Time: Thursday May 22, 2025 @ 13:15
Venue: Sala Górna, Collegium Heliodori Święcicki, Grunwaldzka 6
Speaker: Prof. Raymond Hickey (University of Limerick)
Life and Language Beyond Earth
Abstract
My talk will address four basic questions about life and language beyond Earth with a specific focus on attempted answers to the fourth.
- Is there any life beyond Earth?
- Is there intelligent life beyond Earth?
- Is this life technologically advanced enough to communicate with us?
- Does such life have a communication system which we would recognise as language?
(1) The first question is the most basic and may well be answered in the near future by scientists examining planets and moons within our Solar System, assuming that such life does not have the same source as that on Earth. (2) The second question concerns intelligent life, which here refers to sentient beings on an exoplanet with cognitive abilities comparable to those of humans on Earth. (3) The third question centres on possible communication across the vast distances of interstellar space and would require advanced technology allowing beings on exoplanets to manipulate radio and/or light waves. (4) The fourth question, and the one which is of most relevance for language sciences, involves judging whether beings on exoplanets would have evolved a system which would be functionally comparable to human language. Offering an answer here necessitates looking at how language evolved on Earth and what organisation and structural principles can be found across terrestrial languages. Then one must assess the likelihood that a similar linguistic system (including an internal, genetically encoded language faculty) might evolve on an exoplanet and what type of biology might support such an exolanguage.
About the speaker
Raymond Hickey is Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick and Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg and Essen. His main research interests are varieties of English, Late Modern English and general questions of language contact, variation and change. Recent book publications include Motives for Language Change (Cambridge University Press, 2003), A Sound Atlas of Irish English (Mouton de Gruyter, 2004), Legacies of Colonial English (Cambridge University Press, 2004), Dublin English. Evolution and Change (John Benjamins, 2005), Irish English. History and Present-day Forms (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Eighteenth-Century English (Cambridge University Press, 2010), Varieties of English in Writing (John Benjamins, 2010), Areal Features of the Anglophone World (de Gruyter Mouton, 2012), The Sound Structure of Modern Irish (de Gruyter Mouton, 2014), A Dictionary of Varieties of English (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), Researching Northern English (John Benjamins, 2015), Sociolinguistics in Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Listening to the Past. Audio Records of Accents of English (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Keeping in Touch. Familiar Letters across the English-speaking World (John Benjamins, 2019), The Handbook of Language Contact (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), English in Multilingual South Africa. The linguistics of contact and change (Cambridge University Press, 2020), English in the German-Speaking World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), (with Carolina P. Amador-Moreno) Irish Identities – Sociolinguistic Perspectives (de Gruyter Mouton, 2020), Life and Language Beyond Earth (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He is also the general editor of the New Cambridge History of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
About the lecture series
WA Distinguished Professors’ Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with the faculty and students.