The language barrier is a common challenge explored in first-contact stories both fictional and non-fictional. As such, linguistic differences are often made synonymous with cultural differences in popular media. Two science fiction stories, the film Arrival (2016) and the novel Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, portray the overcoming of severe inter-species language barriers. While they both emphasize the importance of verbal communication and understanding the language of their respective aliens, the pace at which characters overcome the language barrier and the complexity of the languages at hand result in vast differences in the narrative weight the language barriers have. 

Arrival and Project Hail Mary can be compared based on their shared novum: the first contact of humanity with extraterrestrial life. A novum is the “‘new’ or ‘new thing’, to refer to this ‘point of difference’ (the plural is ‘nova’). An SF text may be based on one novum. . . This ‘novum’ must not be supernatural but need not necessarily be a piece of technology” (Roberts, pg. 7) That said, they differ in a few key areas. Arrival quickly establishes that the alien life is intelligent while Project Hail Mary waits until page 125 (out of 478) to introduce intelligent aliens. Arrival exclusively features intelligent aliens, while Project Hail Mary also includes unintelligent alien microbes. Arrival bases its plot on alien linguistics (in order to save humanity from sure destruction) while Project Hail Mary treats it as a passing inconvenience on the way to more pressing plot points (saving humanity from sure destruction). This difference in attitude is what I seek to explore.

Arrival’s protagonist is Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist tasked with learning to communicate with the alien Heptapods whose ship hovers over the United States. The Heptapods, Abbott and Costello, have a cryptic and highly detailed symbol-based language. Project Hail Mary’s protagonist is middle school science teacher, Ryland Grace. On a mission to discover a solution to humanity’s existential threat, the astrophage (a space-dwelling microbe that eats photons), Ryland encounters an intelligent lifeform he nicknames Rocky, from the planet Eris. Rocky’s language, Eridianese, consists of musical notes and chords that compose words and phrases. On the page, the dialogue in Eridianese appears as musical notes.

Compared to Arrival, Project Hail Mary spends proportionally less of its narrative overcoming  the language barrier, and features a far less complex language barrier, which downplays the narrative importance of linguistic difference. While Arrival spends almost the entire film working through the language barrier, Project Hail Mary places the bulk of it between pages 168 and 222. For most of the time before page 168, there was no language barrier to overcome, as Rocky hadn’t yet been introduced, and after 222 the language barrier had been reduced to the occasional unfamiliar word. The language is treated like a code that can be easily converted back and forth between English and Eridianese without regard for interpreting grammar, sentence structures, tenses, or any of the other linguistic elements that make languages different from each other. Using a waveform analysis software and Microsoft Excel (Weir, pg. 194-195), Ryland is able to compile a fairly detailed Eridianese dictionary, with his computers translating the words as Rocky speaks them. In a paper on the issues of accurately conveying the ‘truth’ in research, James Cliffird says that “Since the seventeenth century, they suggest, Western science has excluded certain expressive modes from its legitimate repertoire: rhetoric (in the name of “plain,” transparent signification), fiction (in the name of fact), and subjectivity (in the name of objectivity)” (Clifford, pg. 5).  It could be argued that Ryland’s account of what happened is at best a partial truth, and that the protagonist, who is not a trained linguist or ethnographer, can’t be expected to give a wholly accurate account of the minutiae of learning a language– in this light it could be read a subjective account conveying Ryland’s experience as an objective occurrence. This would excuse the lack of skill in his approach to learning Eridianese, and the lack of nuance in his descriptions of Eridianese, but not explain his success in learning a completely new type of language. However, this could be refuted by Weir’s inclusion of computer software. Instead of engaging with the language barrier head-on, the software is used as a narrative tool to skip the hard parts– the protagonist is spared the long laboring hours of deduction and problem solving depicted in Arrival in order to move on to what Weir intended the story to be about: two desperate lifeforms working together to save their respective species. It is not surprising that Weir would make a convenient foreign language and convenient tools to learn it so that the story could progress smoothly, but it does significantly undercut the narrative role of (and vastly understate the difficulty of overcoming) the language barrier. This handling of language can be at best described as a plot convenience, and at worst, an example of ethnocentric writing. In his article “Ethnocentrism and Ingroup Consciousness,” Richard Adams quotes Herskovits’ definition of ethnocentrism: “’Ethnocentrism is the point of view that one’s own life is to be preferred to all others. Flowing logically from the process of early enculturation, most individuals have this feeling about their own culture, whether they verbalize it or not’,” (Adams, pg. 598). It is hard to tell from his writing whether Weir believed he was writing a completely unique language or not. If he did believe that, the fact that it is grammatically identical to English except for the word vocalizations may be unverbalized ethnocentrism showing through his writing. If this logic were to be followed further, the subordination of social sciences to hard sciences in the text could be interpreted as having a similar cause: a life lived in a society that conflates scientifically produced knowledge with objectivity.

