I think it’s a big maybe, as it’s predicated on the idea that alien languages might have at least some resemblance to human languages.
Dr. John Elliott of Leeds Metropolitan University has developed a computer program which is analyzing a library of 60 disparate human languages to look for commonalities. In much the same way that codebreakers can guess at encrypted words by looking at the frequency of certain letters, Dr. Elliott feels that identifying common structures across human languages will help us recognize the same structures in alien lingo. His argument is that language “has to be structured in a certain way otherwise it will be inefficient and unwieldy.”
That strikes me as one heck of a big assumption, but I guess we’ve gotta start somewhere.