May the Fourth Special: Where Star Wars Gets Linguistics Right
In honor of Star Wars Day and the premiere of the series finale of Clone Wars, let’s explore the sociolinguistics of that galaxy far, far away.
The Star Wars Galaxy is among pop culture’s most expansive and enduring fantasy worlds. Since 1977, eleven feature films, multiple television series, and hundreds of novels, graphic novels, and video games have stitched together a narrative that spans hundreds of planets, thousands of years and, to date, over 150,000 pages of encyclopedic detail in an immense (and often satirized) Star Wars Wiki. However, despite the scale of Star Wars mythology, world-building has often lacked when it comes to language.
Unlike the languages of other fantasy worlds, many of which were designed by real-world linguists, the languages of Star Wars sprang from the imagination of series sound designer Ben Burtt. Chewbacca’s native Shyriiwook, for example, is a sonic pastiche of bears, walruses, and lions. Ewokese, spoken on the forest moon of Endor, is a remix of several human languages from South and Central Asia. Languages on the planet Tatooine are gibberish served with a dash of Quechua. Burtt’s goal was to design unrecognizable sounds not literal languages, as he told Star Wars composer John Williams in an early 1980s conversation.
In other words, while Klingon in Star Trek, Na’vi in Avatar, Elvish in Lord of the Rings, and Dothraki and Valyrian in Game of Thrones are fully developed languages for enthusiastic fans to learn, the many languages of the Star Wars Galaxy — Huttese, Ubese, Jawa, Ewokese, Shyriiwook, Twi’leki and more — aren’t languages at all, but audible set pieces. And while that hasn’t stopped determined Star Wars fans from reverse-engineering translations of on-screen dialogue, as one rigorous analysis of Ubese phonology shows us, the general attitude toward Star Wars linguistics is perhaps best summarized by Game of Thrones linguist D.J. Peterson’s assessment of the aforementioned Ubese: “Not worthy of serious consideration.”
However, the rigorous development of fictional languages doesn’t necessarily constitute rigorous world-building. More important than whether or not fans can learn a language off-screen is how the characters use language on-screen. In other words, a fictional world’s sociolinguistics — how language interacts with psychology, sociology, and culture — is more central to making that world believable. And in sociolinguistics, Star Wars excels.
Let’s explore.
Mutually Passive Multilingualism
Passive multilingualism, also called passive fluency, describes the phenomenon of people who understand a language well without necessarily speaking it. Mutually passive multilingualism occurs when two passively fluent people speak to one another, each in their own language. This is especially common in diaspora and immigrant populations, where children understand their heritage languages, but may not speak them. One of my oldest childhood friends is the daughter of Danish and Greenlandic parents. At home, her parents spoke Danish, while her friends and teachers spoke English. Conversations with her mother were therefore marked by mutually passive bilingualism: her mother spoke Danish and she responded in English.
Mutually passive multilingualism is also common in regions where proficiency in multiple languages is high. When I lived in Barcelona, I often observed conversations in which one person used Spanish, the national language of Spain, and the other used Catalan, the language of the Catalonia region, where Barcelona is the capital. Throughout Catalonia and especially in Barcelona, comprehension in both languages is very high, so it’s common for people to speak in whichever language they find comfortable, regardless of what their conversation partners are speaking. To students of Catalan and Spanish, as I was, this can be confusing, but in Barcelona, mutually passive multilingualism is integral to daily speech. Indeed, it’s a fact of life wherever language diversity is strong — and the culture-rich Star Wars Galaxy is no exception.
Han and Chewie
Two of the most recognizable characters in all the Star Wars saga are Han Solo and Chewie Chewbacca, whose entire friendship is expressed through mutually passive bilingualism. The former, a human, speaks ‘Galactic Basic’ (in other words, English, or whichever language your copy of Star Wars has been dubbed into), while the latter, a Wookiee, speaks Shyriiwook, a language that sounds more like the vocalization of an otter than it does human speech. Though it’s never said explicitly, it’s implied that Wookiees are physiologically incapable of speaking the languages of other species; instead, they learn to understand the languages of other lifeforms, just as other lifeforms learn to understand theirs. In the above scene from The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Han and Chewie have a passively bilingual argument.
Fun fact: while Chewbacca’s dialogue is never subtitled, it is translated in the film’s scripts — and on the set of the 1977 original, the actor actually read the lines.
Han and Greedo
In the 1977 original Star Wars, the Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi calls Mos Eisley spaceport on the planet Tatooine a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”; an interstellar melting pot of criminals from every corner of known space. In our galaxy, such a location would be ripe for mutually passive multilingualism, and in Han Solo’s character introduction, we learn that this is indeed a part of life on Tatooine. When the bounty hunter Greedo approaches him at gunpoint speaking another language (probably Huttese), Han replies in Galactic Basic. The two proceed from there, understanding one another, until Han famously shoots first.
Uncle Owen and the Jawas
In another scene from the 1977 original, Luke Skywalker’s uncle, Owen Lars, barters with a group of Jawas selling robots (‘droids’, as they’re called in Star Wars) and other equipment. While the Jawas speak their language, Owen speaks Galactic Basic, and the haggling proceeds smoothly. The world-building in this scene implies that Jawas and the humans of Tatooine interact frequently enough that members of each species are passively fluent in the other’s language.
Fun fact: the only on-screen human character to speak Jawa is Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin, the titular character of Disney’s The Mandalorian.
