Canadian crucial in helping Arrival sharpen alien tongue
McGill University prof responsible for keeping invasion adventure authentic
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for Arrival.
Large-scale Hollywood films employ a wide range of consultants, from emergency room doctors to military experts to veteran constitutional lawyers.
Rare is the big-budget adventure, however, that retains a linguist specializing in syntax, morphology, ergativity and nominalization.
As moviegoers have turned out to see Arrival — Denis Villeneuve’s cerebral alien-invader adventure has grossed more than $60 million (U.S.) domestically since its release — many have been struck by the language symbols at its centre.
Those ornate, hollowed-out inkblots — like Rorschach tests by way of E.T. — have distinguished the film from many science-fiction movies that came before.
To ensure the authenticity of the symbols (and the linguists), producers hired Jessica Coon, a McGill University associate professor in syntax and indigenous languages. Coon has spent years as a field worker studying assorted Mayan languages as well as the First Nations language of Mi’kmaq in Quebec.
“There was a lot in the script that has to do with how we conduct field work to study a language,” Coon said by phone. “But you’d be surprised by all the emails I’ve been getting: a lot of talk about aliens.”
Arrival centres on Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a specialist recruited by the U.S. government after unidentified aliens known as Heptapods dock their crafts just above 12 global epicentres, including in the United States. Louise spends much of the film trying to communicate with the mysterious and possibly threatening creatures, learning the Heptas’ language and teaching them our own. The question many of us come away with: how much of a language is this really?
The answer is that it is one — slightly. The inkblots, known as logograms, were primarily devised by the film’s production design team under Patrice Vermette. There were only about 100 in use during the shoot. So it’s not like the full-blown language of Star Trek’s Klingon or Avatar’s Na’vi.
Still, there’s a consistency to the logograms as they’re used in Arrival; Coon helped vet them to make sure all the curlicues and flourishes matched on repeated uses of the words and concepts. What’s more, she made sure that Banks’s process for figuring out what they meant looked like that of a person actually studying a new method of communication.
The professor says that Arrival’s linguistic ideas are genuine, even if they’re sometimes outside the bounds of the field’s conventional wisdom.
Coon, based in Montreal, has often travelled to Chiapas and other remote parts of Mexico to research Mayan languages. She said her job is rarely as hard as Banks’s is in the film because there usually are bilingual speakers who can translate — it’s a lot easier to communicate with someone in a language new to each side if you have a go-between who understands both.
Still, with obscure dialects, Coon and colleagues might need to fly as blind as Banks does.