How ‘Andor' Created an Entirely New Language from Scratch

Yahoo

3 hours ago

Across the soundscape of Star Wars, the mosaic of alien languages is as important as John Williams's brass horns. But the Ghorman tongue heard throughout Andor season 2 is unusual, even in a galaxy far, far away. Unlike Jabba's gooey Huttese or R2-D2's whistling bleeps, Ghorman, spoken by the proud Ghor, is one of the most fleshed-out constructed languages (commonly referred to as conlangs) in all of Star Wars. For that, you can say, "Indebe"—that's Ghorman for "thank you," people—to dialect coach and conlang creator Marina Tyndall.
"This conlang of Ghorman was loosely inspired by the inventory of terrestrial French," Tyndall explains to me. "It shares over 85 percent of the phonology of French." She adds that while French is the main foundation for Ghorman, the Ghor language does not contain a single word of French. "You might get a flicker of recognition; you catch a syllable that resembles a French syllable," she says. "But it's a false friend."
Hailing from London, Tyndall is a dialect coach and constructed-language creator with a growing list of credits in Hollywood. She's applied her craft for movies such as Inferno (2016), Tenet (2020), Death on the Nile (2022), and TV shows like Killing Eve. Since 2016, Tyndall has contributed to the Star Wars franchise, beginning with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and more recently with Andor. In season 1, Tyndall formulated the Kenari and Aldhani languages. For season 2, which concluded in May, she created Ghorman entirely from scratch.
"The starting point was that we wanted all of the Ghorman characters to sound approximately alike when speaking English," Tyndall says. It was important that the characters and their actors "share a broad, phonetic, and articulatory base with one another."
Tyndall wasn't alone in her process. She's quick to credit Andor creator Tony Gilroy as well as on-set dialect coaches Naomi Todd and Marion Déprez as her biggest collaborators. Producer David Meanti, a native French speaker, also consulted to ensure no word invented for Ghorman could be misconstrued as "playground innuendo."
Still, if our world had an academic expert on Ghorman, it would be Tyndall. She constructed the language over a process that began in early summer 2022 until the cameras rolled for Andor season 2 that autumn. That included teaching the language to hundreds of extras for Andor's unforgettable eighth episode, in which the Ghor sing their national anthem before a massacre by the Empire.
For Tyndall, the ordeal felt like songwriting, and working with her team like a jam session. "You improvise words and melody and then you figure it out backward," she says. "If you are creating a conlang as an academic exercise, it is best approached as a science. But once you introduce actors and storytelling into the mix, it is very much an art."
Tyndall's songwriting approach to Ghorman turned literal when she translated the Ghor's anthem for episode 8. The lyrics were first written in English and performed on a temp track by—who else?—Tony Gilroy, who then sent it all to Tyndall for translation. She jokingly describes the dynamic like she's Bernie Taupin writing for Gilroy's Elton John. "I am one of the privileged few who heard the English original," she brags. (She adds that Gilroy has "actually a very good voice.")
"I came into the office one day to see David Meanti and other people singing it to each other," Tyndall says. "It was a very full-throated rendition. I was pleased to see the spirit of Ghorman pride had spread as far as the production office. I know a number of our production personnel could easily do it for karaoke night."
While Ghorman has roots in French, it also "contains scrambles, mutations, and back formations of words" from other languages—even from dead ones. "It contains words that have been free-associated out of the semantic cloud of English," says Tyndall. "For example, if the word were ball, we might start throwing words out: throw, arc, bounce. And we make a fusion of anything we've spat out."
French wasn't the only lingual flavor that was recognized by Andor's Ghorman-speaking cast. "Among our cast who played the Ghor, one of them said it reminded him of learning Hebrew," Tyndall recalls. Another actor said they sensed a little bit of Breton.
"It's a really beautiful illustration of why it's so worth casting multilingual actors," Tyndall says. "If you have access to at least one other language, you've got access to a whole other system of thought and feeling. What we asked these actors to do was huge. I feel like this high-wire act we asked them to do, they did so outstandingly."
As for why French is the main influence for Ghorman, those reasons elude even its creator. While she acknowledges parallels between the Ghor's revolt against the Empire and the French resistance during World War II ("It is the story of struggle," she says), Tyndall was not clued in on anything beyond her task of making the language. "The aim was that all the actors we cast had a similar speech style or accent. It could be that there are creative reasons for having landed on a French-speaking cast, but I wasn't party to those reasons."
Tyndall does have thoughts on the world-building implications of Ghorman. Applying the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to Star Wars, Tyndall says the Ghorman language reveals insight to how the Ghor think, feel, and see their place in the galaxy. "It's a language of trade," she says. "It will have cross-pollinated with a number of other languages from people with whom the Ghor have traded. We hypothesize it's a rich language, one in which you're able to be quite specific. You might have more than one word for the verb to know. Depending on context, you're claiming to know you are acquainted, whether you have mastered it, and whether you know it in terms of empathy or appreciation."
And there's this: The Ghor are sticklers for details, which is handy on the frontlines of a rebellion.
"The Ghor are people who communicate in a very efficient but specific way. I imagine they have had to code-shift a lot," Tyndall says. "They have a number of ways of saying the same thing. Because life has been all about trade and peril. These two things have characterized their history in this galaxy—being under threat but having to conduct business at the same time."
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