Star Wars, a space opera franchise created by George Lucas, features various fictional languages throughout its setting. The lingua franca of the franchise is known in-universe as Galactic Basic, which refers to the language of the film or work itself, be it English or a language into which that work was dubbed or translated.
Characters often speak languages other than Basic, notably Shyriiwook spoken by Chewbacca and other Wookiees, droidspeak spoken by R2-D2 and BB-8, Ewokese spoken by Ewoks, and Huttese spoken by Jabba the Hutt. None of these language names appear in the Star Wars films themselves.
The fictional languages were approached as sound design and developed largely by Ben Burtt, sound designer for both the original and prequel trilogies of films. He created alien dialogue out of the sounds of primarily non-English languages, such as Quechua, Haya, and Tibetan. This methodology was also used in The Force Awakens by Sara Forsberg. Lucas also insisted that written text throughout the films look as dissimilar from the English alphabet as possible, and constructed alphabets were developed.
Critics contend the languages constructed for the films compared unfavorably with the true constructed languages found in some other fictional works. The usage of heavily accented English for extraterrestrials characters was also criticized as contributing to the suggestion of racial stereotypes.
Development Language development was approached as sound design and was handled by Ben Burtt, sound designer for both the original and prequel trilogies. He created the alien dialogue out of existing non-English language phrases and their sounds, such as Quechua for Greedo in the original Star Wars film and Haya for the character Nien Nunb in Return of the Jedi. He also used English, as in the original Star Wars, where he synthesized originally English dialogue from a Western film until it sounded alien. Burtt said of the process: "It usually meant doing some research and finding an existing language or several languages which were exotic and interesting, something that our audience — 99 percent of them — would never understand."
This methodology to create the sound of alien languages was carried into production of The Force Awakens. Director J. J. Abrams asked Sara Forsberg, who lacked a professional background in linguistics but created the viral video series "What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners" on YouTube, to develop alien dialogue spoken by Indonesian actor Yayan Ruhian. Forsberg was asked to listen to "Euro-Asian languages", and she drew from Gujarati, Hindi, and other Asian languages as well as Indonesian and Sundanese, Ruhian's native language. She also listened to languages she did not understand to better structure the words and sentences to sound believable.
During production of the prequel trilogy, Lucas insisted that written text throughout the films look as dissimilar from the English alphabet as possible and strongly opposed English-looking characters in screens and signage. In developing typefaces for use in Episode II – Attack of the Clones, including Mandalorian and Geonosian scripts, graphic artist Philip Metschan created alphabets that did not have twenty-six letters like the English alphabet.
Galactic Basic Galactic Basic, often simply Basic, is the language of the work itself — in-universe, it is the lingua franca predominantly spoken by the inhabitants of the galaxy.
Accents Lucas intended to balance American accents and British accents between the heroes and villains of the original film. He also strove to keep accents "very neutral", noting Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing's particular British accents, which he perceived as "sort of mid-Atlantic neutral accents". In critical commentary on Episode I – The Phantom Menace, Patricia Williams of The Nation felt there was a correlation between accent and social class, noting that Jedi speak with "crisp British accents" while the "graceful conquered women of the Naboo" and "white slaves" such as Anakin and Shmi Skywalker "speak with the brusque, determined innocence of middle-class Americans".
To decide on the sound of Nute Gunray, a Neimoidian character portrayed by Silas Carson, Lucas and Rick McCallum listened to actors from different countries reading Carson's lines. Eventually, they chose a heavily Thai-accented English, and Carson rerecorded the dialogue to mimic the Thai actor's accent. Gunray's accent was described by critics to be "Hollywood Oriental" that contributed to criticism of Gunray as an Asian stereotype. Watto's accent was similarly criticized as lending to anti-Semitic and anti-Arab connotations.
Non-standard Basic Yoda characteristically speaks a non-standard syntax of Basic, primarily constructing sentences in object–subject–verb word order rare in natural languages. This sentence construction is cited as a "clever device for making him seem very alien" and characterizes his dialogue as "vaguely riddle-like, which adds to his mystique". This tendency is noted to be written for an English-speaking audience; the word order is retained in Estonian subtitles, where it is grammatical but unusual and emphatic, and Yoda's dialogue is in subject–object–verb word order in Czech dubs.
Gungan characters, notably Jar Jar Binks, speak in a heavily accented Basic dialect critics described as a "Caribbean-flavored pidgin", "a pidgin mush of West African, Caribbean and African-American linguistic styles", "very like Jamaican patois, albeit a notably reductive, even infantilized sort", and suggestive of stereotypical African-American culture. This was cited as a trait that led to criticism of the Gungan species as a racially offensive stereotype or caricature.
Aurebesh
Aurebesh is an alphabet used to represent spoken Galactic Basic (i.e. English) and is the most commonly seen form of written language in the Star Wars franchise. Its letters correspond to each English letter, plus certain English digraphs (pair of characters).
