Exolangs are constructed languages that imagine how the languages of extraterrestrial beings might look and sound—and linguists have come up with some pretty mind-bending options. Some exolangs adhere ...

In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do ...

Symbols that can’t be understood have always captivated human imagination, especially when they tell a story. Some games lean into this captivation by asking players to decipher alien imagination, ...

Could we ever decipher alien languages? Uncovering how AI communicates may be key Language is ephemeral, it leaves no examinable trace in the fossil records. Unlike bones, we can’t dig up ancient ...

In the 2016 movie Arrival, water-dwelling extraterrestrials make an appearance on Earth. The main human character’s job is to learn how to communicate with the seven-tentacled extraterrestrials before ...