As a film, Arrival is fascinating. However, I am more intrigued with the idea of a language that is heavily tied to time and perspective. The film is about a linguist trying to communicate with two aliens who are able to experience time in a completely different way to humans. As such, their language is reflective of this and the film makers worked with linguists to develop a new language that actually 'works' (for lack of a better word). The aliens in said film write with logograms, circular glyphs that feel foreign to any other language on Earth. Its circular form is reflective of the aliens interpretation of time –that it is non-linear. The team of designers and linguists created a dictionary of 100 symbols that all vary in complexity. The logograms weight is suggestive of context: a thicker swirl of ink can indicate a sense of urgency and a thinner one might imply a quiet tone. These nuances are somewhat present in our written language, use of capitalisation, italic text, hierarchy, and so on, but these designs demonstrate how emotive the alien language feels, that it could be completely separate from spoken languages. In terms of time, the alien's non-linear approach to it means that the way they communicate can ‘predict’ the future. Also thinking about how we read English, left to right, ties in with our approach to time, start to finish or beginning and end. The aliens circular language is almost never-ending and always comes full circle.