The alphabet was based on shapes designed by Joe Johnston for the original trilogy, which are briefly featured in screen displays in Return of the Jedi. Johnston's design, called Star Wars 76, was used to create a font and again used in Attack of the Clones by Metschan, who incorporated the font alongside the later Aurebesh version used in the spin-off products. The 2004 DVD release of the original trilogy replaced Latin characters with Aurebesh.
In the early 1990s, Stephen Crane, art director at West End Games, became intrigued with the shapes as they appeared on the Death Star. He sought to develop them into an alphabet to be used in West End Games' licensed Star Wars products, primarily to allow players to render their characters' names, and received permission from Lucasfilm to do so as long as it was presented as one of many alphabets in the Star Wars galaxy, not the sole and exclusive alphabet. After copying the letters from screenshots by hand, he standardized the letters based on shapes similar to the Eurostile font. He named and assigned a value to each letter, and derived the name "Aurebesh" from the names of the first two letters: aurek and besh. Once Crane completed the alphabet, Lucasfilm requested a copy to distribute to other licensees.
In anticipation of the December 2015 release of The Force Awakens, Google Translate added a feature to render text into Aurebesh in November 2015, which was subsequently removed in February 2016.
Other languages Dathomiri Archaic speech samples are found in The Clone Wars season 3. Mother Talzin, a Witch of Dathomir associated with the Nightsisters, is found speaking Dathomiri while possessing Darth Maul on Dathomir.
In April 1994, the then unidentified language first appeared in Dave Wolverton's The Courtship of Princess Leia, when the young Teneniel Djo unleashes a Spell of Storm on Luke Skywalker and Prince Isolder of Hapes. Through retroactive continuity, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (a 1985 made-for-TV film) was the language's first real appearance. In this story, Charal – a witch later retconned as a Nightsister – was seen incanting spells over a crystal oscillator.
Binary (Language) Binary is a language consisting of beeps and other synthesized sounds used by some droid characters, such as R2-D2, BB-9E and BB-8. Burtt created R2-D2's dialogue in the original Star Wars with an ARP 2600 analog synthesizer and by processing his own vocalizations via other effects. In The Force Awakens, BB-8's dialogue was created by manipulating the voices of Bill Hader and Ben Schwartz with a talkbox running through a sound effects application on an iPad. Although binary is unintelligible to the viewing audience, many characters in the Star Wars films are able to understand it, most notably Luke Skywalker.
Ewokese The Ewoks of the forest moon of Endor speak a "primitive dialect" of one of the more than six million other forms of communication that C-3PO is familiar with. Ben Burtt, Return of the Jedis sound designer, created the Ewok language Ewokese.
On Return of the Jedi DVD commentary track, Burtt identified the language that he heard in the BBC documentary as Kalmyk Oirat, a tongue spoken by the isolated nomadic Kalmyks. He describes how, after some research, he identified an 80-year-old Kalmyk refugee. He recorded her telling folk stories in her native language, and then used the recordings as a basis for sounds that became the Ewok language and were performed by voice actors who imitated the old woman's voice in different styles. For the scene in which C-3PO speaks Ewokese, actor Anthony Daniels worked with Burtt and invented words, based on the Kalmyk recordings.Ben Burtt, DVD commentary on The Return of the Jedi. In a previous scene as C-3PO levitates, the Ewoks also spoke words (such as "look", "this", and "beautiful") of Tagalog.
Marcia Calkovsky of the University of Lethbridge holds that Tibetan language contributed to Ewok speech along with Kalmyk, starting the story from attempts to use language samples of Native Americans and later turning to nine Tibetan women living in the San Francisco area, as well as one Kalmyk woman. The story behind these languages' choices is referenced in Burtt's 1989 telephone interview, and many of the used Tibetan phrases translated. The initial prayer Ewoks address to C-3PO is the beginning of a Tibetan Buddhist prayer for the benefit of all sentient beings and/or brahmavihāras (or apramāṇas). There is also the second quarter of a refuge prayer. People of the Tibetan diaspora were puzzled, as many phrases they understood did not correlate to events on screen.
Ghor Ghor is the language of Ghorman, featured in the second season of Andor. A specific language for Ghorman was created to emphasize its sense of community, insularity, pride, and desire to maintain control over itself. Because French actors were cast for Ghorman character, the language was developed by Marina Tyndall based on French and French phonology. Marion Deprez, a French dialogue coach, also contributed to its development. There are two writing systems: Ghorelle (High Ghor) and Dixian (Low Ghor), named after graphic designers Elle McKee and Lauren Dix, respectively.
Rodian In the original Star Wars film, Greedo speaks an unspecified alien language understood by Han Solo; it was later identified as Rodian. Bruce Mannheim described Greedo as speaking Southern Quechua in "morphologically well-formed" phrases with sentences ultimately meaningless. Allen Sonnefrank, a Quechua speaker and linguistic anthropology student at University of California, Berkeley, claimed Lucasfilm contacted him to record Quechua dialogue for the film. He was told the dialogue was to be played backward for the film. Sonnefrank refused to record the dialogue, feeling it to be a "potentially exploitative move best made by one whose first language was Quechua, if at all".
Huttese