Why Earth’s “Best” Language for First Contact Isn’t a Language at All!

What do we say back? In what language?

The scenario is a staple of human imagination. A signal arrives. It’s unambiguous, patterned, and clearly not from Earth. After the initial shock, celebration, and panic, humanity faces its first truly unified question: What do we say back?

This question is immediately followed by a more practical, and perhaps more divisive, one: In what language?

It seems like a simple problem, but it unravels the moment one pulls at the thread. Who gets to choose? Does the message go out in English, the current lingua franca of science and commerce? In Mandarin Chinese, the language with the most native speakers? Or perhaps a “neutral” constructed language like Esperanto?

The search for the “best” language for first contact is a compelling thought experiment. It forces us to confront our own biases, the structure of our thoughts, and the very nature of communication. But the conclusion many scientists, linguists, and philosophers have reached is a challenging one: no existing human language is remotely suitable for the task. The “best” language isn’t a language at all. It’s a process.

This article explores why our languages are a poor fit for this cosmic introduction and what the real alternative – a “primer” built from the ground up – would look like.

The Problem of Picking a Language

At first glance, using a major human language seems logical. It’s efficient. We already have the vocabulary and grammar. The problem is that every single human language, from the most widely spoken to the last vestiges of a dying dialect, is a dense, messy archive of human-specific experience. They are not clean systems of logic; they are living, evolving artifacts, hopelessly entangled with our culture, our biology, and our politics.

The Prison of Culture

Language doesn’t just describe culture; it’s a vehicle for it. Words are not simple labels. They are containers for history, emotion, and context.

Consider a simple word like “home.” For a human, this word might evoke feelings of family, security, a physical place, or a sense of belonging. An alien intelligence, especially one that might be a collective hive-mind or a solitary, immortal gas-cloud, would have no frame of reference for this. Even a more concrete word like “war” is steeped in human concepts of nationalism, resource scarcity, and tribalism that are not universal constants.

If we send a message in English, we are not just sending words. We are sending the baggage of the British Empire, the philosophical weight of the Enlightenment, and the cultural assumptions embedded in Shakespeare. A word like “freedom” is a political and philosophical minefield. What would a species that has no concept of “self” (perhaps a hive mind) or a species that has no concept of “restraint” (perhaps a post-scarcity utopia) make of it?

The same is true for any language. Mandarin Chinese is interwoven with millennia of Confucian philosophy, concepts of “face” (面子), and a deep history of dynastic cycles. These are not universal. They are human.

Sending a message in any human language is like giving someone a single page torn from a 10,000-page book and expecting them to understand the plot. The context is missing, and the context is our entire shared history as a species.

The Biological Box

An even more fundamental barrier is our own biology. Our languages are built entirely around the way we perceive the universe, and our perception is dictated by the specific, limited, and frankly weird set of senses we’ve evolved.

We are bipedal primates who live on a planet with a 1-G gravity field, under a single yellow sun, breathing a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. We perceive a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum as “light” and a narrow range of air vibrations as “sound.”

Our language reflects this body-centric, Earth-centric reality.

• Gravity: We have “up” and “down.” “Heads up” is good; “feeling down” is bad. This metaphor is meaningless to a creature that floats in a zero-G environment or one that perceives the world in only two dimensions.
• Vision: We have “bright” ideas and “dark” moods. We “see” what others mean. What about a species that navigates by sonar or senses magnetic fields? Their entire conceptual library would be different.
• Time: Our languages are obsessed with linear time. We have past, present, and future tenses. This seems basic, but it’s an assumption based on our planet’s rotation and orbit. An alien species might perceive time non-linearly, or all at once. The entire grammatical structure of our language would be gibberish to them.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that the language we speak influences how we think and perceive reality, takes on a cosmic dimension here. We can’t even be sure that aliens would understand basic concepts like “I” and “you.” A collective intelligence might only have a word for “we.” An entity that reproduces by fission might see “I” and “you” as the same thing, just at different points in time.

Our languages are not descriptions of reality. They are descriptions of a human’s experience of reality. And that is too specific to be a good introduction.

The Political Impasse

Finally, there’s the simple, practical, and very human problem of politics. Who chooses?

If the United States decides to send the message in English, how would China or Russia react? The choice of language would instantly be seen as a geopolitical power move, an attempt to assert cultural dominance on a galactic scale. The United Nations headquarters in New York City would be gridlocked in debates.

The six official languages of the UN – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish – all carry the weight of empires and colonization. Choosing any one of them makes a statement about which part of human history is most “important.” The bickering would be endless, and it would present a fractured, divided humanity to the stars.

It’s an impossible political problem. Any attempt to “pick one” would fail before it even began.

Examining the Main Contenders (And Why They Fail)

Even if we could wave a magic wand and solve the cultural and political issues, the main contenders for a “global language” have deep, practical flaws that make them poor choices for xenolinguistics.

English: The Lingua Franca

English is the default language of science, aviation, and the internet. It has a massive vocabulary and is spoken by billions as a first or second language. This seems like a strong case.

