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Heptapod A & B
Pronunciation	hɛptæpɑd
Created by	Ted Chiang
Setting and usage	"Story of Your Life" novella and Arrival film
Purpose	Constructed languages Artistic languages Fictional languages Heptapod A & B
Writing system	Logographic script
Sources	Constructed languages  A priori languages
Language codes
ISO 639-2	art
ISO 639-3	--

The Heptapod Languages are the constructed fictional languages of the heptapods, an alien race that makes first contact with humanity in Ted Chiang's short story, "Story of Your Life," which was later adapted into the 2016 film Arrival.

The languages are classified by two separate names due to the fact that heptapods use two separate languages for vocal communication (Heptapod A) and written communication (Heptapod B), most likely due to how the heptapods perceieve time. Due to this, the heptapods utilize a different writing system (Heptapod B) to present ideas and events simultaneously, instead of following the sequential nature required in speech (Heptapod A).^[1]

Heptapod A and B bear no resemblance to each other due to the semasiographic nature of Heptapod B, which means the written language does not represent the sounds of the spoken language. Both languages also have entirely separate grammatical rules.^[2]

The written language was developed for Arrival by production designer Patrice Vermette and his wife Martine Bertrand, based on the descriptions in the "Story of Your Life" novella.^[3]

During the development of the film Arrival, director Denis Villeneuve wanted to deviate from the typical electronic sounds used in many science fiction films and instead wanted the sound of Heptapod A to be "very organic."

Sound design for Heptapod A initially began with Dave Whitehead, a sound designer who had previously worked on several Peter Jackson films. Whitehead used animal sound recordings, such as whale songs and cat purrs, along with altered recordings of his voice to create the sounds of Heptapod A.^[4] He worked alongside McGill professor Morgan Sonderegger, who served as a linguist consultant and assisted in splicing the sounds during the development of the language. ^[5]

While Martine Bertrand and Patrice Vermette are given credit for the creation of Heptapod B in Arrival, the language was a collaborative effort of the crew. Conceptualization began with screenwriter of the film, Eric Heisserer, who decided to base Heptapod B's circular script off of the etchings in the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings. Due to this, Heisserer's circular illustrations of Heptapod B initially bore a strong resemblance to J.R.R Tolkien's Tengwar script.^[6]

Afterwards, Patrice Vermette, in charge of Production Design for Arrival ^[7], worked alongside other crew members to further develop Heptapod B. Despite consulting with linguists and graphic designers, Vermette and the crew continued to struggle with developing the appearance of the characters. They researched languages such as Arabic, ancient Asian languages, and dialects from North Africa to gain inspiration, but found that this would cause Heptapod B to resemble human language more closely than alien language.^[8]

After several attempts to create a design for Heptapod B, Vermette's wife, artist Martine Bertrand, offered to sketch some conceptual designs for the language. Bertrand approached Vermette with some designs for Heptapod B, which deviated from the more mathematical or hieroglyphic conceptualizations the crew had come up with, and instead appeared as more "inky and smoky" characters.^[9][10] These designs were immediately approved by director Denis Villeneuve, who gave Bertrand the task of developing 15 similar designs for Heptapod B. ^[11][12]

Once the design for Heptapod B was developed, Patrice Vermette and his team oversaw the semantics of the characters. After several characters and definitions were developed, Stephen Wolfram, computer scientist and founder of Wolfram Mathematica, and his son, Christopher, were asked to analyze them. Wolfram and his son developed a computer code using the Wolfram Language to section each character into 12 different parts in order to analyze the language, and found that certain patterns repeated through the characters.^[13][14][15] Heptapod B characters were also sent to Jessica Coon, an associate professor in Linguistics at McGill University who was asked to annotate the characters as if she were analyzing them in real life. The input from the Wolframs and Coon helped inspire various scenes within Arrival.^[16][17] As Vermette and his team gained more insight on the semantics behind Heptapod B, they developed a dictionary of roughly 100 Heptapod B logograms, 71 of which were used in the film.^[18][19][20] With their research into Heptapod B, both Vermette and Christopher Wolfram stated that resources were available to build a larger vocabulary for Heptapod B, but this process would require an extensive amount of time.^[21]

In Story of Your Life, Heptapod A, the vocal communication of the heptapods, is described as sounding "vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur."^[22] Although the specific sounds of the language are mainly described as "flutters" throughout the novella, the characters are able to identify the grammar of the spoken language.