Count Dooku and Poggle The Lesser
In the finale of Attack of the Clones (2002), the Sith Lord Count Dooku conspires with Poggle the Lesser, leader of the Geonosians, to hide their plans for the ultimate superweapon, the Death Star. Much like Shyriiwook, the Geonosian language appears so phonologically distinct that Geonosians struggle to speak the languages of other lifeforms, and other lifeforms struggle to speak theirs. But that’s not a roadblock to understanding. Here, too, in Poggle the Lesser’s and Count Dooku’s conversations, we find mutually passive multilingualism in Star Wars.
Code-Switching
Code-switching, also known as language alteration, is another phenomenon in culturally diverse environments, wherein multilingual people oscillate between different accents of the same language, or between different languages altogether — often subconsciously. For example, when my Miamian girlfriend talks about the city where she was born and raised, her accent naturally shifts in intonation, taking on the harder consonants, shorter vowels, and sing-song drawl of Miami English. When I’m around New Yorkers, especially Jewish New Yorkers, I’m more likely to use Yiddish words and phrases that I learned from my father, like mazel tov, mechaia, oy gevalt, or l’chaim. (This last one is technically Hebrew, but you get the picture.)
In the United States, perhaps the most famous example of this is Spanglish, or ‘Spanish-English code-switching’: the speech of native bilinguals who shift fluidly between both languages depending on the given social context. (There is some debate as to whether certain instances of Spanglish could be classified as a pidgin or hybrid language in its own right, but that’s for another galaxy.) In Star Wars, code-switching is less common than mutually passive multilingualism — perhaps because there is less social pressure to change languages! — but we do, from time to time, see this sociolinguistic phenomenon, too.
Luke and Bib Fortuna
In Return of the Jedi (1983), when Luke Skywalker infiltrates Jabba’s palace to rescue his friends Han and Leia, Jabba’s majordomo Bib Fortuna confronts Luke in Huttese, the lingua franca of Tatooine, commanding Luke to leave. In an instance of passive multilingualism, Luke understands Fortuna, but replies in Galactic Basic, using a Jedi Mind Trick to hypnotize Fortuna into allowing him to stay. “You will take me to Jabba now,” Luke commands and, in a moment of subconscious code-switching, Fortuna replies in Galactic Basic, “I will take you to Jabba now.”
Hera Syndulla and Cham Syndulla
In Homecoming, Season 2, Episode 16 of Star Wars Rebels, the Twi’lek insurgent fighter Hera Syndulla confronts her estranged father, Cham Syndulla, about her decision to abandon the fight for their homeworld, Ryloth, in order to join the wider galactic rebellion. In Star Wars lore, the Twi’leks have a unique mother tongue, but as evidenced by the language of the Syndullas’ argument, it appears their home language is a Twi’leki dialect of Galactic Basic. However, after years of off-world fighting, Hera’s accent appears to have shifted to the pronunciation of her human comrades — only to shift back to her Twi’leki accent as the argument with her father intensifies. This was almost certainly an instance of subconscious code-switching.
Hera Syndulla and Grand Admiral Thrawn
In Hera’s Heroes, Season 3 Episode 5 of Star Wars Rebels, we see an example of conscious code-switching when, under interrogation by imperial officers, Hera Syndulla reverts to her native Twi’leki accent in order to mask her identity, posing as an innocent civilian under the boot of occupation.
My Fan Theory: Tusken Sign Language, trade language?
In The Gunslinger, Season 1 Episode 5 of The Mandalorian, we see Din Djarin negotiate passage across Tusken land using a signed language, which we’ll call Tusken Sign Language, or TSL for short. True to Star Wars tradition, TSL is not a fully developed sign language, but a set of gestures invented by deaf actor Troy Kostur, who played one of the Tuskens on set. This scene was especially notable because, in universe, the Tuskens (known disparagingly by Tatooine’s humans as Tusken Raiders or ‘Sand People’), primarily use an audible language — which, like Geonosian and Shyriiwook, appears phonologically challenging, if not impossible, for other lifeforms to speak. Since we see Din Djarin using TSL to barter with Tuskens, it’s possible that TSL is, in fact, not the native sign language of Tuskens who are deaf, but a signed trade language used for intercultural communication by deaf and hearing speakers alike.
Throughout history, trade languages have emerged in multilingual environments, typically as pidgins of two or more native languages, as a bridge for easing communication in commerce and geopolitics. In the 17th century, for example, Basque-Icelandic pidgin was spoken in Reykjavik. As may be the case with TSL, signed trade languages have emerged in primarily hearing communities, such as Plains Indian Sign Language, which served as an auxiliary language for the Plains Nations of present-day Canada and the United States.
In Conclusion
At first glance, the many cultures of Star Wars seem to strain under the boot of linguistic hegemony, with Galactic Basic representing peak cultural privilege. However, as the prevalence of mutually passive multilingualism shows us, the world of Star Wars is more inclusive than you might think. The world-building implies a galaxy where linguistic diversity is not just accepted but widely practiced. In other words, if you’re from that galaxy far, far away, you’re most likely multilingual, and speaking your language, whatever it is, is the norm — a far cry from our world, where a handful of languages, all the vehicles of recent empires, continue to monopolize public space. (Although, as I’ve written and spoken about, things are getting better.)
Of course, in the more than fifty years since the first Star Wars movie premiered, there have been more critical interpretations of the series’ sociolinguistics. Anthropologists have pointed to the lack of fully constructed languages, the ubiquitous passive fluency in Galactic Basic (that is, English), and the persistent lack of subtitles which, when taken together, appear to constitute chauvinistic othering of non-English-speaking cultures. And while these critiques have a point (don’t get me started on that time C-3P0 described Ewokese as a “primitive dialect”), they’re for another time. It’s Star Wars Day, and the long-awaited finale of Dave Filoni’s opus is here. So, go enjoy the final episode of Clone Wars — and may the Fourth be with you, always.