The problem is that English is a linguistic disaster. It’s a Germanic language with a Romance language vocabulary, all filtered through centuries of invasions, ad-hoc additions, and mangled spellings.

Its spelling is notoriously inconsistent. “Through,” “tough,” “though,” and “thought” are a nightmare. Phrasal verbs – two-word combinations like “put up,” “put down,” “put off,” and “put up with” – are arbitrary and have meanings that can’t be guessed from their parts. Its grammar is riddled with exceptions. Its idioms are a minefield of nonsense. What would an alien make of “it’s raining cats and dogs” or “break a leg”?

English is a powerful and expressive language for humans who share a (very) broad cultural context. For an alien, it’s an ambiguous, inconsistent, and illogical mess.

Mandarin Chinese: The Most Speakers

Mandarin has the most native speakers on Earth. It’s an ancient language with a rich history. This also makes it a strong contender.

But its barriers to entry are immense. Mandarin is a tonal language. The meaning of a “word” (or syllable) changes completely based on the pitch of the speaker’s voice. The syllable “ma” can mean “mother,” “hemp,” “horse,” or “to scold,” depending on the tone.

This is a communications system built for a biological apparatus – the human vocal cord – that can produce and distinguish these fine-grained pitches. An alien species might not even have “sound” as a primary sense, let alone the ability to process tonal variations.

Then there is the writing system. The Chinese writing system is logographic, not alphabetic. It uses thousands of complex characters that represent ideas or words. This is a massive, context-drenched system of memorization. It is not a simple code that can be easily “unlocked.”

Constructed Languages: A Logical Alternative?

If natural languages are too messy, what about languages that were designed to be better?

Esperanto was created in the late 19th century to be a politically neutral, easy-to-learn universal second language. It has a regular grammar, no exceptions, and a vocabulary drawn from major European languages.

But that’s its flaw. It is, in effect, “Euro-speak.” Its entire linguistic and conceptual foundation is based on Indo-European languages. It solves the political problem of picking English over French, but it doesn’t solve the much deeper problem of picking a human-centric language. To an alien, Esperanto is just as arbitrary and culturally specific as Italian or Portuguese.

What about a truly logical language? Lojban, for example, is a language constructed to be unambiguous and based on predicate logic. It’s designed so that its grammatical structure reflects a precise logical statement.

This sounds promising, but it has two problems. First, it’s so complex and rigid that it’s nearly impossible for humans to speak fluently. Second, and more importantly, it’s based on human logic. We have no reason to believe that an alien intelligence would share our systems of predicate logic, our A-equals-A, our concept of “if-then.” They may have a completely different, and equally valid, system of reasoning.

Level

The Real Solution: A Language of Physics

If every human language is a dead end, what’s the alternative? We can’t just stay silent.

The solution is to stop thinking about which of our languages to use and start thinking about how to build a new one from scratch. This new “language” would be based on the only things we can be reasonably sure we share with another intelligent species: the universe itself.

This is the “primer” concept. The goal is not to say “Hello” or “We come in peace.” The goal is to say “We, too, understand the laws of physics.” It’s an attempt to establish a shared, objective foundation.

Step 1: Sending a “We Are Here” Signal

Before you can build a language, you have to get their attention. The signal itself needs to be obviously artificial. Random noise is natural. A repeating, patterned signal is a sign of a mind.

The simplest signal is a pulse. A “beep.” But a single “beep” is not enough. You need a sequence that cannot be produced by any known natural phenomenon.

This is where mathematics comes in. Send a series of pulses corresponding to the prime numbers: two pulses, then three, then five, then seven, then eleven, and so on. There is no known natural process that generates prime numbers. It is a pure, abstract signal of intelligence. It’s the cosmic equivalent of a knock on the door.

Step 2: Establishing a Foundation (The “Primer”)

Once you have their attention, the “conversation” begins. But you don’t send words. You send a dictionary. This is the primer. It’s a message designed to be decoded, teaching the recipient a basic vocabulary built on shared reality.

• Mathematics: You start by defining numbers. You send a group of pulses, then a pause, then a new, arbitrary symbol (let’s say “A”). You send two groups of pulses, a pause, and the symbol “B.” You are building a counting system. Then, you introduce concepts. You show [A] [symbol for PLUS] [A] [symbol for EQUALS] [B]. You have just sent 1 + 1 = 2. By sending thousands of these simple, true mathematical statements, you build a shared mathematical language.
• Physics: Once you have numbers, you can describe physics. The Arecibo message, a 1974 broadcast from the Arecibo Observatory, did exactly this. It was a simple pictogram sent as a binary code. It defined the numbers 1 through 10. It then used those numbers to list the atomic numbers of the key elements for life: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus.
• Chemistry: From there, you can show the structure of these elements. You can send a diagram of the hydrogen atom, the simplest and most common element in the universe. We can be confident that an advanced civilization will also know what hydrogen is. You can send a basic periodic table of elements. This is a “Rosetta Stone” based on the laws of chemistry, which are the same (as far as we know) everywhere.

