What Could Alien Languages Look Like?

What basic properties do all human languages have in common? How might languages from other worlds differ? In this week's episode, we take a look at potential alien languages: how we can categorize them differently from how our languages work, how they could potentially make sounds and compose meanings, and how imaginative we may have to be to understand what other species might have to say to us.
This is Topic #81!
This week's tag language: Na'Vi!
Last episode:
Nosing Around Phonetics: The Acoustics of Sonorant Consonants - • What Do Nasal Sounds L...
Our previous Halloween videos:
Braaaaaaains: The Basics of Neurolinguistics - • Language and the Brain
Future Tense: Predictions for the Future of Language - • How Will Language Chan...
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how complex alien languages might be, at: www.thelingspac...
Find us on all the social media worlds:
Tumblr: / thelingspace
Twitter: / thelingspace
Facebook: / thelingspace
And at our website, www.thelingspac... !
You can also find our store at the website, thelingspace.s...
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Sources:
On semiochemicals:
www.nme.com/blo...
www.psycho.hes....
On the number of languages in the world:
www.linguistics....
On bee dances:
users.rcn.com/j...
On vervet monkey calls:
midnightmediam...
books.google.c...
On one-word grammars and context:
ase.tufts.edu/...
On posture and alien language:
• Most Retarded Aliens i...
On metaphor and alien language:
• Video
• Darmok and Jalad at Ta...
• Darmok and Jalad on th...
Charles Hockett and language design features:
These initially come from Hockett's books, The Origin of Speech (1960) and A Note on Design Features (1968). But for online sources, try:
pages.uoregon.e...
en.wikipedia.o...
en.wikipedia.o...
Chomsky's digital infinity quote:
philpapers.org/...
Mark Liberman and his speculation on the limits of alien language:
languagelog.ldc...
A discussion of novel quantifiers & the problems with schmevery:
www.linguistics...
www.ling.uni-p...
Looking forward to next week!

[@jasonhatt4295]

I wonder if Aliens secretly watch KZbin.

[@thelingspace]

Hard to say! I hope they can understand us okay if they do, though. ^_^

[@arthurhill8185]

Here are some potential alien methods of communication: - subsonic rumbles - releasing swarms of short lived drones(the precise composition of the different types of drone convey further nuances) - inflicting different forms of physical harm(these creatures heal quickly) (the reply is conveyed by careful modulation of the healing process) - flashes of light - burst of electromagnetic interference - using quantum forces as yet unknown to humans to modify the properties of particles inside the recipient's organ specifically for the reception of such messages - vomiting carefully mixed bodily fluids into the recipients communication-vomit reception orifice - altering the timeline such that the recipient is already aware of the things the speaker wished to convey - creating a universe, and the message is conveyed by both the initial conditions and the precise way it comes to an end. (only for communicating things that exist for very long times.)

[@thelingspace]

I have to say that I am particularly a fan of the time travel and drone ones, although for the former, I have a feeling things would get complicated pretty quickly. But it'd be cool to see how that'd work!

[@R.F.9847]

"Ray Jackendoff and Eva Wittenberg have argued that even simple, one-word grammars can function, depending heavily on context for meaning." I AM GROOT.

[@CorneliusSneedley]

Always an interesting topic, and there are quite literally hundreds of short stories that explore this; we land on a distant planet, and all sorts of problems ensue because we do not even realize the inhabitants are attempting to communicate. Or sometimes even that they _are_ inhabitants. Regarding "schmevery," how about this? _"Every, shmevery. Some octopuses live in aquaria."_ :)

[@EEO857]

Rashad Becker's "Traditional music of notional species", is what I imagine alien languages sound like hah

[@thelingspace]

Going to have to try tracking that down! ^_^

[@JoshuaHillerup]

Could there be a form of communication that serves the same function as language for an intelligent alien species, but is continuous?

