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Realistic language barriers in-universe

Discussion in 'Star Wars Community' started by adve, Oct 27, 2022.

  1. adve

    adve Jedi Master star 3

    Registered:
    Nov 23, 2016
    Hi everyone!

    A little thought hit me while I was at work. In Star Wars, characters never really seem to have a meaningful problem communicating with one another. Whether lore wise that is because of some gadget that translates speech like a tizowyrm in Legends, I don’t know.

    i do know that Star Wars is scifi-fantasy and is thus not supposed to follow strict realism, but lets pretend for a second that it does. Realistically speaking, shouldn’t the trillions and trillions of beings in the galaxy have more difficulty speaking to one another than how it’s shown in the movies? It seems dubious to me that Basic would be so ubiquitous as to be the native language of everyone in the galaxy, or that it is even spoken by the majority on a level of high fluency. Additionally, beings with low levels of education speak it quasi-natively, which is odd and certainly not the case with English on Earth.

    for those of you who have thought about this, how do you headcanon this? I am trying to find a good way to explain it in my head.
     
  2. Sarge

    Sarge Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Oct 4, 1998
    IRL, many minority language groups struggle to preserve their own language and culture from the encroaching of English and western culture. It seems that in a GFFA, most of those groups lost the struggle.
     
    Darth Dnej likes this.
  3. Darth Dnej

    Darth Dnej Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Apr 27, 2013
    It's a lot of suspension of disbelief, but I also think in-universe it is because Galactic Basic is so common. Most members of species with any kind of technology at least understand a little of it even if they can't speak it.
    It's for our convenience as audience members that they understand each other. In the GFFA, there are probably hundreds of thousands or more languages. And there are probably many millions of dead languages.
     
  4. Biel Ductavis

    Biel Ductavis Jedi Master star 4

    Registered:
    Aug 17, 2015
    Think it's because most of the prominent species in the GFFA are living together for more than twenty millennia.

    So i guess almost everyone knows at least a few phrases of the main languages (like Basic and/or Huttese for example) and the psychological make up of the main species may be common knowledge.

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    Sarge likes this.
  5. Cowgirl Jedi 1701

    Cowgirl Jedi 1701 Force Ghost star 5

    Registered:
    Dec 21, 2016
    It probably doesn't count as an actual "language barrier" per se, but there's that one scene in Solo where Beckett uses some idioms/slang terms that Han doesn't understand.
     
    Sarge likes this.