1. We come in peace
screening the speaking alien
172.338
Mediated communication in a transcultural world

2. The classical age of the UFO
• Post war phenomenon
• Roswell incident 1947,
• Focus on flying saucers
• 1951 Classic movie
The Day the Earth Stood Still.
• Much later came the idea of the ‘greys’ a
distinctive idea of what aliens look like
• Later still the alien abduction phenomenon

3. They are here
• Even if we don’t believe in UFOs or aliens,
they are here as a cultural phenomenon
• Perspectives on aliens can be provided by
• Scientists
• Abductees
• Hollywood/popular culture

4. The scientists
• The Fermi Paradox is the apparent
contradiction between the high probability
extraterrestrial civilizations' existence and
the lack of contact with such civilizations.
• ‘Where are they?’

5. The emergence of
The experiencers the ‘grey’ as the
standard
representation of
the alien
• The abduction phenomenon
arrived in the 50s but remained
relatively ‘under the radar’ until the
80s
• People made claims that they
were abducted and experimented
on by aliens
• Stories of their abduction
experience emerged under
hypnosis
• Communication achieved via
telepathy
• Elaborate stories emerge about
aliens, alien-US govt coverups etc

6. Aliens in Hollywood
• Aliens have been represented on the
screen for over 50 years

7. Aliens invade Hollywood
• From the dawn of the golden age of UFOs entertainment
media have been fascinated by aliens
• War of the Worlds phenomenon
• (1951) The Day the Earth Stood Still
• first movie with a speaking Alien
• How and why does Hollywood voice or give language to
Aliens?
• What does it say about beliefs and attitudes to
language?
• What does it say about beliefs about humans and
communication?

8. Gort barada nikto
• no translation was ever offered.
• but passed into the movie language hall of
fame
• has been widely quoted and referenced in
other movies.
• What does it mean?
• It is not clear whether it is a sentence a
code word to stop Gort the Robot

9. Representing alien-ness
ET English Yoda English
• ET as language learner • Yoda speaks English with
• He acquires English. an unusual syntax, i.e.
• sources, TV a children’s word order
toy and Gertie a very
young human female • Help you, I will
• His English reflects
patterns reflecting young
English mother tongue
learners
• ET

10. Yoda English vs Terrestrial English
• Probably choose english as well aware the english
speakers are not comfortable with subtitling/dubbing
• Also youthful audience
• The film maker has a problem with English speaking
aliens.
• How to make their speech indexical of their non-human-
ness
• We can see in Yoda syntax that his English is marked in
specific ways to show the audience that he is not a
native speaker of Standard American English – the
language of the majority of the major characters

11. Examples
• YE: Found someone, you have, I would say.
• SE: I would say you have found someone.
• YE: My home this is.
• SE: This is my home
• YE: Take you to him, I will
• SE: I will take you to him.
• This fronting of material styles Yoda as a non-
native speaker of Neutral American

12. Yoda is a fronter
• Only a proportion of Yoda’s lines have this strange word
order
• Too much would have been a burden on the audience
• However this syntactic pattern becomes more
predominant in the movies over time as the audience
clearly related to it.
• This means that it is possible to argue that underlyingly
YE has the same structure as SE
• On occasion, Yoda fronts constituents of sentences
• Rootleaf I cook

14. The fronting process

15. • For those of you who have done 235 linguistic analysis
you might see a pattern. The node which is the sister to
a head can be targetted by Yoda for this fronting.
S This NP is in the appropriate position for
Yoda to target it for fronting. It is the
sister to the head of the VP. That is they
NP the node on the tree immediately above
VP
this node is also immediately above the
V, the head of the phrase.
V NP
I
cook
rootleaf

16. • For those of you who have done 235 linguistic analysis
you might see a pattern. The node which is the sister to
a head can be targeted by Yoda for this fronting.
A new branch is used to
attach to the moved S
material. Then the original
material is deleted.
NP VP
NP
V NP
I
rootleaf
cook rootleaf

17. Alien Tongues
• Two extremely interesting and popular phenomena
representing alien communication in the media are:
• Klingon from the Star Trek franchise
• Na’vi from Avatar (Cameron, 2009)
• These languages are very different from each other
• The creators have different things to say about aliens
• The Klingon language otherises Klingon, reinforces their
otherness – makes them seem inhuman
• Na’vi makes aliens very like us. This language could be
spoken in the Philippines or in the Pacific Northwest of
the US.