[@thelingspace]

I don't think there's any reason to assume that that's impossible. It's difficult for me to imagine - I immediately think of things like, where do you divide the words and meanings, etc. But that's because I have the kind of system I have in my brain; it could well be different in an alien system.

[@GhostSamaritan]

Don't whales communicate with continuous sounds?

[@buerqn]

"Solaris"! Heavens, what a wonderful example of unique alien communication 💚

[@thelingspace]

Yeah, a good reminder that I should revisit that soon. ^_^

[@MasterLapin]

Liked just for the costume :D You rock Monty!

[@thelingspace]

Yeah! It was a lot of fun to put together - lots of green, and I managed not to melt while we were filming, although it took a while to get it off. But we definitely enjoy this sort of thing! Thanks for the kind words. (Also, my name's actually Moti!) ^_^

[@dragoncurveenthusiast]

Mark Liberman and Moti Lieberman? When I heard that I wondered whether the enthusiasm for languages runs in your family, but the spelling is different. However, it could be a typo on a birth certificate at some point in the past and you *are* related

[@1998tkhri]

Darmok and Jilad at Tanagara

[@thelingspace]

We watched parts of that episode in the first linguistics course I ever took, actually. I'd already seen it, but it left an impression. ^_^

[@WilfStepto]

Is it strange that this is helping me to recover emotionally from a massive hangover?

[@thelingspace]

We live to serve!

[@cerberaodollam]

Dunno why but i always imagined aliens would talk with skin color changes like squid and octopuses do.

[@thelingspace]

Totally seems valid to me! And that's one I've definitely seen in sci-fi stories (e.g. one of the alien species in Becky Chambers's The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, most recently). I don't see why not. ^_^

[@awesomeeliam7882]

They could also communicate by flashing light to one another in bursts of varying duration, electrocuting each other with pulses of varying voltage, rhythmically vibrating some parts of their bodies, rubbing their body parts against each other, or by producing different smells that convey several different meanings according to the concentration of different types of protein and chemicals present in the mucus secreted by the addresser

[@rileysmith9105]

Thay made a language were posture plays a role in Communication? What language is this, I need to know it

[@TheBlueToad]

An animal is an octopus iff (if and only if) it lives in the sea.

[@hysteria171]

Hi Moti. love your videos. I'm just wondering if this video was at all inspired by the soon to be released movie Arrival. My Professor consulted as a linguist on the film and I'll be going to see it at a preview next week. Thanks

[@thelingspace]

Haha, yep, we definitely did have Arrival in mind here. We've actually done interviews with the linguists who consulted on the film, and we'll have a video out about that in a couple of weeks! On top of that, unless I'm pretty mistaken, we'll probably be at the same preview screening. Thanks for watching!

[@hysteria171]

Thanks for your reply! Looking forward to your interview with Jessica then. She's my favorite Professor here! I'm actually here on exchange from Australia and didn't realised you were based here!

[@thelingspace]

Yeah, Jessica's pretty awesome, and the footage with her is really interesting! And yeah, we're here. Say hi if you see me at the screening, I'll bring along some Ling Space pins and stuff to give away. ^_^

[@sugarfrosted2005]

Nice birthday present. Before watching, I would guess they're necessarily not properly Type 0. Didn't touch on it. :( You didn't exclude this being a requirement. Basically, I though suspect that a properly type-0 language would be too unwieldly for anything to truly constructively communicate with. Basically, it would take too much effort to ever form naturally.

[@tristanroberts]

sugarfrosted type 0?

[@thelingspace]

Oh, happy birthday! And that's an interesting point. It's certainly the case that one can picture alien languages in any of the other Chomsky hierarchy types. I suppose that I agree with you about the natural evolution of a Type 0 language, but I don't really see this as a reason to rule it out a priori; that is, it may be hard to imagine how it'd develop, but that doesn't render it impossible; there could be some way for it to come into being that we aren't thinking of here. And even if we are prepared to allow that it wouldn't develop naturally, I'd still not want to lay it completely aside, if for no other reason that successful alien conlangers or artificial intelligences could also be things. ^_^

[@jasonhatt4295]

I love schmevery video you make.

