Disney announced this week that it has bought Lucasfilm – the production company founded by George Lucas, the man behind Star Wars and Indiana Jones. In honour of Lucas’s huge galaxy “far, far away”, Language Insight is counting down its top 10 fictional languages. Read on for the first five and come back tomorrow to find out what made the top spot! 10) Ku Ku was a language specifically constructed for use in the 2005 Nicole Kidman movie The Interpreter. The task was given to Said el-Gheithy, head of the Centre for African Learning. As Kidman’s character was raised in the fictional African Republic of Matobo, the film’s director Sydney Pollack asked that the language be based on real languages spoken in east and southern Africa. As well as learning the fictional language, Kidman also had to come up with a completely new accent to use when speaking English. The lengths actors go to for their crafts! 9) Nadsat This is the language exclusively spoken by A Clockwork Orange’s main character Alex and his group of droogs. In fact, the language is not totally fictional, but is actually an adaptation of English with Russian influences and a little cockney rhyming slang thrown in for good measure. The book’s author Anthony Burgess loved language, was able to speak several and understood it was something that constantly evolved and changed. By having his narrator speak Nadsat, Burgess was able to mark Alex as separate from the rest of society and ensure his novel would not get dated. 8) Newspeak Another language constructed for one of the great works of modern literature and another to be based on English, Newspeak is the invention of George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The language is stripped down to the bare minimum, with words acting as verbs as well as nouns and any negative words being removed entirely. This was a language designed to control society! 7) Simlish Anyone who plays life simulation game The Sims will be familiar with this upbeat language. While the language itself is complete gibberish, the thinking behind it is very intelligent. Game makers EA Games knew it would take hours to record all the possible dialogue that could be spoken during the course of playing The Sims, and this would also have to be translated for any foreign releases. They came up with the bare bones of a gobbledygook language and asked the actors to improvise around that. Such is the popularity of Simlish that some pop stars have even rerecorded their hits in the language for use on the game. Check out Lily Allen’s Smile, recorded entirely in Simlish. 6) Dothraki This is a relative newcomer, but if you’ve been glued to HBO’s hit Game of Thrones, you’ll be familiar with Dothraki. It is the language spoken by the people of the same name who live in the Dothraki Sea on Essos. The language was created to appear specifically in the TV adaption of George RR Martin’s epic fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire. The language was constructed by David J Peterson from the Language Creation Society, with the instruction that it be simple enough for the actors to learn and say as though they are speaking fluently. Thanks to the success of the show, numerous websites have now sprung up offering to teach fans how to speak Dothraki. That’s our first five, but don’t forget to come back tomorrow and find out the remaining fictional languages to make our top 10!
