Languages in Star Wars

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The Star Wars space opera universe, created by George Lucas, features some dialogue spoken in fictional languages. 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 that the work was dubbed or translated into.

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.