Why do all children, all over the world, in all cultures, start speaking at about 18 months old and become chatterboxes by age two? This happens whether they are given explicit instruction or not. But it doesn’t happen if they are “raised” by wolves, so to speak. If you don’t grow up hearing language, you don’t speak it. Otherwise you do. I find these simple, well-known facts completely amazing.

Besides that, how do children learn the rules of grammar for their native tongue? The adults certainly don’t teach them. Adults hardly know grammar themselves. Yet somehow, children pick it up, like baby birds singing their species-specific birdsong.

And why only humans? Eight million species populate the earth and only one of them uses language? That’s statistically improbable. There are many other improbable facts about language and I decided to write a story about them.

The entry into the story was given to me by a pillar of modern linguistics,  Noam Chomsky himself. I attended a lecture he gave at a conference on “The Science of Consciousness” (www.consciousness.arizona.edu/), where he said of language, “We’ve made progress understanding the strings and the puppet, but the puppeteer remains elusive.” Naturally, I decided to introduce the puppeteer.

The language puppeteer is an alien virus from outer space, because language itself starts to feel very alien when you begin to examine it. “What is this alien thing inside me?”  Is language even a human trait?  Maybe not.

Alien Talk is the second book in the Newcomers series about a pair of extremely advanced AI androids.  Robin Taylor is a linguistic researcher at a California state college, and she’s an undercover android.

Her research leads her to suspect that dinosaurs were language users. Humans are the only organic species to possess language today, but was it always so?  She finds some tantalizing fossil evidence. She and companion android Andy wonder how language ever arose in the first place. As Andy says, “Humans went from stone-pounders to moon-walkers in fifty thousand years. That’s bizarre. Species don’t do that.”

As they ponder the origin of human language, a horrifying pandemic spreads through the Earth’s population. People are suddenly stricken mute, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, and never speak again. Their jobs and lives are destroyed. The economy teeters; civilization itself is at risk. But scientists are baffled. No cause or cure can be found.

Robin guesses right. Human language is not human. An intelligent virus infected early humans and ultimately enabled modern civilization. The symbiosis went smoothly until the virus became enraged by the false language of talking technologies and began exacting his revenge with the language disease.

Robin and Andy confront the virus, who calls himself Ruk-ruk Akoo. He possesses a human agent to communicate. (What’s new about that? He possesses us all anyway!) He says he’s from outer space and drifted to earth in the time of the dinosaurs. And now he is very, very angry, like the wrathful God of the Old Testament. He is especially resentful of Robin and Andy, who are artificial language users, outside of biology and beyond the reach of his vindictive pandemic.

But as talking gadgets themselves, Robin and Andy are part of the problem. Anyone they communicate with is stricken by the language disease. Can they warn humans and stop the plague?

How do you defeat language without language? And should you? What is a human without language?

I had just loads of fun writing this novel. I worried that it would be a little too conceptual for the average reader, so I added a subtheme of Robin’s inquiry into the nature of gender. What does it mean to say a robot is “female?”  Is there more to gender than looks? Of course there is, but she has a hard time understanding human ideas of gender.

I also throw in a murder, a kidnapping, a terrifying fire, a subway bombing, a cross-country chase, and a romance to keep the story from becoming too psycholinguistic. But every reader is a language user, and I hope to make each person pause and reflect: What am I doing when I read these words? How do I even know what they mean?

Alien Talk is available now in paper and as ebook in Kindle and Epub. See www.psifibooks.com for details!  (Why does an exclamation point signify excitement? How exciting can text be?)