Programme_Atmosphere | The Circle of Language and Cognition

What the alien language from Arrival
reveals about being human


What is the connection between human language and how the human mind works? Understanding the precise relationship between language and how we experience the world has been a central challenge for linguistics and cognitive science throughout the history of those fields. Arrival tackles this question by introducing us to the alien Heptapods: a mysterious species that experiences the universe in a completely different way to humans. The film is an adaptation of Ted Chiang’s 1998 The Story of Your Life, and both pieces explicitly tie the cognition of Heptapods to their language. How they communicate, the story goes, fundamentally shapes how their minds work - and even alters the minds of the humans who learn to communicate with them.

The proposal behind this is often known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee-Whorf. In a moment that obscure theories rarely get, the idea is even name-checked in the Oscar winning film: the linguist protagonist, Louise (Amy Adams), mentions it in passing to her physicist colleague Ian (Jeremy Renner). This occurs just as she first starts becoming disoriented by her memories of the future - memories triggered by her rapid acquisition of the visual alien language, Heptapod B. Cognitive scientists refer to the theory that language causes changes in cognition as linguistic relativity: the idea is that how you see the world is shaped by the languages you know. Although the general concept has deep roots in Greek philosophy, its modern iteration grew largely out of 20th century anthropology, and its namesakes Sapir and Whorf. As sheltered European and American anthropologists observed indigenous cultures and languages that were completely novel to them, they sought to account for what causes such striking human diversity.

The strongest version of linguistic relativity suggests that your language shapes the way your mind works, causing you to think and perceive in specific, deterministic ways. These ideas were entwined with colonialist projects: human diversity was not especially desirable to many early 20th century thinkers. Although at the time the theory was largely untested, this didn’t stop it from being used to threaten minority language and culture. The premise that language causes cognition was an appealing one for colonialists and imperialists alike: if by eradicating an indigenous language one could also eradicate threatening, non-conformist ways of thinking, this would be quite convenient. Despite this questionable recent history, the idea remains a compelling one that looms large especially in popular consciousness. Is it possible your language has a hold on how you see things in ways you may not even realise? Can you change how your mind works in radical ways just by learning another language? If language has this kind of power over our minds, what are its limits?

Particularly in the last few decades, scientists have been able to probe these questions, putting linguistic relativity to the test. Despite the appeal of the idea, strong linguistic relativity lacks evidence: our language does not force us into (or prevent us from) thinking or perceiving in certain ways. However, there is some evidence for weaker interactions between language and cognition. For example, speakers of Russian, which has many separate colour terms for different hues of blue, have slightly better colour discrimination for blues under certain conditions. But what makes this effect weak is that it is not exclusively caused by language: many other factors contribute to how someone perceives colour. An English speaker can learn to see different hues of blue without learning Russian; a color blind person will not spontaneously develop colour vision if they learn enough Russian. Our language may provide cognitive nudges, but it does not shove us into cognitive ruts.

While strong linguistic relativity points to an inevitable determinism, the evidence suggests that our ways of thinking and perceiving are more accurately described as nudgeable. These little flexibilities are an essential adaptive feature, allowing us to stay on our toes: a shove would force us in one direction, making it difficult to change course. But smaller nudges allow us to continuously adapt to a rapidly changing landscape. As a species, we have just the right amount of plasticity: the scientific term for the ability of an individual to change and adapt to its surroundings within its lifetime. In fact, this plasticity is part of what enables language: any human child can learn any one of the thousands of languages on Earth, because we are flexible creatures, especially when we are young. Language does not specifically or uniquely change the way we think or behave; it is just one of many things that can. Humans are caught in little adaptive loops of cause and effect for most of our lives - both linguistic and not. It is one of the things that makes us so successful as a species.

Despite the strong form of linguistic relativity having been largely discredited, a superficial reading of Arrival appears to promote an almost all-consuming version of it: Louise immerses herself in the language of the Heptapods, altering her cognitive system so dramatically that she starts to have memories of her own future. But there is another way to view this change: it comes as much the Heptapod language as from human cognition itself. As a human, Louise is flexible; a creature of cause and effect ready to be nudged by learning. While a strong Whorfian interpretation focuses on the changes language might cause in our minds, it largely ignores the bigger question of how our minds affect language. We see the changes Heptapod B causes in Louise, but the story leaves open questions about how - given time - humans might change Heptapod B.

As a linguist, Louise finds herself with the Heptapods at the invitation of the military. They are otherwise closely guarding the Heptapod ship, but have rushed in a linguist because communication with the visitors is a priority. The question is not if the Heptapods can communicate, but how they can expedite the process: they know that the Heptapods must have evolved a complex, language-like communication system to have arrived where they did.

