| abstract
| - The spoken language most often heard in the Star Wars films is Galactic Basic (shortened to Basic) although this name itself is never explicitly mentioned in the films themselves. Basic is a universal language, used for communication between many different species in the Galactic community. In universe the language is a constructed language that was created from a mixing of the various native languages of the founding members of the Galactic Republic, including the Duros, the Iridonian Zabrak and Humans. Spoken Galactic Basic is identical to spoken English. Imperial officers, some Jedi (including Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn), and other characters (such as droid C-3PO) speak with a Received Pronunciation accent (an accent form of British English). It is often referred to as a Coruscanti accent. The majority of the Rebels and most other humans, however, have American accents, or "Rim accents". Non-humans speaking Basic often also have distinctive accents, sometimes reminiscent of others found on Earth. For example, some people have observed that Neimoidians (who comprise the Trade Federation's leadership) use a Thai-accented English, though this is very hard to justify on concrete linguistic grounds (depending on their country of origin, where they were raised, and/or dialect, speakers of Thai and other Oriental languages the world over have different accents when speaking English). Others have observed that the Toydarian Watto speaks with a Yiddish-, Italian- or perhaps New York-influenced accent, and Jar Jar Binks speaks with a Caribbean English-influenced accent. It is worth noting that languages in the Star Wars universe are not always tied to specific species, just as in the real world languages are not always tied to specific nations or ethnic groups, but can become the native language of a separate population. Notable non-human dialects of Basic include the Gungans of Naboo's pidgin dialect of Galactic Basic (though they do also have a native tongue), and Yoda's unusual dialect of Basic in which sentences usually follow an OSV order, rather than the more usual SVO. Frank Oz, who invented this mode of speech for this character, has said in interviews that this way of speaking demonstrates and represents a certain prescience or awareness of the future that Yoda has. It is unknown if this is a dialect spoken by all members of Yoda's species, or whether it was a quirk only Yoda possessed—although in the Expanded Universe, Yaddle, a female member of the same species as Yoda, is also shown speaking in an OSV order. In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Master Vandar Tokare, a male of the same species as Yoda, is seen speaking Basic in standard SVO mode. Another lingua franca in the Star Wars Universe that is spoken by many groups and species is Huttese, spoken on Tatooine and other worlds in and around Hutt space. The name Huttese suggests that it was originally spoken by the Hutt species and adopted by other races, most likely those involved in business with the Hutts such as the Rodians. It is spoken in the films by both non-humans (Jabba the Hutt, Watto, Sebulba and others) and humans (most notably Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones). Bocce is quite common as a trade language, and is very common on the Outer Rim, but is far lesser known in the Coreward worlds. The Ewoks of the forest moon of Endor speak a "primitive dialect" of one of the six million other forms of communication that C-3PO is familiar with, although what this language was is unknown. According to Ben Burtt, in Bantha Tracks #17 August 1982: "For the Ewoks, I was inspired by a recording on a BBC documentary of an elderly woman speaking Tibetan. It was very high-pitched and sounded like a good basis for Ewokese to me. Eventually then, what evolved was a pidgin, or double talk version of words from Tibetan, Nepali and other Mongolian languages [sic, neither Tibetan nor the Nepali language are Mongolian or even Altaic languages] Huttese was created by the same process." Many interspecies conversations in the Star Wars universe are multilingual, with the humans usually speaking Basic and the non-humans speaking their own or a regional language although many humans are generally familiar with non-human languages even if they do not speak it as goes the same for the non-humans. Code-switching is rare, but most notable among the clone commandos, Mandalorians, and Hutts. There are many other minor languages mostly spoken by native species only. These languages include: Jawaese spoken by the Jawa of Tatooine, Vong spoken by the Yuuzhan Vong, Geonosian, Mando'a spoken by the Mandolorians, Gungan, Dosh spoken by Trandoshans, Mon Calamarian and many more.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)