Step 3: From Physics to Biology (This is Us)

Only after establishing this deep, shared context of math and physics do you even begin to talk about yourself.

The Arecibo message did this. After defining the elements, it showed the chemical formulas for the building blocks of DNA. It then showed a simple graphic of the DNA double-helix itself.

It followed this with a simple stick-figure-like graphic of a human, with a number next to it indicating our average height (measured in units of the message’s own wavelength). It also showed our solar system, highlighting the third planet, and a graphic of the Arecibo telescope itself.

It was a message that said, in effect:

“Here are numbers. Here are the elements we are made of. Here is the chemical structure of our life. This is what we look like. This is where we live. This is the tool we used to send this message.”

It wasn’t a conversation. It was a set of basic, verifiable facts. This is the “best” language for a first message.

The Medium and the Message

This approach has been attempted in a different form with physical artifacts. The Pioneer plaques (on the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes) and the Voyager Golden Records (on Voyager 1 and 2) are primers sent as “messages in a bottle.”

The Pioneer plaque is a diagram etched onto gold. It shows the human form, the location of our Sun relative to 14 pulsars (a cosmic map), and a diagram of the hydrogen atom’s hyperfine transition. This transition, which gives off a radio wave at a wavelength of 21 centimeters (or 1420 MHz), is a fundamental and universal unit of time and length. The human figures on the plaque are drawn to scale against this wavelength.

The Voyager Golden Record is more ambitious. It’s a phonograph record containing sounds and images. The cover of the record is the primer. It includes diagrams on how to build a player to play the record, the pulsar map from the Pioneer plaque, and the hydrogen atom transition to set the correct playback speed.

The content of the record – music from Bach and Chuck Berry, pictures of human life, greetings in 55 languages – is the “hello.” But it’s sent after the instructions. It’s the cultural page from the book, but it’s sent with the physics and math primer that acts as the table of contents.

The Great Unknown: The Cognitive Barrier

This “math and physics” approach is the most logical one we have. But it still relies on a chain of assumptions that may be wrong.

It assumes that the aliens are like us. That they have “science.” That they perceive the universe through a similar lens of mathematics. That they are “curious.”

What if they aren’t? This is the cognitive barrier, and it’s the most significant challenge in xenolinguistics.

We have a hard enough time communicating with other intelligent species on our own planet. Our attempts to “talk” to them reveal the vastness of the cognitive gap we must one day cross with an alien.

Lessons from Earth’s “Aliens”

• Great Apes: Chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest living relatives, share over 98% of our DNA. We have taught some of them American Sign Language. They can learn hundreds of “words” and combine them. But decades of research have shown that they struggle with, or simply do not possess, the key component of human language: syntax (the rules of grammar). More importantly, they seem to lack a concept of linear time. They rarely “talk” about yesterday or tomorrow. They live in an eternal present. This is our closest relative, and we are already at a fundamental cognitive impasse.
• Dolphins: Dolphin communication is a complex system of clicks, whistles, and body language. Their world is not based on light; it’s based on echolocation. They “see” with sound, in 3D, and can even “see” inside each other’s bodies. We cannot “speak” dolphin. Their language is a description of a sensory world we cannot imagine. Any “English” we teach them is a parlor trick, a translation so poor it’s almost meaningless.
• Octopuses: The octopus represents a truly “alien” intelligence. They are invertebrates, and their last common ancestor with us was a microscopic worm. They are highly intelligent, but their “brain” is distributed. Two-thirds of their neurons are in their arms, which can think and act independently. They “speak” by instantly changing the color and texture of their entire body, using cells called chromatophores. They are, in effect, a walking, thinking high-definition screen. How do you “talk” to a creature whose language is a dynamic, full-body visual display and whose “self” is distributed among eight semi-independent arms?

These Earth-bound examples show that intelligence is not a single point on a line. It’s a vast, multidimensional landscape. An alien intelligence may be so different from us that “communication” as we understand it – a transfer of discrete concepts via a shared code – is impossible. They may not even see our mathematical primer as a “message,” any more than we see the pattern of a snowflake as a message.

Summary

So, what is the best language for first contact? The question is the answer. The search for a “best” language reveals our own human-centric biases. We are trapped in our own cultures, our own biology, and our own political squabbles.

No human language – not English, not Mandarin, not Esperanto – is suitable. They are the end-product of a very specific, very local evolutionary and cultural history. They are archives of human experience, not a toolkit for cosmic experience.

The only viable “language” is one that is not a language at all. It is a slow, methodical process of building a shared dictionary from scratch. It’s a primer, a message that starts with the simplest, most universal truths we know: 2, 3, 5, 7… the properties of hydrogen… the location of our world.

This primer, as exemplified by the Arecibo message and the Voyager record, is the real “first language.” It’s an act of demonstration, not of conversation. It’s an attempt to find a tiny patch of common ground – the laws of physics – in the vast, unknown territory of an alien mind.

The real challenge of first contact isn’t linguistic. It’s cognitive. It’s not about finding the right words. It’s about finding out if “words” are something we even have in common.