'Arrival': Languages and A Story of Our Times

I remember going to see a well-cast sci-fi linguistics film in 2017 prepared to nerd out and bask in talk of clauses, semiotics and word order. What followed was anything but, though all such topics of conversation were sprinkled throughout the film like flecks of past-its-sell-by pre-grated Parmesan. A shy-of-2-hours deep meditation on the nature of time, language, and memory, Arrival felt important. It deeply moved me in a way that was at the time explicable. The friend with whom I saw the film laughed at me, but I know what I felt. I was only marginally interested in linguistics at the time - forgive me, I was seventeen years old - but I knew this film had explored something more profound than mere ink blots on a page or larynx-based phonetics.

All the Hollywood tropes of villainry are intelligently semi-subverted, though Russia and China still appear to be the bad guys when dealing with the heptapods compared to our heroes, the American military. Louise Banks, played fantastically by Amy Adams, seeks to bring meaning and understanding to the peculiar way in which these aliens communicate. Their logographic language is rare both in human linguistics and in film history, for foreign scripts are rarely shown in their written form on the silver screen. Languages like Chinese, Egyptian hieroglyphics and early cuneiform scripts all made use of logograms, but combined them with a syllabic structure. No known language is purely logographic that we have come across. The heptapod script is therefore entirely alien. And yet, it seems strangely familiar.

There is a non-zero chance that a child has drawn this exact image before. That isn't to diminish the film's production design, either. Who's to say children aren't communicating in a heptapod-esque language before we beat our languages into them?

The formation of language in the mind of a child takes a very non-linear path towards some degree of fluency. Drawings and signs signify words that we come to know. This sort of word association leads to a semiotic understanding of what's going on in the world, even if it is done so subconsciously. We know a tree looks like a tree because we have given it the linguistic value of 'tree' in our language. That happens all across the world in all human scripts. Children draw and doodle to make sense of the world around them. That is how they begin to understand language in its broader context. You ask any child to draw a tree, and they will mostly be able to give an accurate depiction of a tree. But some won't. Some will blob and scratch and tear at the paper, producing some symbol that, to them and to us, is a tree. 

The alien language moves in a similar way, becoming what we want it to become because we choose to interpret it that way. One of my favourite moments of my undergraduate degree was when a stuffy English lecturer from Denmark asked us to draw 'nevertheless'. We laughed but he stood in silence, awaiting our artwork. It perfectly captured this idea in my head. Ask a child to draw nevertheless and you will get something akin to the heptapod script. Certainly, it would be closer to that than anything symbol to which it could be ascribed.

The language in Arrival involves a reframing of time which is absolutely alien to any viewer, but even the shifting of linguistic perspective and understanding is innately common to human beings. I took it upon myself to learn a bit of Arabic after traveling to Egypt and being scared shitless, making neither head nor tail of what went before me. The right-to-left script of Arabic stumped me for well over a year of learning. To couple that with a new alphabet was beyond challenging and I am still struggling to make sense of words and sentences. But it reshaped how I viewed and understood languages, like learning Ancient Greek had done for me before. I was unwittingly becoming an example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on linguistic relativity, the theory that the language you speak influences the way you think.

We are hoomans. 

More literally, my concepts of written space on the page and sentence construction noticeably began to change once the rudiments of Arabic were in my back pocket. I found my standard of English, at least my cognitive standard, shifting. I perceived a drop in quality, which is likely an absurd realisation, but whatever slight change occurred, it caught me off guard. This horrified me, and took considerable reading and journaling to amend. Revisiting Arrival now, having not watched it since seeing it in the cinema, it amazed me how relatable Banks' character experienced her own shift on account of language, even if it were far more drastic than any changes I experienced.

But what does Arrival have to say for communication and language in the world today? It's obviously a modern story made for the modern world, telling a powerful geopolitical story of international cooperation and subterfuge. But I want to leave the politics to one side and talk about communication in the modern world. Emerging as we are from the Coronavirus pandemic, the deep-rooted effects of this in terms of communication will only emerge after some time. However, I would say that an entirely digital education, as most children experienced for quite some time, will have utterly profound effects on the way they communicate. It is even rather noticeable to me now. I work with children now and I worked with children before the pandemic, and they way they communicate now seems to be markedly different. There's less care about sentence construction, more half-baked phrases that require the teacher/volunteer/coach to be made complete. I have no epistemological evidence to back this up, but it is an observation I have drawn from years of working with children.

The development of generative AI in the past year will only further change how we communicate in ways I can't fully comprehend. But, watching Arrival, I couldn't help but find the line, "We help humanity", subtitled from the heptapod speech, a little ironic and considerably alarming. Banks ends up realising, of course, that the world must work together to decipher the alien script and that once it is deciphered, the future of humanity will be secured and the heptapods will return to help the next world. That's all well and good. Woohoo for international cooperation and the bending of time. Fair play. I'm not so convinced that such preachers of AI will ensure the future survival of our race. But who knows? I'm just an English graduate.

Always watch this film when it is on TV because its power and scope will surprise you. You will forget aspects of the plot in a good way. You will learn something previously unknown in a good way. And, you get to watch Amy Adams act, which is pretty much always a treat.