Although Heptapod A contains some grammar structures structures that are similar to that of human language, the language often breaks linguistic universals found in human language, as it is designed to "provide flexibility within the confines of sequential speech" ^[23]

Similar to some human languages, Heptapod A uses case markers to indicate whether a noun is a subject or object of the sentence. Due to this, the sound of nouns in Heptapod A would change depending on whether they are a subject or object of the sentence.

For example, the word "who" takes on the case marker -m to indicate that it is the object of a sentence:

Who as a subject: Who is at the door?

Who as an object: Whom did you see?

Case markers can also change the sound of the noun completely to indicate subject/object, such as with the words "I" and "me."

In Heptapod A, prefixes are added to verbs and function similarly to adverbs. In the novella, the heptapods are described as adding prefixes to the verbs "hear" and "see" to indicate that they have heard or seen clearly or easily.

Verb prefixes can serve a similar function in human language, such as in the examples heard and misheard

Heptapod A has free word order, which is different from most human languages. This means that words can be placed anywhere in a sentence and still have the same meaning. For example, the meaning expressed in the sentence, "I see you" could be expressed in the following ways:

"I see you."

"I you see."

"You I see."

One distinct difference between Heptapod A and human languages is the free word order to the extent that conditional clauses (ie. if-statements) have free order in sentences. This is notable due to the fact that most human languages follow a specific order for conditional statements, and this rule is generally considered a linguistic universal between most human languages.^[24]

According to Joseph Greenberg's linguistic universal #14, most human languages follow the rule that the antecedent of a conditional clause (ie. the if-clause) must always precede its consequent (the result), regardless of what word order the language follows.

For example, Japanese, a language that structures sentences as subject-object-verb (SVO), shows the presence of this rule despite having a reverse word order to English, which uses the subject-verb-object (SOV) order.^[25]

If-clauses in English (SVO)
Sentence		If it rains, I will stay home.
Word		if	it	rains,	I	will	stay	home.
Word Order (SVO)		conjunction	subject	verb	subject	verb		object
Conditional clause		antecedent (if-clause)			consequent (result)

If-clauses in Japanese (SOV)
Sentence		雨が降ったら、私は家にいる. Ame ga futtara, watashi wa ie ni iru.
Word		ame-ga	fut-ta-ra	watasi-wa	ie-ni	i-ru.
Word Order (SOV)		subject (rain)	verb (fall-conditional)	subject (I)	object (house-in)	verb (stay-nonpresent)
Conditional clause		antecedent (if-clause)		consequent (result)

Heptapod A is not dependent on presenting the hypothetical of a situation (the antecedent) before presenting the consequence of such event (the consequent), which means that the consequence of an event can be presented before mentioning the event that triggered the consequence in the first place. In order to convey this in speech, the speaker would have to have knowledge of the consequence either before or at the same time as having knowledge of the event that triggered it.

Heptapod A also utilizes center embedding in sentences, which involves the embedding of a phrase into the middle of another phrase of the same type.^[26] Although center embedding is a common practice for human languages, Heptapod A permits an unlimited amount of center embedding in sentences, which would severely complicate the meaning of human sentences.

Jessica Coon illustrates the increasingly complicated nature of center embedding in a sentence:

a. The cat fell. b. The cat [ that the dog chased ] fell. c. The cat [ that the dog [ that the mouse scared ] chased ] fell. d. The cat [ that the dog [ that the mouse [ that the bird saw ] scared ] chased ] fell.[27]

The complicated nature of sentences c and d is not specifically due to the syntax (arrangement of words), given that sentence b can still be well-understood with center embedding. Instead, the difficulty with multiple center embedding has been claimed to be an issue of human short term memory.^[28] Human short term memory must remember the subjects of the sentence and later match them with their disjointed predicates (information on the subject), which are usually separated by multiple other clauses. Due to this, multiple center-embedding is practically absent in spoken human language, and does not exceed the amount of three cases in written language.^[29]

The presence of unlimited center embedding implies that heptapods can easily handle the cognitive load required to understand multiple center embedding.^[30]

In Story of Your Life, Heptapod B, the written language of the heptapods, is described as looking "like fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escheresque lattice, each slightly different in its stance." ^[31]

Heptapod B is semasiographic, which means the written language does not represent the sounds of the spoken language (Heptapod A). This is another main difference between the heptapod languages and human language, as all human writing systems are based on the spoken language in some way.^[32]

In the story, the main character initially uses the term "logogram" to refer to the individual written "graphs" the heptapods produce, but realizes that it implies that individual graphs have an equivalent in spoken language. The term "semagram" is found to be more appropriate, as the graphs contain meaning without being linked to spoken words.

