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Leia’s surname, Organa, reflects that in the conflict between the natural world and the evil mechanized Empire, she stands firmly on the side of nature. After he recorded actors speaking the newly invented words, Burtt sped up the tape to create the Jawas’ signature high-pitched voices.Įwokese: The language spoken by the Ewoks is actually a pidgin of several Mongolic languages including Tibetan, Nepali and Kalmyk.

Jawaese: The language spoken by the Jawas was inspired by Zulu, as well as a few other African languages. Huttese is predominantly heard on Tatooine and is spoken by many characters including Greedo, and Jabba the Hutt and his entourage. Burtt mostly took the sounds of words as a jumping off point, but some Quechua words did make it into Huttese (although he ignored their original meanings). Huttese: The most-spoken fictional language in the films, Huttese was based on the Incan language Quechua. Instead of constructing alien languages from scratch, he riffed on real indigenous languages from all over the world: They are evocative, atmospheric and merely hint at fully-developed fictional worlds. Instead, Star Wars’ sound designer Ben Burtt approached the invention of alien languages in much the same way as the rest of the films’ sound effects. Unlike the systematic languages created for The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek, the languages in Star Wars do not have functional grammar, vocabulary and syntax. Instead of constructing alien languages from scratch, he riffed on real indigenous languages from all over the world.

Star Wars’ sound designer Ben Burtt approached the invention of alien languages in much the same way as the rest of the films’ sound effects. With Star Wars, Lucas set out to retell the timeless “hero’s journey” myth, but in a very new way. Reading Campbell’s book helped Lucas build his characters and story on time-tested archetypes and mythic structures. Tying these disparate cultural elements together is the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose book, The Hero with the Thousand Faces, claims that all cultures throughout time have told and retold the same essential myths. These influences are clearly visible in Lucas’ films - from the good guys dressed in white and bad guys dressed in black, to the desert planets, robots, laser guns and spaceships, to the venerable sword-wielding mercenaries following Taoist philosophy. Like most boys growing up in 1950s and ’60s America, Lucas was raised on Westerns, campy sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, epic science fiction novels like Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars and Frank Herbert’s Dune, and Japanese samurai films. To understand where Star Wars stands in the pop culture pantheon, we must first acknowledge the stories that influenced the films’ creator, George Lucas. In honor of the franchise’s continued popularity, we’ve done some intergalactic etymology to discover the origins of the character names and cultures from that very familiar galaxy far, far away, as well as offer a deep dive into Star Wars language.

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More than 40 years (and 350 films, books, TV shows, comics and videogames) later, the Star Wars galaxy holds permanent real estate in the pop cultural mass imagination. It wowed audiences worldwide and became a modern classic. In 1977, Star Wars unleashed a brand of Hollywood blockbuster that had never been seen before.

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