Why would an alien speak English?
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And now, for some unknown reason, I have the mental image of these aliens all speaking like Bronn, from Game of Thrones...
They taught themselves English when they picked up old Friends broadcasts. When they land, instead of "Take me to your leader", they say "How you doin'?".
Thank you everyone for your responses! I love the idea of this alien learning english based on Earth media like Star Wars, she's such a nerdy little alien that it would make perfect sense.
I like the "babel fish" idea and I think I will use that for the other aliens, who are a mixed group of creatures from around the solar system. I don't think any of them would speak english except for our little nerd, because if humans have never achieved space travel their languages probably aren't worth learning to the average alien.(SPOILER: The humans are about to go extinct, so none of them will except for the human MC)
But now I need to think of appropriately nerdy things for my English-speaker to watch and learn from.
I like the "babel fish" idea and I think I will use that for the other aliens, who are a mixed group of creatures from around the solar system. I don't think any of them would speak english except for our little nerd, because if humans have never achieved space travel their languages probably aren't worth learning to the average alien.(SPOILER: The humans are about to go extinct, so none of them will except for the human MC)
But now I need to think of appropriately nerdy things for my English-speaker to watch and learn from.
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Just an interesting factoid is that there really would be a cutoff date for broadcasts migrating out into the void. As technology has advanced, signal strength has grown exponentially _weaker_ as both transmission and reception technology has grown more efficient, and there is a whole lot more that is either transmitted directly, or remains an entirely earthbound signal instead of being broadcast willynilly omnidirectionally.
I've always thought an even funnier question, is why English and not French, Spanish, Japanese, etc? Imagine traveling lightyears to visit, and boning up on the wrong human language! Or at least, wrong in the sense that it doesn't match the language of the humans you've abducted...
An alien who only speaks French could be hilarious.
An alien who only speaks French could be hilarious.
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In my series, I made sense of it by braking down languages into whatever was the most dominantly-spoken tongue in each universal quadrant. So for the Western Quadrant, from the alien's point of view, English = Speaking "West".
Maybe that'll give you an idea!
Maybe that'll give you an idea!
And by the time they leave, the English language has stolen many of their words and concepts.It's very efficient that way.
Hah! And then the radical language purists would lynch speakers who used the new terms! (Or at least insult them in the supermarket as some such nuts have done lately. NO FURRIN LANGUAGES! AMERICA FIRST!)
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One of the many things I love about C. J. Cherryh's Foreigner series is the way she handles languages, particularly humans trying to communicate with others who are not human—and who the humans need to communicate in terms of surviving in a world that is not theirs. Learning a completely new language, understanding how to learn, understanding the ways in which language and thought and emotion are intertwined.
Also in her other series. Part of it is how she creates aliens whose psychology is subtly different from ours and portrays that so well.
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If we go by the number of speakers on Earth, Mandarin Chinese would be number one, and of the several versions of Mandarin the Beijing version. Close to it would be Hindi, the unofficial main language of India.
An alien might choose English since a version of it is spoken by lots of people. It's one of the main languages of commerce.
Spanish is widely spoken too in South America, of course.
We only need a few dozen or hundred words and a few linguistic patterns to get by in daily life in most languages. I was able to do that in Argentina a few years ago. I was only there to study and practice tango, so in addition to general terms I only needed a couple dozen special dance terms.
As for technically advanced aliens, I'd expect them to have a sophisticated translator. It might be microscopic in size, maybe a pill that's swallowed and dissolves and becomes part of their brain - assuming they have anything as localized as a brain.
The good thing about a story is that we don't need to explain anything much. We just show it in action. If we do it vividly enough and the story doesn't drag along readers won't question its realism.
We MIGHT throw in a phrase or sentence to smooth matters along. ("Sue switched to Simplified Mandarin and stumbled only a little to get across that she REALLY needed to go to the bathroom. Dramatically crossing her legs and hopping up and down also helped.")