![]() Louise’s methodology is inspired by a series of daydreams about playing with her child, including familiar tricks like the use of illustrated children’s books. The early stages of data collection show common frustrations in the field: The aliens (“heptapods”) can’t tell whether Louise is trying to talk about herself or humans generally until she and colleague Ian dramatically rip off their hazmat suits and repeatedly shout their names, Pokemon style. Thankfully for Louise, that methodology can also apply to the ink-ring language squirted by giant superintelligent noisesquids who arrive on Earth in massive shell-like UFOs. Linguistic fieldwork is unique because for the most part, documentation linguists use the same tools in the field while working on any of the 7000-ish living languages, before the majority of them inevitably perish. ![]() In Arrival, linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) is in a fieldwork situation - she is presented with an alien language, documents it and uses her data to further linguistic theory (with a sweet book deal). Instead, it explores how that kind of “universal translator” could come to be in the first place.īut before my Tinder dates switch their openers from “how many languages do you speak?” to blowing ink rings in my face, I’d like to examine linguistics as portrayed by Arrival and how it relates to our work. Arrival doesn’t assume we’ll be able to communicate with aliens with some advanced technology that makes no sense. Finally, popular culture is giving us a reference point. ![]() It’s difficult for linguists to explain to people we meet what it is that we do, and why we are so fascinated with it. ![]()
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