Will humanity ever be able to communicate with aliens?

Will humanity be able to communicate with representatives of potentially existing civilizations on other planets? Xenolinguistics, the hypothetical science that studies the languages of intelligent aliens, deals with this very question.

Biologists, anthropologists, linguists, and other experts in language and communication have begun to study what nonhuman and nonterrestrial language might look like. There's even a Klingon Language Institute, founded in 1992, that studies possible forms of alien languages and whether we can understand them.

Off-Earth intelligence

President of Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI International) in San Francisco Astrobiologist Douglas Vakoch has co-edited a new book with Jeffrey Punske called Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language. The book is based on popular theories about human language and animal communication systems, but the book makes suggestions about what we might discover if we encounter extraterrestrial intelligence.

For more than six decades, researchers have been involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by listening for signals with radio telescopes, and they may succeed in the future, Vakoch told Space.com.

"We might be faced with understanding a message from an unknown civilization, and linguists could provide the key to cracking the code," said Vakoch. "The recommendations coming out of our new book are directly shaping how we will say 'Hello, universe.'"

Vakoch emphasized the importance of communicating the intentions of humanity. "Another important question is whether universal grammar, as we see it in languages on Earth, will be valid in the wider universe," he noted.

As the book points out, one of the main issues is that communication involves more than just the content of what is said. "You also want to communicate your intention," explained Vakoch.

Start a conversation

According to Douglas Vakoch, one of the common objections to METI is that humanity could alert hostile aliens to our existence and provoke an alien invasion.

"In reality, any civilization with the capacity to travel between the stars also has the technology to pick up the accidental radio and television signals that have been leaking off into space for the past century," Vakoch said.

So any aliens receiving our target messages, according to Vakoch, would not be surprised to learn of our existence. "But what will surprise them is that we're attempting to start a conversation. That's the whole point of METI — to get across our intention of making first contact."

Universal principles

Douglas Vakoch stated that he is most interested in extraterrestrials with whom humanity can make contact. "Those are the aliens who have developed the technology to transmit and receive radio signals. In the past, when scientists have sent interstellar messages, this shared technology has provided the foundation for crafting the messages."

The messages we've sent into space so far have relied on seemingly universal principles of math and science as a starting point, Vakoch noted. "But maybe there's something more basic. Long before humans had math and science, we had language. Maybe the same is true on planets orbiting other stars."

Core of language

Associate Professor Jeffrey Panske, director of undergraduate linguistics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, co-author of a new book on xenolinguistics, said that what we define as the core of language may be fundamentally constrained by external considerations, and if so, he it is almost certain that linguistic, non-human intelligence will have the same core as language.

"However, there are many aspects of language that are universal to human language that cannot solely be attributed to such externals," he said. "Those aspects are likely products of the structure of human cognition. There is certainly no guarantee that a non-human intelligence would share our cognitive systems. Thus, while the underlying structure of language might be the same, the message might not be interpretable."

New perspective

Bridget Samuels, director of the Center for Craniofacial Molecular Biology at the University of Southern California, is very excited that scientists are starting to get serious about xenolinguistics. He conducts research in two areas that address the question of where universal grammar might fit in the universe; How did language arise in humans, and what are the limits of human language variation?

"The study of animal communication has exploded in recent years, and it's given us a new perspective on how human language is, and isn't, unique," Samuels told Space.com. "Also, how communication systems are shaped by the unique cognitive abilities of the organisms that use them, as well as by the environmental niches they inhabit."

Invariant laws of physics

The research, combined with a "third factor" in language formation that shapes language beyond our genetic abilities and experience, has laid the groundwork for a whole new theory about universal grammar, Samuels noted.

That theory helped Samuels and Punske make the following prediction. "Some aspects of language syntax and externalization may even be shared by extraterrestrial languages, as they are constrained by invariant laws of physics."

Speaking about language and animal communication in a cosmic context, Vakoch said we have to rethink how unique language is, even on our own planet, whether or not we ever make contact with aliens.

"Xenolinguistics shows that human language may not have the privileged position we've always assumed," he said.