Arrival: A Synthesis Essay

In the movie Arrival, with Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker, 12 unknown objects land in 12 different, important locations across the world. Each country’s military has a different approach to dealing with the aliens and the US military decides to get a linguistic anthropologist, Dr. Louise Banks in order to try and communicate or decode the language of the aliens so they can find their purpose on earth (Villeneuve 2016). In the movie Arrival they use the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and show how Louise becomes immersed in their language and begins to think like the aliens. The idea of the sapir-whorf hypothesis is that language is locked to how we think, if we immerse ourselves in another language we can rewire

The movie Arrival uses the strong version of this hypothesis. The strong version is that the language you speak limits what you can think about and you can only think and view the world in the language you know. The strong version could also be referred to as language determinism, where the language you speak determines how you think and see the world (Welsh and Kirk 2013). The weak version is the idea that language influences the way you think and how you think because of the customs and cultures associated with the language you speak and where you speak it. This is language relativism, where language can affect the way you think and see the world and interpret the world (Welsh and Kirk 2013). In English there sometimes are not words to express the exact thing you feel or need or want but there might be a word in a different language. Not all words have a clean and perfect translation to words in any other languages. In this way we are limited to think in the languages we know but we are not slaves to that, I can word things that don’t make sense in English into Spanish. Occasionally I have days where my English makes little sense or the emotions I feel are more difficult to express because there is no direct word. This is when another language can come to the rescue and allow me to express my situation and what is occurring. This shows the weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and how our language

Louise Banks beginning to think in non-linear thought as she becomes fluent in the language of the Aliens, which is non-linear, and thinks the same way as the aliens. There are many indicators that Louise becomes fluent, the first and foremost is that she begins to think and view the world in the same way that the aliens do. She also has a dream in this language, which can be considered as an indicator of fluently by linguistic anthropology (Park 2011). This movie wonderfully plays out the way that emersion and ways that language can shape your thought process and world view. There are also several conversations concerning how the aliens can be taught, each country is teaching in a different way. China used games of chess to communicate with the aliens (Villeneuve 2016) while America was trying to teach the language of english, this is because if a conversation is done via a board game, there will always be a winner or a loser to the game and therefor