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. Peterson claims that this is in the name of believability.
The time depth of the Dune books makes the amount of recognizable Arabic that survived completely (and I mean COMPLETELY) impossible, he wrote on Reddit. When a user asked him to explain, he pointed to “Beowulf”, which was written around a thousand years ago and is uninterpretable to most modern English speakers.And we’re talking about twenty thousand years?! Not a single shred of the language should be recognizable.Key terms like shai-hulud and Lisan al-Gaib have made it into the films, but they’re treated in Peterson’s conlang as fortuitous convergences, not ancient holdovers, as if English were to one day lose the word “sandwich” only to serendipitously re-create it thousands of years later from new etymological building blocks.
The second omission is evident in that powerful moment from the trailer, Paul Atreides’ call to his fighters. From what we’ve seen, Paul speaks Peterson’s fictional language. Without a subtitle, he would be unintelligible. In the book, however, the phrase
Manvir SinghLong live the fightersis written asYa 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. The scholar Khaldoun Khelil, drawing on his Palestinian Algerian heritage, has described the whitewashing of these characters as an effect of Western media’s tendency to portray Arabs asbad guys—fanatics with unreasonable demands and a strange religion. BecauseArabs can’t be heroes, Khelil writes,we must be erased.
The way language evolves over time has always fascinated me, how some words travel across the world reflecting ancient commercial ties between nations, a myriad of tiny, repeated interactions that coalesce into what we call ‘language’. While we can trace some of that back in time, it feels like predicting the future course of language would be just as difficult as predicting biological evolution.
I was intrigued to find out that David J. Peterson, who worked on Dune, created many other conlangs, from Game of Thrones to The 100 – the article kind of makes it seem as if he’s the only game in town when you want a fictional language for a movie project. Despite his clever work, his choices for Dune and the explanation quoted above leave a lot to be desired. Dune is explicitly set in the future of our Earth; Galach, the lingua franca of the Imperium, is said to be a mixture of English and Slavic – no doubt inspired by the space race that was heating up between the United States and the Soviet Union when Herbert was writing the first book; in later books he introduces ethnic groups that have retained their language and individuality through successive relocations because of their internal cohesion faced with constant external threats. My own language Romanian preserved its Latin core for almost two millennia despite multiple waves of Slavic and Hun migrations, which became our neighbors, so there are real world precedents for long-term stability.
There are also in-universe mechanisms to preserve ancient history and language in the form of Other Memory; Reverend Mothers regularly converse in otherwise dead languages for secrecy, and Fremen have access to this through their wild Reverend Mothers and spice orgies. Arguing that Arabic languages wouldn’t have survived in this context is disingenuous, especially when the first movie featured bagpipes of all things! Apparently, there’s modern Chinese Mandarin being spoken in a scene between Paul and Dr. Yueh as well – how did that one language survive through the ages?!
I am, in other words, definitely overthinking it. The first movie opens by telling us that spice harvesting happens at night, to avoid the heat, but all the raids we see on spice harvesters happen during the day. The reason is because it looks cool. Why has the word jihad been removed from the movie—it appears 36 times in the first Dune novel—along with so much else that would remind you that Dune is about Muslims in space? That’s even easier: Someone decided they would make more money if they toned down the “Muslims in space” thing. Cool stuff happens; the mechanics of why and how, or of cause and necessary effect, are not Villeneuve’s focus. It’s cooler if Paul gets stabbed but doesn’t die. Feyd-Rautha’s choice to use artillery has to be genius to force Paul to upgrade his prescience; the other houses have to refuse to respect his ascension because otherwise, there’d be no need for the galactic space jihad that the whole movie has been circling around, and we need a big battle at the end because big, climactic battles are the kind of thing that happens in this kind of movie.
Aaron Bady
I think it all comes down to Villeneuve’s (terribly flawed) vision for the adaptation: he wanted to tone down the Arabic elements, so that’s what he directed Peterson to produce. Yet another reason why the two recent movies are shallow adaptations, where things happen not because of organic reasons, but because they ‘look cool’ on screen.
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