Heptapod B script is not word-divided, and therefore is not written in a linear fashion, such as in rows or spirals.^[33] Instead, sentences are formed by combining the individual semagrams for each word together. This is done by rotating and modifying the individual semagrams to fit together.^[34] However, when heptapods write in Heptapod B, they do not write a single semagram and then alter it afterward to form a sentence. Instead, semagrams begin with a single continuous line that participate in several clauses in a sentence as the semagram becomes more complex. This means that one must know the layout of the entire sentence before writing the first stroke.^[35]

Due to the semasiographic nature of Heptapod B, it contains an entirely separate grammar system to the spoken language, Heptapod A.

Inflections are used on semagrams to indicate its declension (gender, number, case, etc.). There are various inflections that are used by Heptapod B to illustrate declension, including but not limited to:

• Varying a certain stroke’s curvature or thickness
• Varying its undulation (ie. shape)
• Varying relative sizes of two root words
• Varying relative distances or orientations of two or more root words^[36]

Due to the amount of variations Heptapod B semagrams can have, it is impossible to isolate single graphemes (letters or short strings of letters) from a semagram.

Heptapod B does not contain punctuation, mostly due to the fact that it does not represent spoken language. Instead, the syntax (arrangement of words and phrases) of a sentence is determined by the way in which semagrams are combined together. Sentences are created by combining two or more semagrams together, and the only indication of a paragraph or page of writing is the size of the semagram.^[37]

Heptapod B illustrates the subject and object of a sentence by orientating the noun in a semagram relative to the verb. A common rule in Heptapod B appears to be indicating the subject of the sentence by positioning the strokes for the noun and verb parallel to one another. To indicate the object of a sentence, the strokes for the noun and verb run perpendicular.^[38]

Heptapod B appears to use an inflection system to modify the verbs in a sentence. This is done by changing the curve of certain sections of the semagram.^[39]

Heptapod B functions on Lagrangian Mechanics, a form of classical mechanics that is based on least action principles and describes the motion of objects in terms of energy (ie. kinetic and potential energy).^[40][41] This differs from Newtonian mechanics, which describes the motion of objects in terms of forces rather than energies.^[42] In Story of Your Life, it is discovered that the heptapods view Lagrangian Mechanics as basic knowledge.^[43]

According to Lagrangian Mechanics:

1. The moving path of an object will always be the one in which the action is minimized between Point A and Point B (ie. the least action principle)
2. One can fully predict where the object will move to next if they know the potential and kinetic energy of the object

A popular example of least action principles is Fermat's principle, which states that rays of light always follow the path that takes the least amount of time.

In Story of Your Life, the characters discover that Lagrangian Mechanics influence several aspects of Heptapod B, such as the free word order, and their ability to write semagrams. In order to write in Heptapod B, one must know the entirety of the sentence before producing a single stroke, which reflects principles in Lagrangian Mechanics.

The foundational nature of Lagrangian Mechanics causes heptapods to percieve time differently from humans, which is also reflected in their language.

In Lagrangian Mechanics, if an individual knows the stored energy (potential energy) and moving energy (kinetic energy) of an object, they will have knowledge of both the start and end point of an object's path, and therefore be able to predict the entire path of the object before it begins departing from Point A to Point B. Ted Chiang uses a teleological interpretation of least-action principles to suggest that heptapods view time holistically, and therefore can see both the present and future simultaneously.

In Heptapod A and B, this perception of time is largely present in their free-word order, especially in Heptapod's A conditional clauses, which are not reliant on stating the cause of an event before the consequence of an event. It can also be argued that heptapods' holistic percetion of time also impact the writing method used in Heptapod B, as the entire sentence must be known before writing the first stroke.

On a comment board, Ted Chiang states that his inspiration for including a teleological interpretation of least-action principles in Story of Your Life came from Variational Principles in Dynamics and Quantum Theory, which includes a quote from Max Plank suggesting that least-action principles could reasonably impact an individual's perception of time.^[44][45]

In Story of Your Life, the main character begins to understand and use the heptapod language, and thus begins perceive time in the way the heptapods do. This situation is largely reliant on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which suggests that the language an individual speaks impacts the way they think. Although the controversial hypothesis is largely deemed as false by modern linguists^[46], the inclusion of the theory in Story of Your Life does lend itself to the discussion of how impactful language can be on an individual's life.