18. constructing the exotic
• use a mixture of features found in human languages but
in new ways
• they also contrast in some different ways
• mix language universals and some rare elements
• Rare language elements = not usually parts of European
languages, and definitely not standard parts of American
English
• Glottal stop aʔa is a very common consonant outside
European languages but appears in almost every
constructed alien language
• Polynesians are aliens?

19. constructing an ‘alien language’
Klingon for Star Trek,
devised by Marc Okrand
• The sounds of Klingon
individually occur in existing
‘Terran’ languages, but no
single language uses the entire
collection. Paramount wanted
the language to be gutteral and
harsh, and Okrand wanted it to
be unusual, so he selected
sounds that combined in ways
not typically found in other
languages

20. Constructing an alien language
Na’vi designed by Paul • I really love the film, the
Frommer for Avatar story, the incredible
• “To create some interest, realistic pictures of the
I included a group of Pandora scenery and its
sounds not often found in residents, the beautiful
western languages … Na'vi race,
• Na'vi is a beautiful
language but definitely
hard to learn

21. Origins of the features
• Klingon creator Marc Okrand and Paul
Frommer for Navi are linguists – they
deliberately developed some ‘alien
features’
• Okrand and Frommer both specialise in
languages of the Americas and some of
the features of these languages appear in
their constructed languages

22. Na’vi ejective consonants
• Similar to English /p t and k/ px tx kx
• But air is trapped in the throat and expelled with a kind of
pop
• skxawng! "moron!“pxasìk "screw that!” Kaltxì
“greetings”
• Common features of Northwest America and South
America
• Not found in European languages
• http://wals.info/feature/7?tg_format=map&v1=a000&v2=c00d&
z2=2994&z1=2993

23. The sounds of Klingon as
described for learners
• ph as in pat • b as in bat • b as in bat
• th as in tap • kh as in cap • kh as in cap
• v as in vat • m, n ng as in • w, r, l
• ch as in chop English • j as in yes
ɖ these two sounds are nearly like English s,d
but with the tongue curled towards the
back
ʂ
ʔ Cockney English t in bottle Samoan fa’a
of the throat
x Scottish ‘loch
γ a voiced version of loch

24. More Sounds
• more complex • Vowels
sounds • a as in part
• tlh say t and l at the • e as in dress
same time IPA [t͡ɬ] • I as in bid not beat
• q followed by throat • o as in or
clearing, [qχ] a rare
• u as in boot
africate found only
• Very similar to the 5 classic
in Bardi a Caucasian vowels of Polynesia, the BID
language vowel is the odd one out

25. Languages like patterns: English
velar
labials Interdental glottal
-alveolar

26. Languages like patterns: Klingon?
retroflex Velar uvular glottal
labials alveolar

27. Languages like patterns:Na’vi
labials alveolar velar glottal

28. Word ordering
• Most languages have a relatively set neutral word order
• The dog bit the man
• SUBJ verb object
English is SVO - as is Chinese and many others
Another major order is SOV Japanese, Hindi
Next most common is VSO like Polynesian and Celtic
languages
The rarest word orders are OVS and OSV

29. Sentence structure
• Both languages exhibit interesting sentence structure
• Klingon is a OVS language
• If the statement The dog bit the man was said in Klingon
the order would be
• The man bit the dog.
• Extremely rare word order in human language, until
1970s thought it would not be possible ...until
• Hixkaryana – small culture of the Amazon were
encountered.

30. Constructed word orders
• Hixkaryana, a Language of the Amazon
• Klingon is OVS
• Thlingan Hol ghoj tera’ngan
• Klingon language learn earthling

31. Na’vi morphosyntax
• Na’vi has SVO – far more common, mainstream
• Has features that are unusual for European
languages
• Words change shape to make grammatical
forms by inserting material inside a word.
• Tense
• taron ‘hunt’
• tìmaron ‘just now hunted’
• tayaron ‘will hunt’
• This use of infixing is a feature of languages of
Southeast Asia

32. What is the effect of these
choices?
• Klingon sounds very foreign and harsh to English
speaking ears.
• The complexity and rarity of the grammar defies typical
patterns, presenting them as not human. A Chomskyian
view of this language would suggest that it might be
unlearnable for humans because it does not follow UG
patterns
• Na’vi, spoken by aliens we are meant to identify with, is
regular and deemed beautiful by fans of the movie
• Looking back at the pictures of the Klingons and the
Pandorans, the blue aliens are intended to be more
beautiful too

33. Alien languages are human languages
• Tell us something about our fascination with our
ability to communicate?
• Our desire to communicate with another
language-using species
• Tell us something about how human languages
work
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HekpXSI-N_o
• http://www.wapt.com/video/24967422/detail.html