The Story Behind The Language in Dune
The science of creating an artificial language
Invented languages, sometimes called conlangs (short for ‘constructed languages’), have been receiving a lot of attention in the last decade or so. This is largely due to the phenomenal popularity of Game of Thrones, with several fictional languages spoken throughout the show’s many seasons. Fantasy and sci-fi fans have long been fascinated by the languages of Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and others, but the recent trend for tv and film adaptations of major series in these genres has brought them to a wider audience. The release of Dune: Part Two in cinemas has once again highlighted this element of fantasy storytelling.
One of the challenges of adapting fantasy and sci-fi epics for the screen is how to include their fictional languages. When writing a novel, it is relatively easy to have your characters speak in an invented language. The lowest effort option is simply stating “x character spoke in y language”, although most authors throw in a couple of made up words to give the reader a certain impression of how the language might sound. However, this isn’t really an option on film, since the medium directly shows characters speaking, rather than telling us that they are speaking.
There is actually an entire field within academia called Adaptation Studies, which considers such dilemmas and suggests possible solutions. I discovered this field during my own Translation Studies course, since the two are closely related. Using some terminology from these fields can help us to understand why the production team working on Dune would choose to have so much of the film spoken in a fictional language.
To give a simplified overview, there are two main options in this situation: omission and explicitation. Omission means doing away with the fictional language(s) to avoid confusion and the need for subtitles, but losing a beloved and enriching part of the series’ worldbuilding. Explicitation involves the characters speaking in the fictional language(s) and providing subtitles for the viewers.
When working with a fictional language from a novel, the second option requires far more work on the part of the production team, as substantial fleshing out of the source material’s fictional language is needed. Vocabulary and grammatical rules must be invented and applied, then actors trained in how to pronounce their lines.
This is the approach taken in Dune: Part Two. The Fremen people speak the language Chakobsa throughout the film, in fact many of the film’s major speeches are carried out in this language.
Most fictional languages are somewhat based on a real language or language family. For example, the slang language Nadsat used by teenagers in A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess is based on Russian (‘nadsat’ actually means ‘teen’ in Russian) and Tolkien’s influences include Welsh, Old English and Finnish. Frank Herbert, Dune’s author, drew heavily from Arabic: over 80 terms in the novel are clearly derived from this language.
But why is so much of the film in this constructed language? Far more of Dune: Part Two is acted out in Chakobsa than is the case in previous adaptations of fantasy and sci-fi works.
A couple of terms from Translation Studies can be useful in explaining this choice, namely domestication and foreignization. Domestication is the act of translating a cultural item in the source text by using a common, similar, but not identical, item in the target language, whereas foreignization is retaining the foreign term.
A useful example of this is the translation of food items: keeping the original foreign food (foreignization) reminds the audience that they are reading/watching a translation, whereas changing the item to a local food (domestication) fits the book/film/tv show into the audience’s culture. Domestication is particularly common in children’s media, such as the infamous and controversial changes 4Kids made to anime when adapting shows for American TV.
But what does this have to do with language in Dune? Well, Dune is a sci-fi epic set on another world, thousands of years in the future. Because Arrakis is so different to Earth, it should, arguably, feel foreign to the viewer. While giving audiences glimpses of unknown food items, strange technology and more goes a long way to creating this foreign effect, the most intuitive way audiences will feel like they’re experiencing another world and culture is to put a language barrier between us and the characters.
The linguists David and Jessie Peterson who expanded the Chakobsa language beyond the words present in Herbert’s book series deliberately moved away from the books’ heavy use of Arabic in order to make the film feel more foreign. David Peterson explained the rational behind this move: languages change a lot over time and Dune is set 20,000 years in the future, therefore we could not reasonably expect many words from our languages of today to still be used by the Fremen of Arrakis. Think about how different Shakespearean English is to how we speak and write today. Those changes took place over just 400 years.
Creating conlangs is not an exact science and has no one correct answer. As such, debate and disagreement over how Chakobsa and Dune’s other languages should be presented on screen is inevitable. Often how we feel about such issues can reveal more about us than the story.
Criticisms of and praise for the Petersons’ moves away from an Arabic-based language are often driven by real-world concerns. Some have expressed a desire for more representation of a language not often used in major Hollywood, despite having more than 300 million speakers worldwide. (Think how much more often a character speaks a few remarks in Spanish, French or Russian). However, films are not produced in a vacuum and must take their audience into account. One of most commonly used Arabic-derived words in the novel is ‘jihad’. Given that a film does not have the same capacity as a novel to explain exactly how the characters mean such a politically loaded term, the film’s use of ‘holy war’ instead may be the wiser decision, despite being a change from the book.
Since different viewers have different preferences, linguists will never please everyone with their solutions. The debate around conlangs reveals that this isn’t only an issue for real-world translators but for those creating fictional languages too.
