ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses what impact blindness would have on languages potentially used by a humanoid extraterrestrial species living on an Earth-like planet. The cultural biases surrounding blindness are examined and deconstructed to arrive at a list of the factors that actually constitute blindness. This chapter explores how a language would develop without sighted influences. The concept of blindness would not exist, nor would color terms. Blindness would affect the development of content words, multi-channel speech, and back-channeling, with an increased complexity of function words and grammar rules. By imagining language construction under various hypotheticals, a greater understanding of how humans might one day interact with intelligent extraterrestrial species is reached.