For living things to have some communication system is unremarkable: bacteria send chemical messages to each other, flowers signal the location of nectar to bees, whales sing elaborate songs to attract mates. Each of these systems reflects the biology of the species that uses it: the biology of bacteria, for example, constrains it to limited forms of chemical communication. Human language, on the other hand, inhabits spoken, signed, and written forms. It can convey an unlimited range of thoughts: every day we produce utterances that have never previously been spoken in the history of our species. At least on Earth, there is something unique about human cognition that enables us to learn and use a complex and open-ended communication system. Without this kind of language-like communication system, it is unclear how a species could build something as complex and necessarily collaborative as a spaceship. That Heptapods are like us - at least in this way - is never in question.

Biological constraints on communication reframe the relationship between language and our minds in a new way: across species, radical differences in communication systems are likely to arise from radical differences in cognitive systems. Diversity in cognition begets diversity in communication. Communication may affect cognition, but we can’t forget that cognition shapes communication. This has been the focus of much recent work in the evolution of language: how, precisely, do particular features of human cognition give rise to particular features of language? How does the nature of individual minds end up shaping the shared collective behaviour that we call Language?

As evolutionary linguists, we often wish we had more examples of open-ended communication systems like language that we could study. What could we learn if we did find an alien species with a different, but equally powerful, way of communicating? Aliens have been a recurring theme in thinking about the evolution of human language. Charles Hockett, an influential linguist in the mid 20th century, packaged many of his ideas about the evolved design features of human language in a short sci-fi piece, How to Learn Martian. This legacy continues with modern research which uses artificial “alien” languages in the lab, teaching these to volunteers to see how well they can be learned, how they change over time, and whether they do indeed change the way people think.

In the story, while we know Heptapods must have a complex, language-like communication system, they are nonetheless undeniably alien: they have a completely different cognitive system to humans. In the story, Chiang identifies Heptapod cognition as teleological, while human cognition is sequential. As flexible creatures of cause and effect, humans create flexible sequential languages. Human sentences proceed word by word in one direction, requiring incremental, time-bound planning and perception to build or understand messages. Louise and her fellow scientists initially struggle with Heptapod A, the acoustic Heptapod language. This is precisely because they are searching for temporal, sequential patterns - like the ones found in human languages - that aren't there.

As teleological beings, the Heptapods always already know what the message will be, and can come out with it all at once. There is no such thing as a sequence. The circular Heptapod B symbols encode an entire utterance in one shape; unlike human sentences, these do not require a temporal order to interpret. Heptapod cognition perceives all of time simultaneously, and so their actions in a moment - including their utterances - entail the known state of the future. Producing and reading Heptapod B shifts Louise’s perspective in this direction; as Chiang puts it in his original story, “From the beginning, I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly”. As soon as Louise knows her future, her actions must preserve it.

But if Heptapod B caused a shift in perspective, what made Heptapod B the way it is? The language reflects the teleological cognition of the Heptapods, just as human language reflects the sequential cause and effect nature of human cognition. Despite their vast differences, both systems have the capacity to encode any message, about anything that may ever be.

The communication system of any species will be a product of the cognitive system it has evolved in. This makes human language a product of human biology to some extent - but its open-endedness means it has transcended its biological roots. Humans don’t only pass on DNA to their children, but tremendous amounts of cultural information - to their children, and to anyone else willing to receive it. This information is encapsulated in everything from stories and art, holding the key to everything from tools to weapons. We use language to network our intellects across time and space, to create platforms for ever more complex cultural products. These products evolve themselves, at faster and faster rates, free from the constraints and timescales of their biological bases. Not only is language shaped by cognition, but it provides a new kind of tool for minds to use. The flexible nature of our cognition has run away with this, likely accounting for much of our success as a species.

The relationship between language and thought is, in this view, circular. Asking how language affects cognition makes little sense unless we simultaneously consider how cognition affects language. Each shapes the other, and their mutual influence is difficult to break into a linear sequence. Like a Heptapod B symbol, it must be considered all at once to be fully understood. Although Louise’s human mind could not evolve a teleological language like Heptapod B, evolved human cognitive flexibility nonetheless means that the language can change her understanding of the world. The sequential nature of human cognition means that it can shift over time in response to events. Heptapods, on the other hand, always have a destination in mind: their actions are shaped by the ending, rather than the other way around. Neither the story nor the film provides the perspective of the Heptapods: we never really find out exactly why they came to Earth, what they are going to want from humanity in the future, or whether they were changed by their encounter with human language. But if Heptapods are truly cognitively teleological, any effect human language could have had on them was there with them all along. They always knew the destination, and they chose their route accordingly.



Chrissy Cuskley & Simon Kirby
Edinburgh, 2025