Not really about study of language, but like communication...Babel? Spanglish, Love Actually (Colin Firth's story) Lost in Translation. Not as interesting as alien language though. Or like codes maybe.

Hi, I agree with the fact that they conveniently skipped over the technique of mastering the alien language.

Another example of a film where they found a 'creative' way of showing how to learn a language was The 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas.

He played an Arabic poet, who was captured by Vikings who take him back to their country, up north. At first he doesn't speak the language. But since he is on the boat with them for weeks (months?) he gradually starts to make sense of their 'growling'. And at the end he does speak Norwegian! I found it very creative at the time (the movie is from 1999). And I wonder if you can pick up a language if you are exposed to it long enough.

Well you can always go to the source - Chomsky - on universal grammar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbKO-9n5qmc ;)

It was only mentioned very VERY briefly, but Ratners character (at some point after the second contact I think) mentioned that they'd been at it for over a month. It's not well handled but I think from that you could imagine they had been working through the vocabulary with the aliens for a couple of months by the time we get to the part where Amy Adams is making her own symbols.

As a translator, I felt really thrilled to see a linguist as a main character in a film, that is very rare! I saw this one a few years ago, I remember it was good but for some reason it was not so popular when it was released. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaudi_Afternoon Guess it would be a different story now that Barcelona is so trendy (which can be annoying sometimes if you're a local...).

You may want to check out Nell (1994). Although it's been a while since I've seen that movie, so I don't remember much of the story unfortunately.

Of course there's also Stargate (1994). It's basically a common sci-fi action blockbuster, but the lead character is a linguist who is assigned to decipher alien language.

In my opinion, Arrival, not only explores the "art" of language (the Amy Adams character refers to language as an art form during her classroom lecture at the beginning of the film) but about the language of film as an artform. The visual links Arrival has to "Persona" and "2001: A Space Odyssey," films which, in their souls, are about cinema as an art form, is striking. The image of Amy Adams reaching out to the screen that separates her from the "aliens" is certainly an homage to the sequence in the beginning of "Persona." And the shape of the "alien" vessels vaguely resembles the monolith in "2001," which has been interpreted as a stand-in / metaphor of the cinematic screen.

As to Chomsky's universal grammar theory, note that it is challenged these days : http://www.salon.com/2016/09/10/what-will-universal-grammar-evidence-rebuts-chomskys-theory-of-language-learning_partner/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/25/daniel-everett-human-language-piraha Here is a comprehensive account of the discovery of the extremely difficult to decipher Piraha language that is at the center of the controversy: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interpreter-2

Showing the details of how linguists go about learning a new language would probably be a bit boring for a movie. There is an interesting SF novel by Jack Vance, "The Languages of Pao" about a world on which different classes of citizens all have their own language. E.g. the warrior class has a language particularly suitable to its task, etc. A few other SF authors have also taken up the subject. I've read another novel that had language as its main plot point a few years ago, but its author and the title escape me now (I will post it when I remember). Anyway, I vaguely recall that understanding a fiendishly inaccessible alien language was crucial to ending/ winning a major conflict.