The Use Of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis In The Film Arrival

‘Arrival’ a film directed by Dennis Villeneuve and released in 2016, a science fiction film with protagonists Amy Adams (as Dr. Louise Banks) and Jeremy Renner (as Ian Donnelly), is a film about aliens in spaceships arriving at different spots across the entire world. To prevent the aliens from attacking the earth the United States Armed Forces ask Dr. Louise Banks to try and communicate with the seven-limb aliens, or as they call them in the film: heptapods. Banks, together with scientist Ian Donnelly, travels to the location where the spaceship in the US landed. They use the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to investigate and try to find out how the heptapods communicate and how their language works. The heptapods use circles to write sentences or stories and in the end Dr. Banks sees that that has to do with the fact that the heptapods don’t know about time.

As a linguist I was surprised by the fact that filmmakers used the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the way people think is affected by their native language, it is a theory made by linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf. It was quite fun to watch a film as a linguist based on this hypothesis, on the other hand they went too far with some aspects of the film which aren't possible. One example of this is the moment when Ian Donnelly, the scientist, said that learning or being able to speak another language than your native language will ‘rewire the cables in your brain’ it is not a linguist who says it which makes it less painful for me to hear but what Ian said here is not true at all, of course another language gives you other vocabulary and gives you another way of speaking and writing but it seriously won’t change your brain. Nobody would ever learn a few words of another language and at the same moment they understand why the Indians have their ceremonies or why the Aboriginals are actually so much different to Western people. For a film it could look cool and fun but in reality, this is far from possible. I

n the Netherlands we always have a break in the middle of the film when it is played in the cinema. Most people get out of the theatre to get some drinks and snacks, my wife and I did the same. During the break I spoke to my wife about the film and how they made it, then all of a sudden, a lady came to me and asked me about the language of the heptapods and if a linguist as I could really understand this so easily. I don’t know how she knew I am a linguist, I think she read some of my articles or she was just listening in on our conversation, but nevertheless I told her that in my eyes and in the eyes of a lot of other linguists this isn't possible, and she was kind of disappointed to hear this from me, this lady really thought that what they told and showed us in the film was something that could be true. I told this short story to give my compliments to the makers of Arrival, they really made people believe in this theory which is difficult because it is very hard nowadays to let the audience really believe in something like this.

Although I really enjoyed this film I did miss something which for me as a linguist would be interesting. The aspect that is miss is that the film doesn’t show how Louise understands the heptapod’s language, what you see is Dr. Banks feeding all the information she has into the computer and then doing some calculations and measurements, but they don’t go into detail about how Banks at the end discovers the language. I think if they would have put that in the film it would have been much better. In the end I think Dennis Villeneuve, the director of Arrival, has done a very good job by making this film, it is difficult to put a theory as the one from Sapir and Whorf in a film, but this film has done it very well.

I would really recommend you go and see this film, and although it is not all possible what happens in Arrival, I would even recommend linguists to go to the cinema and enjoy this film with your colleague linguists. Rationale I chose to write an article for the film magazine Sceen Daily, also known as Screen International as a linguist about the film Arrival because I got inspired by the film and I wanted to get to know more about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, how it gets used in the film and if it is actually realistic how it gets used.

To gather this information, I found some good articles or reviews from linguists and with the information and some of my own knowledge and fantasy I wrote this article. I chose to make this article not too formal because it is made for both intelligent and less intelligent people. I did it by not using too difficult words and I also added the story about me, the linguist, going to the cinema to make it more informal and I think interesting to read. Of course, the written task is related to the course because of me writing as a linguist about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and how another language can change the way you think or look at different parts of life. I learned a lot writing this written task about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the film Arrival, especially that another language cannot change the way you think as much as is showed in the film.