Can language change the way you think? The science of Arrival

Can language change the way you think?
This is the question at the heart of Arrival—the story of a linguist meeting alien life for the first time.
As a linguist, I love this movie! It raises a ton of fascinating questions about language, culture, biology, and the mind.
Let’s talk about the (cognitive) science of Arrival!

Chapters
0:00 - First contact (skit)
0:25 - The science of Arrival
2:11 - Universal structure
5:45 - Decoding alien speech
7:14 - Visual language
9:13 - The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
11:17 - Space and time
13:29 - The power of writing
15:21 - Mental timelines
17:46 - Language and the mind
19:43 - Parting thoughts

Links:

Sources:
Andreas et al. (2022). Toward understanding the communication in sperm whales.
Beguš et al. (2023). Vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales.
Bode et al. (2016). Left–right position in moving images: An analysis of face orientation, face position, and movement direction in eight action films.
Boroditsky (2001). Does language shape thought?: Mandarin and English speakers’ conceptions of time.
Casasanto & Bottini (2014). Mirror reading can reverse the flow of time.
Coon (2020). The linguistics of Arrival: Heptapods, field linguistics, and Universal Grammar.
Guida et al. (2018). Spatialization in working memory is related to literacy and reading direction: Culture “literarily” directs our thoughts.
Pérez González (2012). Lateral organisation in nineteenth-century studio photographs is influenced by the direction of writing: A comparison of Iranian and Spanish photographs.
Pitt & Casasanto (2020). The correlations in experience principle: How culture shapes concepts of time and number.
Pitt et al. (2021). Spatial concepts of number, size, and time in an indigenous culture.
Rill (2017). The morphology and syntax of ergativity: A typological approach. (p. 32)

[JKTCGMV]

Putting a spoiler warning for an 8 year old movie is admirable

[jocosesonata]

Commenting for the algorithm Gods to notice.

Linguistics is an underrated study, at least in terms of media popularity.

[LEDewey_MD]

The movie, "Arrival", blew me away with its intelligence and sophistication, (felt that it even went way beyond the original written short story, "Story of Your Life".) Enjoyed this video very much. Subscribed.

[rowandoggo]

ASL signer here, thank you for acknowledging that English and ASL are cometely separate languages. I will often be standing as a proxy interpreter between my Deaf and Hearing friends, and my hearing friends cant seem to get that fact.

[mxvega]

Cool take. I studied history/linguistics, then more history, then mandarin... and there's an even weirder spatiotemporal thing: the word for "the day after tomorrow" - which many English speakers would think of as in a future "in front" of them, perhaps over two hurdles of night - is "houtian", which in characters is literally "behind day". That is "the day that is behind me" and the other side of "mingtian", tomorrow. So the orientation of perceiving self along a time "line" is to face the past, with the future behind. There are curiosities re on / under - to describe time, but it's this one that always stuck with me. It is like the poetic description of history being an angel blown backwards into the future.
And I dreamed in mandarin for years. And my English handwriting got really weird - still find myself filling in the middle of words having written the first and end letters.

[mrglassscience]

I moved to a foreign country when I was 28 with basically no prior knowledge of the language. I was immersed in the language for two years with little to no outlet for me to use my native English. My experience was that it not only changed the way I thought about abstract ideas, but it did also affect my behavior. I went from thinking of the present as a narrow slice of only a few seconds or minutes at most, to the present being smeared out over several minutes or even hours. This affected the way I slept, interacted with other people, prepared for activities I had planned, and so on (all things to do with understanding the flow of time)

Unfortunately, these kind of changes are difficult to pin down with the scientific method because of the many confounding variables at play and us human beings doing things for so many different reasons. But my experience was that there is absolutely some truth to the idea of language rewiring our brain. It's just never going to be clear how much of an influence there is and how much it depends on the individual having the experience.

Also, yes: It won't ever give us magical powers to change the laws of physics.

[UkumaOokami]

My linguistics department also went together to see arrival, but we were really lucky and got to see a pre-screening about a week before it hit theatres, and before and after the film we were given talks in the theatre by the linguist who worked on the film and were given time after the film to ask them questions 1 on 1

[jeremy]

This isn’t quite what he talks about in the video, but I think it supports his points. I’m American and I was raised in a Christian home where my dad was the pastor of our church. Around 10ish years old, I started having “gay” thoughts. I thought my whole childhood that I was supposed to be straight and like girls, and I didn’t really even have a concept of being gay. Not once did I ever hear anyone in my church say anything bad about gays, but I also never heard anything good. I just didn’t really know that being gay was an option. So then as I became a teenager, you know how teens are, I started hearing other kids say bad things about gays and say that Christians hate gays. Over time, I realized I had absolutely no interest in girls and was very interested in guys, so I felt very uncomfortable with myself and very ashamed, like something was wrong with me. Eventually I worked it out with myself and my God and started to feel comfortable with the inconsistencies. When I started to learn and really understand Spanish in my mid teens, I started to realize how impossible it is to directly translate a sentence from one language to another. It made me think about the millennia in which the Bible had to be copied by hand, translated by hand, written and written and rewritten _countless_ times, translated from ancient language to ancient language to modern language to modern language and back again. It made me realize that the Bible is not infallible and I can’t take everything in it literally, which eventually led to me realizing I can’t take organized religion so seriously. Long story short, learning Spanish changed me from a sheltered depressed closeted gay Christian to a bilingual still depressed but openly gay agnostic.

