(SPOILERS AHEAD!)

Based on the 1998 short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. “Arrival” gave us a temporal paradox and a sci-fi movie, not like any other alien movie. And the important message is that language is important not only to communicate to each other, but to improve our biology and even our conception of reality.

The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ world view or cognition. Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the principle is often defined to include two versions. The strong version says that language determines thought, and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories, whereas the weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.

The most cited example is the claim that Eskimo languages have an unusually large number of words for snow is a widespread but controversial idea first based on the work by anthropologist Franz Boas. It is often used to argue that language embodies different local concerns in different areas of the world or to defend the theory of linguistic relativity.

An example. In English, some nouns (like bean) are “countable” and can be made plural (beans), while others are ‘mass’ and can’t be made plural (you can have two cups of rice but not two rices). Other languages, like Japanese, don’t make this distinction; instead, classifiers like cup of are used for all nouns. Researchers are studying whether this property of the language makes English speakers more aware of the distinction between substances and individual objects.

The researcher Lera Boroditsky, describes in “Edge“:

When asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.”

Also, investigations tell that bilingual people could have change the order in their brains and can prevent mental and neurodegenerative diseases, more than monolingual people.

What do you think?

Learning a different language could change the way we think?