Thoughts on language diversity in Star Wars (warning, I have a lot of thoughts)
I LOVED seeing humans speak something other than Galactic Basic/English in Andor and I want to see more of it!!
Generally, Star Wars does a decent job of showing us alien languages. Which makes sense. Not only are there a variety of different regions/cultures throughout the many planets in the galaxy that would be expected to have unique languages, but also, alien mouths and throats are different from human mouths. Sometimes drastically different. Like Ithorians, who have two mouths!
With humans, though, the majority we see speak basic. And while this makes sense from a storytelling perspective (we as the audience need to understand what the characters are saying), it doesn’t make sense from within the story.
There are a LOT of humans in the galaxy, spread out over thousands of planets. I don’t believe for a second that every human on every planet is a native galactic basic speaker. Even if humans all came from one basic-speaking region and colonized/spread themselves out across the galaxy from that point, the language wouldn’t have stayed the same. Over the years, languages take on new words and accents from other languages. Slang develops and gradually becomes actual words. Grammar structures and words and tones and sounds evolve and adjust according to terrain and culture and so many other areas of life.
So with the vast number of planets in Star Wars + how long humans have lived there…thousands of dialects should have developed. Not just for aliens, but for humans, too.
And I wish they would show us this more often in Star Wars media. Yeah, there are some cool Wookiepedia articles about Star Wars species and their languages, but I want to see it appreciated on the screen.
We do hear a variety of different accents in Star Wars, which had to come from somewhere. So maybe this suggests that some humans (and aliens) have a native language and learned basic at school or later in life, like Cassian did. It seems like this is the case with the Twi’leks as well. And then you get cases like the Gungans who have developed their own dialect, which allows them to communicate with basic-speakers but clearly has some different grammar and pronunciation (perhaps due to Gungan mouth/face structure and the need to speak underwater/in high humidity).
If this is the case, though, and a bunch of our favorite characters are bi/tri/multilingual, can we please see little snippets and flashbacks, like we saw in Andor, of characters’ native languages? Or have characters make little references to their native languages, or languages spoken on their home planets? Or see written languages other than Aurebesh?
Side note: I also love seeing the written Mando’a in the Mandalorian. How cool would it be if we could see little details like that more often— Geonosian written on ships made by Geonosians and Futhork translations on a restaurant sign because the owner is from Naboo?
To do this is more work on the creation side of things but in my opinion, it pays off. Language adds so much more depth to the universe and it’s just beautiful and I love it