[jonnestyronicha]

I find it interesting that in my language (a northeast indo-aryan language called assamese) and I think in several other indo-aryan languages, the words for "tomorrow/yesterday" and "day after tomorrow/before yesterday" fully lack temporal direction; they can refer to the past or future, and only encode the absolute distance of a specific point in time from the present, not the direction that point in time goes in.
The word for "tomorrow/yesterday" is "kali" (which is incidentally very similar to the name of the warrior goddess of time, destruction, and death, but I haven't looked into whether the word and the name are related) and the word for "the day before yesterday/after tomorrow" is "poroxi." Instead of distinguishing "tomorrow" and "yesterday, " you just use the word "kali" and either future tense or one of the past tenses, i.e. "I will do it _kali_" would be "I will do it _tomorrow_, " and "I did it _kali_" is "I did it _yesterday_". You can distinguish "tomorrow" and "yesterday" if you want by saying "the _kali_ that comes" and "the _kali_ that goes" but for the most part they're just determined based on sentence tense or context.

[zeideerskine]

Every bilingual or polyglot knows that language changes the way you think.

[Nosceres]

This video is incredibly well done. The creator should be proud of the quality of this.

[coenvo]

13:53 In mandarin, the two characters that indicate the temporal direction of time that you can put in front of the word for 'week' for example, are "上“ and ”下“, because written chinese is traditionally written top to bottom, these characters are actually literally pointing towards the temporal direction they indicate, 上 goes up and indicates a past (what is up, you have already written down), and 下 points to the future, to the direction you are writing in.

[bluesdudebassist]

Thank you, what a superb and eloquent video essay. Not only a fascinating examination of the language in the movie but also a cogent and well-argued piece in general. I learned a lot!

[raymiller]

A really interesting topic to me. I am a person who is mildly dyslexic with ADHD both diagnosed as an adult. Since those to revelations I have looked back at my life and I realize that many of my struggles have been related to time and rhythm… challenge perceiving either.

The ADHD part of my brain seems to have no grasp of the passage of time and rhythm. Which generally makes me (among other things) a terrible dancer.

I sometimes wonder how my challenges with words, and speaking patterns might fall into a similar space.

OT… I really loved Arrival, it was and remains a fascinating story for me.

[mollydooker]

I love Ted Chiang and couldnt believe the sheer hubris of attempting to turn the story into a screenplay. But what a truly great result. One of my favourite sci fi films. Great content, loved it. Just subbed.

[pillepolle]

This channel is gonna blow up in no time. Why do I know that? Because have learned the alien language from arrival.

[riccello]

Subscribed. Arrival was great. How the language affects the way we think has been on my mind for the last 20 years. I speak and understand 5 languages, 4 of which I learned by studying.

What got me thinking about it is the fact that certain cultures have predespositions towards certain qualities, whether they are objective or subjective. Like, why the Japanese are so neat and precise, or why italians make the world's most beautiful cars, why german mechanical engineering is top notch etc.

One particular question I had was whether the suffering of russian people and the stagnation of russian economic development is rooted in the russian language. I grew up in russia and russian is my mother tongue, but having lived in the US for the last 30 years, I can definitely feel that the mentality of those who live in russia and use russian on a daily basis is definitely different.

Russian is a complex language. Sentences can be constructed using words in any order. Words can be transformed to convey additional meaning. There are always too many choices, if you think about it. English is much more direct and precise in that regard. You just dont have to think about all those minute details and focus on the meaning.

So my theory is that we russians overthink stuff, and sometimes confuse the aims and the means.

There are probably even deeper implications that I have not realized yet, or perhaps I am unable to see because "the fish does not know its in the water".

[thakyou]

YES!!! Finally, I've been waiting for this kind of video! Language definitely does change the way you think. I, as a multilingual, know this very well!

[Lemonz]

This is my favorite movie!

I’m fluent in 3 languages, but my native language is tiny - it only has 70k speakers, so it’s pretty “useless”. I live in another country now, with another language (my 2nd language), so now I almost only use my native language in my internal monologue, with my family and sometimes when I listen to music from my home country. Even the internal monologue has become more and more in the other two languages that aren’t my native one, after so many years of not using it in any significant way.

All three of my languages are relatively closely related to each other (all are Germanic languages), so there are no significant “surprises” to my brain like how time is perceived, but it does affect the way I think in other ways. My dreams are less verbal now in any language, and are more “I just know what is said” without any actual talking.

[AxisSage]

I like how hollywood aliens have the ability to travel vast distances, pick a planet with intelligent beings but when they get here to talk, they leave figuring language to us...