"Language is the foundation of civilization, it is the glue that holds people together..." -Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner); The Arrival (2016)
This comes to a common conscience in the film regarding vocal communication in intelligent life,
intelligence being the ability to convey conscience through human channels and all, it treats this simple trait as the only way for an intelligent species to communicate when it is entirely possible for a species to be successful, potential even near or beyond human technology level without it. First to understand why vocal communication is not a necessity we would need to know why we use vocal communication. It is a very low energy use of an ever present property of Earth, no where on Earth is there an entirely natural occurrence of a complete vacuum, an area without any form of medium water/air. We don't have to use constant and intense resources to produce sound the same way a creature with bioluminescence may need to, we can convey strong context using short burst of energy thus making it a very attractive ability that many species of Earth have adopted, but let's say we remove the idea of there being the need or the opportunity to use vocal communication it would be highly likely that a species would more than likely not gain the ability to speak but could still communicate using other means. One good example of this could be a extraterrestrial species, being a species not bound to a planet, which would have no real use for the production of sound to convey meaning so they would most likely utilize a form communication similar to bioluminescence, like what many deep sea fish do, or have bodies that could reflect sunlight and manipulate it to convey meaning, think light signals or flags also technically chameleons do this.
But now that we understand why we have vocal communication, we must fully grasp how a species could communicate without vocalizations, though vocal elements could still play a role like how humans have pheromones and such but don't use them nearly as much in social situations as other animals. These theoretical aliens could use light based communication as established but that could be prone to error and would more or less make at least one creature confused as they have to be looking directly at the creature and would need no outside interference light, so they'd probably coast around dead solar systems or in the spaces between systems, similar to Junior from Star Trek. Other forms of communication depend solely on the planets these creatures inhabit, maybe a planet of very turbulent winds or very thick or light atmosphere making it impossible to communicate vocally properly which could encourage sonar communication, think bats/dolphins, or potentially ESP communication. Regardless there are other forms of communication other than vocal that can exist and there are many examples on Earth to this day, insects utilize bioluminescence, pheromones, and occasionally sounds to communicate.
The most important thing to consider though is there a way to communicate with a species that lacks any form of vocal communication and somehow come to a common conscience, YES!! We could use a variety of diagrams and scientific principles that could help illustrate what we’re trying to communicate, the Voyager plates have an example of this but on the plate there is a flaw which we will get to. Also if they lack neither vocal nor visual perception than we may be in trouble but there are examples on Earth of this being the case and we have actually gotten far in experimentation with them, Dolphins have limited visual perception relying mostly on sonar to sense things so using too much visual was a no go so we monitored and understood dolphins learning their barebones of their language and soon we may be able to convey certain ideas to them but this will be reinterpretation not true understanding similar to the "talking" monkey experiments, we may never be able to properly communicate with a creature with fundamentally different properties and understanding of intelligence it is all relative to what that creature was designed to do. Using laws like the composition of an atom is our best shoot at reaching common ground, but it isn’t assured they will understand just looking at how the idea of what an atom looks like has evolved over the time we've known about it maybe they stopped at figgy pudding or have evolved such sophisticated systems as to illustrate the true form of an atom without any need for abstraction, but the thought is there and maybe the aliens will be able to interrupt that two shapes surrounding each other in an orbital path is in fact a hydrogen atom but it could very well just be from their perspective how we perceive the solar system maybe the alien’s could think we live in a single planet solar system and we’re trying to demonstrate the map shows distance by the revolutions of our planet, which is unreliable at best as they don’t know the specifics of our planet, not the sun’s shape, stage, nor planets size or where to start measuring and so on. But now on to a problem the movie as well as the Voyager plate fell into, the concept of the arrow, it is so simple so primal that I doubt you even thought that potentially a species could develop with no understanding of what an arrow could mean or represents, the movie shows this with the lead actress pointing to herself to indicate that she is who she is referring to but an alien species especially the ones that are depicted in the movie; who would be wanting to utilize their limbs for multiples tasks at once and would thus not really have a free arm to potentially be able to indicate themselves even in rest would have no understand of what that gesture means. This is only compounded when we look at other Terranen animals such as dogs. Do you know instinctively when your dog is referring to itself in communication? We can understand when monkeys do as they have similar way of showing it as us but not dogs they physical can’t point to themselves so how do they I don’t know and it’s not what this is about it’s only here to indicate that the fact that if we don’t know how creatures we live with everyday point to themselves than how can we expect an alien we’ve known for months does.
In conclusion The Arrival is a good movie go watch it
Further reading