Linguistics as the Science of Science Fiction

Well, I've been away for a while, and I have several old drafts waiting around for me to get back to them and turn them into more analyses of Linguistically Interesting Media... but right now, I have been inspired to get writing again not by a particular work of fiction, but by this 2018 blog post by Martin Haspelmath.

Linguistic science fiction is relatively limited in how it deploys the actual science of linguistics. Most science fiction that employs linguistics as a background focuses on some variety of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that language constrains thought, and thus teaching people different languages can be employed as an effectively technological solution to various problems--either mundanely altering how people behave, or exercising somewhat fantastical levels of control, or granting people mental superpowers. This kind of linguistic SF conceit shows up in, for example,

• Native Tongue by Suzette Hayden Elgin
• The Embedding by Ian Watson
• The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
• Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany
• Arrival (film) / The Story of Your Life (novella) by Ted Chiang

(As usual, all links to media are Amazon Affiliate links.)

And then we have some more peripheral examples:

• Embassytown by China Miéville, which features aliens who cannot lie. This is frequently claimed to be an instance of Whorfianism in sci-fi, but the weirdness is not an inherent feature of the fictional language, but rather of the aliens' minds.
• Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson, which features a language that can directly reprogram the human brain. This is certainly akin to Whorfianism, but in my mind not quite the same thing, as Stephenson's brain programming language operates at a physiological, rather than psychological, level. Other readers may disagree, but the mechanism of action here feels a lot more like a highly refined version of the kind of direct neurological manipulation that occurs by accident in, e.g., epileptic people who have seizures triggered by flashing lights, rather than the sort of Whorfian personality manipulation seen in The Languages of Pao, etc.

And there are a few other stories available that avoid Whorfianism altogether; Sheila Finch wrote a few collected in The Guild of Xenolinguists, such as "Reading the Bones" (about which I have written previously), which, somewhat like Embassytown, deals with a fictional culture's psychological and cultural relationship to language-as-cognitive-technology--neither aliens nor humans have their minds fundamentally altered by learning each other's languages in that story! Nevertheless, these sorts of examples are hard to find, and I am far from the first commentator to notice the overwhelming overuse of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as the basis for linguistic science fiction.

So, what does this have to do with Martin Haspelmath? Well, his blog post made me realize that there is, in fact, a second principle of theoretical linguistics which has informed a great deal of science fiction and fantasy: The Universal Grammar (UG) hypothesis. This shows up explicitly in The Embedding, where the backstory is all about setting up The Forbidden Experiment to test the limits of UG, but it is often much more subtle, to the point that most readers may not even realize that they are being exposed to linguistic sci-fi when they encounter it!

Every time we encounter aliens or eldritch monsters whose languages are beyond human comprehension--that's making an implicit claim about UG, that humans have an innate grammatical system and the aliens have a different, incompatible one. To quote Martin-quoting-Jessica-Coon:

There are grammatical properties we could imagine that we just don’t ever find in any human language, so we know what’s specific to humans and our endowment for language. There’s no reason to expect aliens would have the same system. In fact, it would be very surprising if they did.

If the UG hypothesis is true, then almost all aliens should be fundamentally incomprehensible!

Meanwhile, every time you encounter a universal translator, the story is making an even stronger claim--that not only does UG exist, but it is actually not accidental to human evolution, but rather is the same for all language-using beings, such that the universal translator can just find the right settings for a finite number of switches in order to convert between specific languages flawlessly.

But, there is a more nuanced view, one adopted by Martin himself:

We wouldn’t expect aliens to have the same representational (=UG) constraints as humans, because presumably they have different brains and minds. But their languages would be expected to be subject to very similar functional-adaptive constraints as human languages, if the languages are used for communication in much the same way as humans use their language.

In other words, differences in the construction of other species' brains may indeed cause them to evolve languages with features that we cannot learn to use fluently--and vice-versa! For example, Jeffrey Henning's conlang Fith depends on a very non-human structure for short-term working memory. But even if we could not use the full extent of some specific alien language intuitively and fluently, we should be able to comprehend how it works and interpret it, and to find a common ground that does allow for meaningful communication--e.g., by constructing a creole like Shallow Fith, accessible to both Fithians and Humans. So far, The Guild of Xenolinguists is the only body of fiction work I know of so far that takes this approach seriously!

Considering the physical, cognitive, and functional bases of language allows us to more deeply examine some other common tropes. How often have seen a member of a Superior Species explain how easily they were able to learn our "primitive language"? Well, what might that actually mean? What differences in cognitive ability could create a asymmetry that makes it easy for aliens to learn our languages but not easy for us to learn theirs? Is it a higher bitrate that allows them to use something like Heinlein's Speedtalk? Is it vastly expanded working memory that lets them track a larger number of unambiguous anaphoric references? The possibilities are vast, and could present a variety of distinct types of disability to be faced by a human trying to interact with that culture. Or consider the trope of the name unpronounceable by humans: is it really unpronounceable by humans, or just by this Anglophone human? If it really is unpronounceable by humans, why can the bearer of the name pronounce human speech correctly? Maybe they can't, are implicitly speaking with a thick accent, and our names get butchered by them just as badly as their do by us. Or maybe they are built like birds, and just have a much better ability to synthesize arbitrary sounds than we do. Either possibility can exploited for further plot and characterization!

So... yeah. I have no particularly compelling conclusion here, but go forth and write better linguistic SF!

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