'Arrival': The Movie Shines A Spotlight On Linguistics; New Games Being Developed To Let Players Crack An Alien Language

Arrival is a 2016 science fiction movie about a linguist, played by Amy Adams, trying to communicate with alien life forms that came to Earth. The main plot of the movie is how the linguist can crack the alien's language to know why the aliens have come to Earth. The movie shines on the beauty of linguistics and how new games are being developed to let players crack alien language to begin communication.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language and its structures, which include semantics, phonetics, syntax and morphology. With a movie like Arrival, it shines on the beauty and importance of languages. The path of communications for species, in this case, aliens, is to exchange information and to understand each other.

The alien language used in Arrival was developed through the collaboration of great minds. Patrice Vermette and Martine Bertrand were in charge of the visualization of the alien language in Arrival. Stephen Wolfram and Christopher Wolfram, known for Mathematica and popular mathematics website Wolfram, were in charge of analyzing the created symbols. Jessica Coon, a McGill University linguistics professor, was in charge to put everything together for the written language used in the film. For the spoken language used by the heptapods, the film's mysterious aliens, fellow McGill University professor Morgan Sonderegger created the language by combining audio clips of whale songs, purring cats and many more sounds.

Professor Jessica Coon, in an interview with Business Insider, shares that although the created alien language of Arrival was presented more creatively and more like art, it still portrayed how a linguist would go about deciphering a new language. One thing that Arrival got correct is that language is an interaction, and in order to understand each other, whether it be with alien life forms or with each other, is to start small and look for patterns in a language.

The very idea of cracking alien languages has inspired a slew of new games, on the other hand. Sethian is a game where players have to solve the mystery of a planet by cracking an alien language. The alien language featured in Sethian was invented by game developer Grant Kurning. It even has a set of vocabulary and created a whole new way of speaking the language.

Sethian is not the only game jumping on the alien language fad. Xenolanguage and Sign are just a few of the games that offer invented alien languages. "Games about language explore what it means to be human," says game developers Hymes and Seyalioglu in an interview with New Scientist. Languages might all be different, but human beings are more than capable of learning in order to communicate with each other.