ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore the idea that the patterns of communication evolution start locally and become global, due to the evolution of civilization during its technological and informational eras. Intelligent communication is a coevolutionary process, intertwined with the collective behavior that forms such civilization, and therefore leads to common, universal patterns of communication, mostly in the form of language (although language is not the only form of intelligent communication). Among alien civilizations, we would similarly expect language to have coevolved with the social and technological evolution of that particular civilization, as well. Globalized languages and large systems of communication are products of selection and adaptation mechanisms that emerged from the social, technological, and economic systems embedded in our collective history. After outlining the rationale for how to conceptualize xenolinguistics in terms of complex social patterns, I outline the methodologies and steps we can use today to classify and categorize these patterns, as well as the scenarios and experiments we can design once we have a deeper understanding and curated collection of these patterns. Overall, I am trying to lay down a framework of thought about xenolinguistics in concordance with what we know from research in communication, complex systems, history, economics, social sciences, and data and computer sciences in a broader, but unified fashion.
