Xenolinguistics: The Nature of Language and the Potential of Extraterrestrial Communication

Join PFC Member Dr. Carol Tenny for a fascinating exploration of the nature of language and the potential for extraterrestrial communication. Xenolinguistics -- thinking about the possible languages of extraterrestrial intelligences --  forces us to think about our own human language and our powers  of communication in the context of other intelligences besides our own.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/xenolinguistics-the-study-of-alien-languages-helps-to-reveal-why-all-beings/

Carol Tenny earned her PhD in theoretical linguistics from MIT in 1987. Following that, she taught at the University of Pittsburgh and at CMU for several years. In her theoretical work she looked at how time, space, causation, the structure of events, and human point of view are expressed in human grammars. After teaching at Pitt and CMU, she worked in industry for many years (computational linguistics or natural language processing). Most recently, she worked in speech language recognition for automobiles, mostly for Japanese.

Retired since 2025, she is now thinking about xenolinguistics (extraterrestrial linguistics).

Before landing in linguistics, she worked at very different kinds of jobs, from horse training to analyzing oxygen isotopes in a geochemistry lab. She spent some time in oceanography at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California. She is also a dog trainer.

https://www.linguist.org/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carol-l-tenny-2323928/details/experience/