‘Predator: Badlands’ Yautja expert explains alien language

When the Predator: Badlands director was asked what part of the alien language used by the franchise's central hunters he could speak. Then Trachtenberg quickly answers: “Zero.”

“My mouth won't even let me say [even] “It's phonetics,” Trachtenberg says of the language created for his film, praising his actors for learning it. Linguist Britton Watkins “really developed language as if it had evolved from the mouth shape and throat sounds we used to hear from”Predator' [movies]but it does fit the ecology of the Yautja species. But my throat won’t allow me to do this.”

Predator: Badlands, which began with franchise record $40 million at the domestic box office – this is the first part of “Predator”, where the main character is one of the alien hunters. The film follows Deka (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young outcast Yautja who tries to prove his worth to his clan by hunting a huge, nearly unkillable beast on a deadly planet.

While hunting, Dec meets Tia (Elle Fanning), an android who has been separated from the rest of her research group as well as the lower half of her body, and is happy to provide useful information about the planet's deadly flora and fauna.

Trachtenberg, who rejuvenated long-running science fiction franchise With 2022 prequel “Prey”. It was important that the Yautja and their culture feel “as authentic and archaeological” as the humans he featured in his Predator films, which also include this summer's animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers.

“I wanted to make sure that the Yautja species were taken seriously and with dignity,” says the director. “We're asking people to empathize with a monster, someone who was, to some extent, a slasher in a slasher movie decades ago.”

This meant turning to an expert to completely create the Yautja language. Watkins was recommended to the Predator: Badlands team by Paul Frommer, a linguist who created the Na'vi language For “AvatarHe was tasked with developing both the spoken and written Yautja language, first introduced in “Assassin of Assassins”.

Watkins knew that Badlands would include both the action that audiences would expect from a Predator film, as well as quieter moments where the characters simply talk to each other. This meant creating a language that would be as faithful as possible to the warbles and roars of the previous Predator films, while also being “tonally consistent and sort of an atmospheric match” to English for scenes where both languages ​​are used in conversation.

“I didn't start with a complete language, vocabulary and everything, but with a structure that I could build as things changed during production,” Watkins says, explaining that this involved creating both phonological and grammatical rules. “I created a framework for a language that would never have any extraneous sounds, but could expand in terms of vocabulary and grammar to accommodate whatever we needed over the course of a long period of filming.”

He also knew that once Yautja was introduced, there would be fans who would want to see him. cut And learn this just like it was for others artificial languages created for science fiction and fantasy films and TV series.

“I knew that… people would want to pause [the movie] and they'll want to rewind and figure it all out,” Watkins says. “So I wanted everything to be simple, but not stupid. It is culturally acceptable but accessible as a language. [for] People [that] I want to learn this.”

Here are some tips from Watkins for those interested in learning Yautja.

The alphabet includes complex groups of consonants.

When developing the phonology of the Yautja language, Watkins took into account the physiology of the aliens.

“They don't have lips, so they can't ma or ba or F [sounds] because they don’t have the lips to do it,” Watkins explains. “In addition to the absence of F, V, Th and M, we have consonant clusters such as jl And Thu … which we don’t have in English, but can be made lower down the throat.”

These consonant clusters consist of multiple letters when written in the Latin alphabet, but represent a single letter in the Yautja alphabet. For example, the Yautja word for prey begins with the letter hrr.

Their alphabet is “optimized for the visual efficiency of their sound system,” says Watkins. Yautja inscription can be seen on weapons and other items in Badlands.

The basic sentence structure is the opposite of English.

In Yautja, the structure of a declarative sentence (one that makes a statement, provides a fact, or offers an explanation) is the opposite of the structure in English.

“The object or predicate comes first, the verb comes in the middle, and the subject comes at the end,” says Watkins. “Once you have made such a rule, you must abide by it, unless you have a legitimate reason to break it, as we do in English.”

Listen to repeated words

Yautja words are primarily analytical, meaning that “there are not 14 versions of one noun,” Watkins explains. This includes the first person pronoun “I”, which in Yautja means There is.

“When the word “I” appears at the beginning of a sentence, it There is [and] when at the end of a sentence there is “I” as the subject, it is still There is” says Watkins. “That won't change.”

Another sound worth trying to catch: What. Ngai that's a Yautja word meaning “no”, so What occurs in any word containing a negative element, such as “nobody.”

You can tell how the Yautja feel about you by the way they call you.

Unlike There isYautja use different words when addressing others based on respect and affection.

“The words 'you' and 'he' or 'she' change depending on who's talking about who,” Watkins explains. “It is culturally acceptable to Yautja, in Yautja culture, [to] talking about other people in a derogatory manner.”

Think of it as the difference between using You or You in Spanish. When addressing someone they look down on or disrespect, Yautja use vuland the one they respect will be treated as dhow. Kai it is a word used when addressing a close friend.

Yautja is not a gendered language (for the most part)

Unlike languages ​​such as French and Spanish, Yautja has no grammatical gender, so nouns are not assigned gender categories.

However, there is a gender difference between the pronouns “he” and “she”, just like in English. It's the same way all Yautja use There is for “I” and “me” regardless of gender.

One of the reasons Yautja don't have a grammatical gender is because it was the most practical thing to do.

“There wasn't much time [to create Yautja]and adding gender like that would complicate the language,” says Watkins, explaining that this complexity would have made it more difficult to quickly make any adjustments to the script that needed to be made during filming.

The bonus is that this also helps keep the language accessible to Yautja learners.