Science-Fictional Linguistics: How the Arrival of Language Means the Dawning of New Worlds

Using two recent science fictional (hereafter sf) treatments of linguistics, Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” and China Miéville’s Embassytown, this article extends upon Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language through the texts’ respective imaginings of alien languages in order to reject the possibility of a normative account of language use. According to Wittgenstein’s linguistic stance, as articulated in his Philosophical Investigations, language is constructed collectively from communication and the emergence of culture, and a language’s development cannot in turn be divided from its community of origin. Structuralist accounts of language, such as Noam Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, in contrast presuppose a normative view of language use in which innate mechanisms of the brain result in a relatively homogenous language output irrespective of culture. Troubling Chomsky’s universalism, the contemporary sf texts, “Story of Your Life” and Embassytown, posit human populations whose very worlds are shaken by the arrival of alien populations with completely foreign forms of language and, consequently, alien forms of life. In both texts, the protagonist becomes the chosen ambassador between the human and alien populations, and their vehicle of understanding, language. The human ambassadors’ subsequent actualization of a different worldview through their acquisition of the newly arrived alien language in turn demonstrates the importance of language to culturally acquired worldviews. Moreover, their gradual development of empathy for the alien beings as they become fluent posits language as, first and foremost, a tool of communication and understanding rather than the product of isolated minds. Ultimately, Chiang and Miéville’s alien thought experiments illuminate how Wittgenstein’s non-normative linguistic philosophies more fully account for language’s transformative relation to culture than Chomsky’s universalist structuralism