When Hollywood and Linguistics Collide

  • December 3, 2014
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  • Blog

Image via Flickr

While LSA helps people to connect in hundreds of the world’s languages, there are a few that may never be requested by our clients outside of their use by Hollywood and literature.

Directors often look to language to authenticate their stories, some going so far as to hire professional linguists to construct a new language for use in their film. Though, these linguistic creatives rarely start from scratch! Often they pull together threads of existing languages to create their new language’s unique syntax and phonology.

Take director Sydney Pollack’s 2005 film The Interpreter, in which a UN interpreter and expatriate of central Africa overhears a threat against the corrupt leader of her home country spoken in Ku. This country and its language were fabricated by Said el-Gheithy, the director of the Centre for African Language Learning in London. Ku, or Chitob uk u as it is known to native speakers, has parallels in the Bantu languages spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa.

J.R.R. Tolkien, a linguaphile and scholar of Old English, Old Norse, Finnish and other languages, constructed a multitude of language to which Middle-earth is home. Elves speak Quenya and Sindarin. Dwarves speak Khuzdul or sign in Iglishmêk. Men and hobbits? Depending on the time, Taliska, Adûnaic or Westron. Listen closely, and you can hear the roots in Old English, Finnish and other languages which fascinated the author.

Fans of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series can appreciate the effort expended by David J. Peterson to create the TV series’ Dothraki and Valyrian languages. Fans of Star Trek continue to speak and develop the Vulcan and Klingon languages first created for the series by American linguist Marc Okrand.

Ever heard of Newspeak? That’s the language spoken by the repressed in the film adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. What about The Divine Language of Luc Besson’s 1997 film The Fifth Element? Or Na’vi, spoken in James Cameron’s Avatar?

Many more examples abound. You can read more about fictional linguistic creations for Hollywood by clicking here. Ready to test out some vocabulary from a fictional language? Try your “tongue” here.