xenolinguistics n.

James Dalkeith, graduate in xenolinguistics, sat in his cabin and wrote a letter to his wife.

CenCom decided I should study xenolinguistics because as a child I learned to speak the Amerind tongue as well as I could speak Inglis.

As a footnote to this discussion of linguistic theories, we should make mention of the research being done in Artificial Intelligence, for what we learn from teaching a machine to use language, and recognizing if and when sentience has developed in our creation, will be vastly useful to the infant science of xenolinguistics.

Back on the other side of the Mirror, he’d gotten some training in the theory of xenolinguistics, just in case the Bugs wanted to talk, but nothing he’d been taught made any sense at the moment.

Even with all the sophisticated equipment for recording and analysis that we now possess, at some stage in deciphering an alien tongue we’re still dependent on the old point and repeat method. The human element of interaction, of trial and error, remains a necessary part of xenolinguistics.

KIRK (CONT’D) Okay, so you’re a cadet. Studying. What’s your focus? UHURA Xenolinugistics. Lemme guess: you don’t know what that means. KIRK Let me guess: study of Alien languages: phonology, morphology, syntax.

‘We have no way of knowing if these sounds are speech!’…‘You are quite correct…. So I suggest we let someone who can knowledgably [sic] guess give an expert opinion. I suggest we call Arnold Chen.…. He received his doctorate in xenolinguistics.’