychology or animal behavior “by asking hypothetical questions about alien language that push the boundaries.”
In a way, this is science doing what science fiction has always done: using imaginary worlds, with different creatures and circumstances and civilizations, to shed light on our own.
After being invited to speak at the 2024 workshop as “an outside voice,” Brown spent six months researching xenolinguistics and figuring out how it fit in—and didn’t fit in—with more traditional lines of scientific research. Right away a key difference emerged. “There’s no data,” he says—at least no direct data.
To wit, no aliens, no languages.
That situation is not without precedent, though. Astrobiology—xenolinguistics’ sister field—is the study of life in the universe. Scientists know of no biology in the astro. But both data-poor fields involve applying insights from more concrete disciplines and using the astro and xeno what-ifs to propel them in new directions: chemistry, geology and regular biology in the case of astrobiology and linguistics, anthropology, psychology and animal behavior in the case of xenolinguistics.
Take animal behavior researcher Irene Pepperberg, a workshop participant who has spent decades studying parrots, those famous speaking birds. Pepperberg dabbles in xenolinguistics, using her research to poke holes in its assumptions. One big takeaway from Pepperberg’s winged subjects (and Earth’s other animals) is that nonhuman communication is more sophisticated and varied than people assume—and that it encompasses modes of interaction and expression humans don’t even have access to. Dogs smell their world; dolphins and bats hear sounds at much higher frequencies than humans can; birds see ultraviolet light. Given that these animals evolved on the same planet as us, how could we possibly know how extraterrestrials might obtain and transmit information?
We can’t, but research such as Pepperberg’s can give scientists a sense of their ignorance and perhaps humility and openness to new ideas about the forms that communication could take. “We sort of sit there, [and] we go, ‘Oh, it’s going to be some kind of flashes of light or something like that that they’re going to send to us in a pattern that we’re going to be able to recognize,’” Pepperberg says of potential transmissions from aliens. “But who knows what they’re going to send us?”
And who knows why they’re going to send it? This question was central for Elin McCready, a research professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona. McCready had never worked in xenolinguistics before she pitched a presentation for the conference. But inspired by her long-standing interest in science fiction, she wanted to shake up xenolinguists’ conceptions of the universe. “I find it all really conservative in a specific way,” she says. She thinks the field hovers around an assumption that might not be true.
“The assumption,” she says, “is very much that everybody in the universe would use linguistic or languagelike systems to do the same things that we do. But why?” After all, the universe is famously big and typically stranger than we initially imagine.
Linguists often assume that the primary goal of language is to transmit truth, to convey factual information from one being to another. But that’s not even always true of humans or animals on Earth. Telling jokes, writing fiction, making art, performing religious rituals (“or bullshitting,” McCready says, “which is now a technical term in philosophy”) don’t have truth-telling as their ultimate aim and, in fact, sometimes have the opposite goal.
Humans, you may be aware, lie to avoid hurting your feelings when they don’t think your dress looks nice or to get out of jail free or to manipulate you into doing that PowerPoint for them.
In McCready’s view, xenolinguists have nonetheless upheld truth transmission in part because regular linguists have also tended to do so. And so, McCready says, “this is what we know how to do.”
Another reason could be that if we didn’t assume aliens were trying to give us information, it would be difficult for us to intuit what they were trying to do. A universe of possibilities would open up.
It may turn out to be hard enough to determine whether a message from light-years away is intentional, structured and linguistic at all, let alone what its purpose might be—especially because alien communication might come embedded in, say, radio waves shot across the universe rather than a little green creature bleep-blorping in front of you.
Given all that, McCready thinks xenolinguistics essentially has two subfields. The first is about pattern recognition: identifying and perhaps decoding a xenolanguage.
The other is more like xenoanthropology, with a goal of crossing cosmic cultural divides. “When we’re faced with a being that is doing something potentially quite different than we are, how do we try to interact and find common ground?” she says. “It’s a difficult question, but fortunately, it’s a question that we’re faced with every single day of our lives.” In other words, every day we have to talk to beings on Earth that have their own brain and personality and have developed in their own unique environment.
Our assumptions creep in there, too, often to our detriment. “When we interact with other species and with our own species, why do we assume that they’re like us and they’re trying to do the same thing as us?”
In that way, McCready says, xenolinguistics is a much larger project than simply studying hypothetical alien languages: it’s about coming to terms with life’s diversity, and its intentions, on Earth.