[@thelingspace]

Haha, thanks. We appreciate it! ^_^

[@mattlawyer3245]

When you say that kids don’t acquire words like “schmevrey” when we try to teach it to them, are there actually studies which have been done attempting things like this? Can you point me to a specific study or other resource?

[@riclacy3796]

Interesting vid! I think you'd benefit from looking at things from a non-Chomskian perspective too though ^_^

[@thelingspace]

Glad you liked it! But to me, this video is close to entirely non-Chomskyan, in the sense that we don't deal with Universal Grammar claims at all; in fact, we tried to keep away from UG stuff and focus on the things that are most universal. Hockett was pretty anti-Chomskyan, as well. Everything we're saying in this one is observational and theory-neutral - human language is discrete, hierarchical, and productive. As far as I'm aware, I don't think anyone on either side of the argument would disagree with that. The only thing that's specifically a claim from Chomsky is the claim that an alien scientist would find all our languages to be dialects of each other, but there, we're just saying it's been claimed, not trying to back it up. And given that the claim is literally about a Martian scientist saying that, it was hard to resist that temptation. ^_^

[@riclacy3796]

My bad! I think I was conflating different things a bit. ^_^ I do specifically take exception to the "languages are more similar than they are different" claim which you said you'd been arguing for since episode one, and took your further statements to be evidence of that. I've never found the absence of rules such as "flip the third word" as particularly compelling example of a human linguistic universal, I think it's just a computational universal. We do have to credit Chomsky for his work here, but he draws too much from it. If we look at programming languages, they're more built from mathematics up rather than from human language down, so I think we can claim some measure of objectivity from them. And you can't get computation done without a syntax with hierarchy, and flipping based on arbitrary position helps not at all ^_^

[@XamiNaxamis]

On the other hand, is there a decent chance that, given a similar basic psychology to ours, an alien might speak a language that could blend right in on Earth, barring things like mouth shape or cultural differences? Like, maybe something that could reasonably be called a Germanic tongue if it weren't for the fact the words are pronounced via different chords due to three vocal chords but not a moving mouth; or maybe something with a politeness system that could be construed to have been borrowed from Japanese, except the "politeness" is how superior or inferior you are to the speaker, having come from a race that believes in extreme social Darwinism.

[@Pining_for_the_fjords]

Isn't the 'shmevry' meaning simply taking a sentence beginning with 'every' and reversing it? Take the format 'Every X relationship Y' where 'relationship' is the relationship between X and Y. In _Every octopus lives in the sea_, 'octopus' is X, 'the sea' is Y and 'lives in' is the relationship. The word 'every' can also be used for shmevry if you reverse the X and Y and add the conditional 'that'. _'Everything that lives in the sea is an octopus'._ It still uses 'every' in the word everything. A simpler example is _'Every opera singer is an Italian'_, which can be shmevried by saying _'Every Italian is an opera singer'._

[@JayFolipurba]

Some teens in the tram today spoke, what I call 'the new German'. One greeted the other by saying: "Wohin mit dir?" which doesn't only sound very rude, it doesn't really make sense, since it roughly translates to: "where to put you?" It's a really lazy way to talk

[@SuviTuuliAllan]

hahahaha "rude" oh these Indo-Europeans and their fancy schmancy languages!! you crack me right up

[@groszak1]

what if HTML5 is the language of aliens, and humans have been making HTML5 software so that aliens can use them even after the Earth dies

[@s_4643]

There's a language that exsits it's minionese it's basically all languages from the world and mixed up minons use that language minons may be aliens so aliens may use minonnese

[@hannohartig2654]

The green andorian

[@jinglebob4382]

we Speak your Language

[@LoriWolfcat]

He kinda sounds like TheJWitts I think his name is.

[@quentintaylor6127]

Hah I found it it's not deep at all actually

[@Davidpostingshid]

This so racist… he’s doing green face!