Arrival spends almost all of its run time on the language barrier, and in doing so makes the linguistic elements of the story the defining feature of the film. This on its own would be enough to do the language barrier justice. The protagonist, Dr. Banks approaches the task in a way that effectively communicates the complexity and difficulty of unraveling an entirely new language. In the scene at minute 42 of the film, Banks describes the process, beginning with the question of whether or not the aliens understand what a question is (Villeneuve). In a piece about Arrival and the anthropological context of it, Sutton quotes McWhorter in saying, “‘The Sapir-Whorf idea is true in itself, but to nowhere near the extent that the film implies’” (Sutton, pg. 9). The pay-off of the film, the grand reveal at the end, is that the language the heptapods had been using all along was the weapon or tool that they had come to deliver in the first place. In receiving this language, Banks is able to unlock an entirely new experience of reality which demonstrates that the film is aware of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and able to apply it in a way that allows them to explore hypothetical questions relating to it. McWhorter is correct in saying that they overstate the extent of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but in doing so they greatly magnify the narrative weight of the language barrier. Not only was learning the language shown to be crucial in answering the question of why the heptapods arrived, but it was the whole point of the arrival in the first place. In the notes of Sutton and Wogan’s introduction to their book Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies, they say “Weakland writes that films are superior to other fictional material. . .  in “projecting important cultural views” because “they are a group rather than an individual product . . . [and] they are a mass medium of communication, aimed for a very wide and popular audience; they thus are likely to deal, relatively simply, with quite basic and general themes, not ones which are highly intellectual, specialized, or esoteric” (Sutton and Wogan, pg. 20). In this sense, Arrival both conforms to Weakland’s low expectations for films, and exceeds them. It exceeds Weakland’s expectations in that it deals with complex linguistic ideas that mass audiences may not otherwise be exposed to. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might be considered intellectual, specialized, and esoteric by the casual viewer. Arrival slouches to Weakland’s expectations in the sense that it explores the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the most caricatured, extreme fashion, without the nuance that can be communicated in, for instance, an academic setting. The flavor-blasted version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis depicted in the film is not, technically speaking, a successful one. With that said, Beth Baker-Cristalis says in her article “Poiesis of Possibility: The Ethnographic Sensibilities of Ursula K. Le Guin”,“fiction writers completely control the worlds about which they write, and although those worlds may mean to say something about the world outside the book, the realities they invent begin and end within the story” (Baker-Cristales, pg. 15). While Arrival clearly draws upon real concepts and modes of understanding language, such a statement from Baker-Cristales is worth considering– part of the novum (the heptapods with their universal language) could be that the language functions in a way that is quite similar to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis taken to the extreme. Since this is not presented directly in the film, and the claim that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is at work is presented clearly, it must be read as if the exaggeration is not part of the novum.

Bibliogrpahy

Adams, Richard N. “Ethnocentrism and Ingroup Consciousness.” American Anthropologist, vol. 53, no. 4, 1951, pp. 598–600., https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1951.53.4.02a00380.

Baker-Cristales, Beth. “Poiesis of Possibility: The Ethnographic Sensibilities of Ursula K. Le Guin.” Anthropology and Humanism, vol. 37, no. 1, 2012, pp. 15–26., https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1409.2012.01105.x.

Clifford, James. Writing Culture. University of California Press, 1986.

Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction. Routledge, 2008.

Sutton, David Evan, and Peter Wogan. Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies. Berg, 2010.

Villeneuve, Denis, director. Arrival. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2016.

Weir, Andy. Project Hail Mary: A Novel. Vallantine Books, 2022.