‘Conlangers’ invent a new language to give a desert tongue to ‘Dune’

In Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi Dune

movies, Indigenous people known as Fremen use a device to tunnel rapidly through their desert planet’s surface.

The instrument is called a “compaction tool” in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune, on which the films are based. But the professional language constructors David J. Peterson and Jessie Peterson wanted something more sophisticated as the husband and wife built out the Fremen language, Chakobsa, for Dune: Part Two, which premiered this month.

They started with a verb they had made up meaning “to press” — kira

— and, applying rules David Peterson had devised for the language before the first movie, fashioned another verb that means “to compress” or “to free space by compression” — kiraza. From there, they used his established suffixes to come up with a noun. Thus was born the Chakobsa word for a sand compressor, kirzib, which can be heard in background dialogue in Dune: Part Two.

For language constructors — “conlangers,” as they are known — such small touches enhance the verisimilitude of even gigantic edifices like the Dune series. If the demand for conlangers’ work is any indication, filmmakers and showrunners agree.

“There’s a very big limit to what you can do with anything approaching gibberish,” said Jessie Peterson, who holds a doctorate in linguistics. “If you just shouted one word in gibberish, that would probably be fine. If you shouted a phrase of two words, OK. But if you tried to do a whole sentence structure in gibberish, it would fall apart very quickly. If somebody needed to respond or repeat information, it won’t cohere.”

Other languages are a significant part of the Dune films. For Part One, David Peterson devised a chant for the emperor’s fearsome military forces, the Sardaukar, and the sign language of discreet hand gestures employed by the central Atreides family.

In Part Two, Chakobsa is spoken — and often subtitled — extensively, not just by Fremen played by Javier Bardem and Zendaya, but also by outsiders like Rebecca Ferguson’s Lady Jessica and Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, the movies’ main character, who first wishes to travel to Arrakis to learn Chakobsa and by the end of the second movie delivers an entire monologue in the language.

Constructed languages (as opposed to so-called natural ones like English, Dutch or Japanese) date back roughly 1,000 years. J.R.R. Tolkien conceived several tongues for the Middle-earth of his celebrated books, including the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (He called language construction his “secret vice.”) The Klingon Dictionary, based on the speech of the pugilistic people in Star Trek, was published in 1985.

More recently, conlangers expanded on the languages in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books for the series Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. (David Peterson is responsible for the Dothraki that actor Jason Momoa delivered as Khal Drogo.) They also crafted vocabulary and grammar for the Na’vi who live on Pandora in James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022).

“Before the movie even came out, there was already information about the language released to the fans — a survival guide to Pandora, with full glossary,” said Christine Schreyer, a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia as well as the constructor of Kryptonian for the 2013 Superman movie Man of Steel.

In the Petersons’ hands, Chakobsa has a specific grammatical structure. Like Latin, it regularly employs declensions, so even proper nouns sound slightly different depending on whether they are the subject or object of a sentence. And there are roughly 700 basic vocabulary words — a figure that does not include the myriad other words possible through adjustments that make kirza into kirzib or lija (to eat) into lijjin (a snack).

As with Game of Thrones, they had something to work with: dozens of words from the original Dune novel. Herbert’s Fremen in many ways resemble the Bedouin, and their language had some obvious Arabic touches. It sounds roughly like Arabic without certain sounds, such as pharyngeals like the “h” sound you make when fogging a piece of glass, according to David Peterson.