In the 2016 blockbuster film Arrival, aliens with inscrutable motives descend on Earth—and it is up to a scientist played by Amy Adams to help communicate with them. Were this to occur in real life, ...

Eric Mack has been a CNET contributor since 2011. Eric and his family live 100% energy and water independent on his off-grid compound in the New Mexico desert. Eric uses his passion for writing about ...

If earthlings ever make contact with intelligent space aliens, will we be able to understand them? We use a language of spoken and written words, of course, but aliens might use numbers, shapes, tones ...

Imagine if, when aliens make first contact with humans, not only do they not speak English, but they don’t even use spoken words. The problem (and the reason why the Army’s own cryptographers are ...

An international team proposes replacing Hockett’s feature checklist with a model of language as a dynamic, multimodal, and socially evolving system.