Earth influences on Mando'a

Is Mando'a based on any real-world languages?

Quotes from published sources

As the final bit of polish, I created the ancient Mandalorian language specifically for Republic Commando. The Clones' ancestral language is largely inspired by a mix of Hungarian, Celtic war poetry, and Soviet proletariat work anthems. 

 

"Jess had to create lyrics that could be sung, because that was his primary objective, so he needed to get syllables to fit rhythms. But I needed to reconcile that with a structured grammar Jess shared his thoughts with me about how he developed the sounds and I stuck with that softer sound he'd created. He took his sounds from Latin and Hungarian, and I added on some sounds from Urdu, Gurkhali and even Romany; I gave it a Hebrew rhythm and the end result sounds almost like Russian and Gaelic crossed with Hebrew From one or two words -- I started with structuring singular from plural and adding adjectival endings for Hard Contact -- it just took me over completely It's a living language to me."


Jesse is a bloke. Yes, of course I worked with him on this. I asked if he minded my developing the lyrics into a language and he's seen the finished material (if an evolving thing can ever be called finished).

His notes, which he was kind enough to share with me, related only to the pronunciation and where he dervied the sounds from. I stress the sounds because if I say a language is based on something, everyone then starts looking for meanings of words and also for grammar. It doesn't actually work that way. But if you listen to a language, there's a definite sound and rhythm to it, so when Jesse says he started from Hungarian and Latin (he needed something that sounded right when sung) or I say I took Hungarian, Latin, Gurkhali and Romany (because I wanted somehting vivid, diirect and expressive) it's the sounds we're talking about, not structure.

Having said that, I found that entirely at random - because I knew no Hungarian - I'd used identical grammatical devices in some places to Magyar. Like no gender and agglutinative construction. And that was by working out a language from basic principles - what I felt Mandalorians would use in their language and how they would see the world.


Alas, it's not the language so much as the sounds. When you see the lexicon, you won't find much in common with Magyar, or even Latin come to that. A friend of mine said that when I spoke Mando'a - as a demo, you understand, I haven't got totally nuts yet - it sounded more like a Semitic language. (I did Hebrew as well as classics, so...yeah, actually, it's more like Hebrew in some ways.)


When I was writing Hard Contact, the continuity guy at LucasArts Ryan Kaufman asked if I wanted to see the lyrics that would go with the game soundtrack, in case they were any use for the book. They'd been written by the composer, Jess Harlin, and I was instantly taken with them and asked Jess if I could use his lyrics to develop the language for use in the book. It went from there. Jess made a brilliant job of the lyrics, and the sound and weight of the language felt real to me, so I took it as the foundation for the feel of the it the phonemes and built from conceptual basics. It's only in the last couple of months that a Mandarin speaker told me how similar the concepts of Mando'a are to it, but I don't know the language at all. Once you start asking, "What do I need to express things?" then you tend to re-evolve languages just like real ones. It's how human brains work and Mandarin was never in Jess's thinking or mine. He was going for soft sounds Hungarian and Latin and I picked that up and added Gurkhali, Urdu, Romany and Celtic sounds. Not words just sounds. With a few deliberate exceptions, like "dinii", "birgaan" and "wayii", which are there as a nod to my home town's dialect, the vocabulary was created from scratch, too.

Links to interviews

Earth words that Traviss turned into Mando'a words