Sheri Wells-Jensen on NPR’s Science Friday

Last fall, Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguistics professor in the English Department, appeared on National Public Radio’s weekly show Science Friday to discuss the movie Arrival, which depicts efforts made to communicate with an alien species that has landed on Earth.

Dr. Wells-Jensen appeared as an expert in the field of xenolinguistics: the study of (possible) languages and language-like systems used by (possible) extra-terrestrial civilizations. Dr. Wells-Jensen first taught a class on xenolinguistics in 2001 and was able to draw from fields including astronomy, astro-biology, philosophy, linguistics, and science fiction. She even included a session on the study of Klingon.

Because of that class, she was invited to present her research at a conference sponsored by SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) in 2014 and was named to the advisory council of METI international (Messaging Extra Terrestrial Intelligence). The producer of Science Friday contacted her after receiving her name from the president of METI, Doug Vakoch.

While Dr. Wells-Jensen admits that the prospect of having to communicate with aliens is remote, she finds other benefits in the study of xenolinguistics. “For me the immediate point is not that we are prepping for ET. The immediate point is that we begin to discover things about ourselves: What assumptions (unkind, unjustified, unhelpful) do we make about each other that limit us?”

On the show, Dr. Wells-Jensen made it clear that the Arrival got a lot of things right. “They got the linguistics right (which was refreshing), and good on them for choosing a mild-mannered academic to do the job.” But she also made clear that there would be many more wrong turns, frustrations, and potentially horrible misunderstandings in trying to communicate with alien species.

She used an example from the philosopher W. V. Quine to illustrate one possible misunderstanding.  If you were with a speaker of another language – or an alien – and you saw a rabbit in the woods, you could point to it, and the speaker of another language could say Gavagai. “You think, ‘I just learned the word for bunny! Good on me.’ But Gavagai could mean anything from ‘bunny’ to ‘hop’ to ‘fast’ to ‘good to eat’ to ‘what are you pointing at?’ We hit this wall all the time in translation and in field methods. Very frustrating. But it forces you to be very careful and systematic, and you sometimes learn things that you would have overlooked.”

Dr. Wells-Jensen said that she will be doing future work in the field of xenolinguistics.

“There's this nice little place where linguistics, disability studies, and astrobiology all come together. That's what my sabbatical year will be all about. I've waited 20 years, and the universe has finally given me a topic that's perfectly my own.”

The segment on Arrival was chosen one of the best Science Friday shows of 2016. Listen to it here.