{"id":338305,"date":"2025-10-28T12:04:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T12:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/338305\/"},"modified":"2025-10-28T12:04:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T12:04:12","slug":"how-the-written-word-evolved-in-star-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/338305\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Written Word Evolved in ‘Star Wars’"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the beginning there was the word, and that word was Basic. But just\u00a0how you approach writing<\/a> the primary language of the galaxy far, far away, has been a fascinating topic of exploration in Star Wars from its start<\/a>. The need to flesh out\u00a0Star Wars\u00a0into a wider universe after the original film exploded into popularity created a worldbuilding problem<\/a> that would take decades to \u201csolve\u201d\u2014and in doing so created a rich variety of writing systems to populate its galaxy.<\/p>\n

Basic: The Language of Star Wars \"Star\u00a9 Lucasfilm <\/p>\n

Before you even get to how to even write it, you have to know what Basic (also known as Galactic Basic, or Galactic Basic Standard) represents in\u00a0Star Wars. Although we as an English-speaking audience hear it as English\u2014and of course Star Wars is a fictional universe created by English-language speakers\u2014Basic itself is not meant to be a direct equivalent to spoken English.<\/p>\n

Although we have seen that multiple languages exist across the\u00a0Star Wars galaxy\u2014Rodese, Shyriiwook, Huttese, Sith, Ghor, and so on\u2014Basic is essentially a lingua franca, a common language adopted on a broad level by galactic society. But when we watch\u00a0Star Wars, we are not really hearing Basic, but instead Basic\u2019s translation into English, or whatever language you are watching a Star Wars project in: the Japanese dub of A New Hope is as canon to\u00a0Star Wars as its English-language version is, even if there are subtle differences due to the nature of translation.<\/p>\n

But that generalized view of Basic was not fully formed when\u00a0Star Wars was created\u2014not in its spoken form, as that didn\u2019t really matter for the most part. Its written form, however, quickly became an issue.<\/p>\n

The original\u00a0Star Wars is covered with English signage and written words on displays, something that would change in the wake of the film\u2019s blockbuster success. Both\u00a0Empire Strikes Back and\u00a0Return of the Jedi\u00a0would, with the confidence that audiences had accepted the galaxy far, far away, move away from putting English text on-screen, instead creating unique writing systems\u2014reams of text that were not just left untranslated, but were never given meaning behind the symbology beyond the graphic design.<\/p>\n

Enter Aurebesh \"Star\u00a9 Put Me In The Story <\/p>\n

That would begin to change with the arrival of the Expanded Universe in the early 1990s and Aurebesh.<\/p>\n

Aurebesh was developed in 1994 by Stephen Crane for a companion booklet to West End Games\u2019 tabletop skirmish game Star Wars Miniatures Battles,\u00a0a spinoff designed for miniatures originally intended to be used with the company\u2019s highly influential\u00a0Star Wars roleplaying game. Inspired by a font design glimpsed in the opening of\u00a0Return of the Jedi, Aurebesh was fleshed out by Crane with Lucasfilm\u2019s approval.<\/p>\n

A 34-character alphabet, Aurebesh takes its name similarly to how \u201calphabet\u201d itself is a portmanteau of the first two characters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta, instead borrowing the first two characters Crane established, Aurek and Besh. The writing system was further expanded upon by Crane in the 1996 supplement\u00a0Imperial Entanglements, which added punctuation, and by that time, although other Expanded Universe works had attempted to establish their own non-Latin writing systems (such as Atrisian Script, most commonly seen throughout the LucasArts\u00a0Star Wars games in the mid-\u201990s), Aurebesh quickly became widely adopted by EU material as the primary written word of Star Wars.<\/p>\n

But the EU, as influential and popular as it was at the time, was not the movies\u2014and Aurebesh would arguably really take off when it was first used on-screen in\u00a0Star Wars in 1999, alongside other newly introduced typefaces, in The Phantom Menace. From there, Aurebesh as Crane had designed it would continue to appear throughout EU material and the prequel trilogy. In 2004, when the original\u00a0Star Wars was re-released on DVD, one of several cosmetic tweaks included the official overwriting of what had previously been English text with correctly translated Aurebesh, effectively establishing the writing system as Basic\u2019s official writing system, appearing heavily again in series like\u00a0Clone Wars, and of course, after\u00a0Star Wars\u2018 sale to Disney and the reshuffling of\u00a0Star Wars canon.<\/p>\n

Crane initially didn\u2019t design a numerical system for Aurebesh, as the alien text seen in Return of the Jedi still utilized Arabic numerals\u2014an alternate dot-based number system was actually created in 1995 for the West End Games RPG supplement Platt\u2019s Starport Guide, and eventually found its way into\u00a0Star Wars canon through the popularization of fan-made fonts shared online, namely Peter Schuster\u2019s New Aurabesh, first released in 1998. The font, including its West End-inspired numerical system, would eventually be used in episodes of\u00a0Clone Wars and\u00a0Rebels, and appear alongside continued use of Arabic numerals in the Disney-era movies.<\/p>\n

For as widely adopted as Aurebesh became, however, the system didn\u2019t come without its faults. The Latin alphabet still occasionally appeared in Star Wars material alongside Aurebesh, meaning that it existed in the galaxy far, far away even if Aurebesh was significantly more widespread. That alphabet also inadvertently played a key part in\u00a0Star Wars worldbuilding through ship design: namely, that alphabet fighters were all built around the adoption of the Latin alphabet before Aurebesh existed (they\u2019re X-Wings, after all, not Xesh-Wings). Ship design, among other military designations, raised similar questions with other real-world alphabets too, in particular with the Greek alphabet, which was frequently adopted throughout the series, from Lambda-class Imperial shuttles, to Delta Squad, the stars of\u00a0Republic Commando.<\/p>\n

Further Writing Forms in Star Wars \"Star\u00a9 Lucasfilm <\/p>\n

Although Aurebesh and variations upon it have become the dominant written language of\u00a0Star Wars today, there are hundreds of writing systems across the EU and contemporary canon to reflect hundreds more languages beyond just Galactic Basic. Here\u2019s a few examples beyond Aurebesh that have existed across the original Expanded Universe and current continuity.<\/p>\n