"Dune" and the delicate art of making fictional languages (or, how Dune was de-Arabized)
The words Timothée Chalamet speaks to the Fremen in “Dune” are not gibberish; they’re part of an intricate linguistic system that was devised for the film adaptations. But something was lost in the language’s construction, @mnvrsngh writes. https://t.co/fbmNtIBsJs
- The New Yorker (@NewYorker) February 29, 2024
David J. Peterson is considered the most influential conlanger working today. His big break came in 2009 when he created Dothraki for Game of Thrones. When he was invited to work on Dune, Peterson decided to create an "a priori" language, which is a language with entirely original/new grammar and vocabulary, not derived from an existing linguistic system.
A bit of background -
How language works in the Dune novels: "The time span separating us from the events of “Dune” is roughly twice the distance between us and the end of the Ice Age; sabre-toothed tigers are closer to us than the plot of “Dune” is. Nevertheless, it’s a world suffused with familiar echoes, most of which manifest in language... The language with the greatest influence in “Dune” is Arabic. In the novel, the Fremen use at least eighty terms with clear Arabic origins, many of them tied to Islam"
[the Fremen are descendants of Muslim Arabs, and they wear that heritage in their speech]The article notes that the books explain the similarities: "'We are the people of Misr,' says a Fremen wise woman, using the Arabic word for Egypt, elaborating that their “Sunni ancestors fled from Nilotic al-Ourouba,” or Nile of the Arabs. The intervening millennia fused their Sunni heritage with a variant of Buddhism, but that doesn’t change a basic fact: the Fremen are descendants of Muslim Arabs, and they wear that heritage in their speech."
Per the article, the series' author, Frank Herbert, also once said in a 1976 interview that he resented the tendency "not to study Islam, not to recognize how much it has contributed to our culture."
The problem with the movies -
In contrast to the books, "although Peterson’s version of the Fremen language retains a vaguely Arabic sound, almost all other traces of the language have been expunged from Villeneuve’s “Dune” films."
[apparently it would not have been believable for the language to be noticeably Arabic in influence, even though they speak english in the movies too]Peterson justified himself in a Reddit AMA, saying it wouldn't have been believable for the language to retain much Arabic influence: "The time depth of the Dune books makes the amount of recognizable Arabic that survived completely (and I mean COMPLETELY) impossible." Explaining further, he mentioned "Beowulf," which was written about a thousand years ago and is known for being extraordinarily difficult for most modern English speakers to understand. "And we’re talking about twenty thousand years?! Not a single shred of the language should be recognizable."
(The realism excuse wobbles a bit when you realize that the main character's name is fucking Paul, but I digress.)
Two excisions from the movie stand out in particular:
1. Jihad - "Herbert’s term for the fervent crusade led by Paul Atreides with the Fremen against the oppressive interstellar regime. Herbert saw jihad as the embodiment of messianic and religious passion-a force that is socially transformative and potentially liberating, but also dangerous and to be feared."
2. Ya hya chouhada - "A reference to a celebratory chant from the Algerian war of independence, which Herbert renders in Frenchified Arabic. This line, more than any other, connects the Fremen’s struggle to recent independence movements, turning them from outer-space sand people into portraits of anti-imperialism."
Scholar Khaldoun Khelil has previously criticized whitewashing of Dune's characters: "In “Dune,” despite so much of the setting being steeped in our culture, Arabs can’t be heroes so we must be erased. Arab has become such an easy shorthand for villains in film, that even a “visionary director” could not imagine us as anything more."
sources: 1, 2