Interstellar Competence: Applications of Linguistics and Communicative and Cultural Competencies to Extraterrestrial Communication

This chapter draws on a set of assumptions about language, then builds away from them to outline a practical approach to alien communication. Several essential components of the xenolinguistic complex are considered: establishing and maintaining regular contact; the ways in which the constraints of remote contact sketch a roadmap toward the development of an adaptive process of learning, understanding, and communication; and designing a working plan for bridging pre-physical and physical contact communication scenarios. Drawing on work from several interrelated fields, the chapter offers an approach to a (highly probable) hyper-asynchronous, physically removed, first-contact scenario.