In the 2016 movie Arrival, water-dwelling extraterrestrials make an appearance on Earth. The main human character’s job is to learn how to communicate with the seven-tentacled extraterrestrials before tensions escalate into war. This character, played by Amy Adams, is a linguist, and she uses her earthly expertise to decode the language of and communicate back to the “heptapods.” Ultimately, she learns that their language is richer than it seemed and includes an embedded experience of time that is different from that of humans.
Obviously, Arrival is a fictional movie, and Adams hasn’t studied actual alien syntax (that we know of), though she did work with a linguist to prepare for the role. But there are researchers who are trying to prepare for the kind of scenario Adams’s character finds herself in: investigating, ahead of any cosmic contact, how hypothetical space aliens and humans might someday understand one another. They’re part of a field called xenolinguistics.
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