Space travel could create unintelligible language for people on Earth

Given the mounting crises of 2020, wouldn’t it be nice to get on a giant spaceship and leave this troubled planet behind? While we still don’t have a foolproof candidate for the new Earth, and our technology is probably still decades, if not centuries behind, interstellar travel proposals and achievements are piling up. A new study presents the fascinating case that if a group of humans ventured on a space voyage that lasted generations, their language would likely change. It could evolve into something that the original Earth people would not understand.

Let’s say, a contingent of people board a so-called “generation ship,” a fully equipped spacecraft that can hold generations of humans in space, slowly making its way across the skies to another possibly habitable planet like Proxima b in the Proxima Centauri star system. . We still can’t build such a ship, which could have to fly for thousands of years, unless we invent some kind of warp propulsion or use antimatter, as imagined in science fiction, but there have been some initial studies on the topic.

Such a journey could be subject to a variety of dangers and unforeseen circumstances like viruses, asteroids, computer malfunction, whatever. New research, carried out by linguistics teachers. Andrew McKenzie from the University of Kansas and Jeffrey Punske from the University of Southern Illinois, shows that what could also happen is that the language of the travelers would mutate. The study highlights the fact that when communities isolate each other, the conditions are ripe for language to transform. Over time, the spacecraft’s colonizers would not be able to understand its original language.

In the study, linguists use examples of effects of long-distance travel on Earth, such as the changing languages ​​of Polynesian island explorers, to show how much the language can change, even during life.

Professor McKenzie described a likely (and somewhat sad) scenario in a press release:

“If you are on this ship for 10 generations, new concepts will emerge, new social problems will arise, and people will create ways of talking about them,” McKenzie explained, “and these will become the particular vocabulary of the ship.” People on Earth may never know about these words, unless there is a reason to say them. And the further away you are, the less you will talk to people in your country. Generations pass and there is no one at home to speak. to. And there’s not a lot you want to tell them, because they’ll only find out years later, and then you’ll hear from you years after that. “

What could also happen is that it would change the language of people on Earth. Therefore, it is possible, given the distance and the diminishing reasons for communicating, that both parties simply cannot speak to each other as time passes.

One way to avoid this problem: have a crew member trained in linguistics or make other adjustments to remember the language of Earth. Thinking further into the future, the teachers propose that each new spacecraft of people approaching a distant space colony would essentially contain “language immigrants” and an effort should be made to train them in the changed language to help them avoid discrimination. .

In case you are bent on going to Proxima b, recent research found that using the technology currently imaginable such a journey would take 6300 years and would need to start with a crew of at least 98 persons.

Take a look at the study “Language Development During Interstellar Travel” in Acta Futura, the magazine of the Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency.