#this is probably the least labor-intensive work I'll ever do on this project lol

[mandoa-for-dummies]

Ancient Space Racists, History, and Other Initial Considerations

I am waiting for my big fat phonology handbook to ship in the mail. Until it gets here, let’s talk about Mando’a and some of the Canon Headaches that come along with it.

The biggest, baddest and (in my opinion) most interesting Canon Headache is that, as I mentioned in my introductory post, Mando’a is supposed to be an auxlang or auxiliary language. Why is this Canon Headache Number One?

Because auxlangs don’t work outside of societies of hobbyist nerds dedicated to learning and speaking them. They’ve never been widely adopted and naturalized, much less by an entire culture. There are probably a number of reasons for this, but a big one is that a technocratic fantasy that underpins the creation of many auxlangs is essentially that languages are complex because human beings are inefficient. This is just not fucking true. Languages are complex because human beings use language in breathtakingly complex ways. When real redundancy or irregularity occurs in a language, speakers tend to abandon that feature of the language over time, except in cases like Old Irish, where irregularity was artificially frozen in writing as a mark of class prestige. You can try to invent a language that does all of the things that natural languages do as “elegantly”, “regularly” or “simply” as possible, but you do tend to run into the problem of making normative judgments about what is elegant, regular or simple, probably from the unconscious perspective of your own native language use.

But we’re playing pretend, here, so let’s imagine that a society did come up with an auxlang and successfully implement it--or claim to have done so, anyways. They would almost certainly have to enforce this new language with violence. It would be a pretty fashy and authoritarian society. People will fight hard to speak their mother tongues, probably especially whatever highly collectivist society are the forerunners of Mandalorians. 

Well...it doesn’t not sound like Mandalore, so far.

Anyways, the official pretext for Mando’a (that it can be picked up easily by any convert to the Creed) is also outright nonsense. It presumes a humanoid facial structure, for one thing. What about Tuskens? What about any alien with keratinous beaks or mandibles, for whom all of those B and P sounds are going to be a serious hassle, if not damn near insurmountable? Then again, I’ve never seen in-canon representations of Mandalorians who aren’t humanoids. Maybe this is another political innovation of the ruling class of let’s say ~6000 BBY Mandalore. You say that the unifying feature of your society is religion and not race, and according to the letter of the law, that’s true. You say that your religion is enshrined in the Creed, which you’ve happened to rewrite in your newly-purified language. It’s very difficult for non-humans to speak it. Oops! Guess only a very select few can be full participants in the Creed. [shocked pikachu face]

But how long can a truly authoritarian regime really last without pushback? A few hundred years? Mando’a has evolved in the intervening millennia. Speakers quickly identify in everyday life where “official” Mando’a falls short. In the waning hours of old Mandalore, rebels, subversives and forward-thinkers adopt the “underground” borrowings from the linguistic ancestors of Aurebesh and Huttese as a political statement. By the time the reform government's new dynasty is well-established, there has been a massively popular and successful campaign to introduce a supplemental sign language to standard Mando’a, borrowed heavily from the Tuskens. Although Mandalorian society is still overwhelmingly humanoid, sign support is still considered an integral portion of Classical Mando’a--especially because, for a blip in Mando’a’s history, sign language enabled you to communicate in ways that the regime-sanctioned auxlang didn’t allow: and to do it, moreover, without being picked up by radio surveillance.

Maybe a cult like Din’s is trying to “restore” Classical Mando’a and looks favorably on avoiding “outside influences” to the language--especially now that the reality of its oppressive history has been blurred by romanticization and nostalgia for a past that never really existed--but it’s a lost cause, in the same way that trying to speak Old English in the 21st century to do 21st century things would be a lost cause. Mando’a as it is spoken in Din’s lifetime has evolved into a natural language with very little resemblance to Classical Mando’a. Most Mandalorians only use Classical Mando’a on ceremonial occasions of great significance. *cough* Like taking their wedding vows, for instance.

Stay tuned for the rudimentary stages of language building as we puzzle over a far less interesting canon headache: Goddamn Motherfucking Fantasy Language Apostrophes.