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Between all the dialog in A Phantom Menace and A New Hope, the various animated series (where I understand the Hutts figured prominently in some story lines) and now The Mandalorian, there has been quite a lot of Huttese on screen, much of it subtitled.

(Related: Why does Greedo say "Maclunkey" in the Mos Eisley Cantina?)

We also know that a number of SF/SFF languages have been quite extensively developed, including Klingon, Dothraki, the various languages in LOTR, etc, either by authors/producers or the fandom. And Star Wars fans can be quite a serious bunch.

What is the level of development Huttese? It is consistent within Star Wars canon? Does it have a defined grammar and vocabulary?

TheLethalCarrot
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ThePopMachine
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  • in other words, is there a Marc Okrand (Klingonese) equivalent in the Star Wars universe? Good question - cursory lookings around seem to indicate no, that it's bases on Quencha, a South American language and written as needed based on how it sounds. Looking forward to real answers with sources. This comment is all I have time for :) – NKCampbell Nov 15 '19 at 17:03

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Wermo's Dictionary of the Huttese Language is a pretty fair indication. The creator has painstakingly pored through every canon source that has Huttese speech and has compiled a dictionary consisting of 310 words. It's by no means a complete record of all Huttese (recent films and TV shows would probably increase that number, as would the plethora of new canon books) but we're probably still talking about less than 400 words overall.

The smallest real-world language ever recorded is Taki Taki (with just 340 words) and Huttese certainly rivals this in complexity. That being said, the Huttese shown on screen has no discernible pattern of use, nor consistent use from one film/TV show to the next and while the original language has some relation to Quechua, more recent additions don't seem to.

You could certainly learn the vocab, but you can't speak Huttese with any fluency since it lacks the basic structures needed to be an actual language.

Valorum
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  • In what sense does Taki Taki have only 240 words? – chepner Nov 15 '19 at 20:44
  • @chepner - https://www.vistawide.com/languages/language_statistics.htm – Valorum Nov 15 '19 at 20:50
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    That page hardly looks credible. A list of random facts with only a small list of very broad sources at the bottom? – chepner Nov 15 '19 at 20:52
  • @chepner - Alas, yes. Wermo's Guide comes from an earlier era of the Internet before everyone referenced everything obsessively. I can assure you that it was, in its day, considered to be quite the resource. – Valorum Nov 15 '19 at 21:08
  • I'm not talking about Wermo's Guide; I'm talking about the page that claims the Taki Taki has only 340 words with no direct evidence of the fact. – chepner Nov 15 '19 at 21:22
  • @chepner - I didn't spend very much time researching it. If you want to add a better example, feel free to do so – Valorum Nov 15 '19 at 21:30
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    The entire concept of trying to count the number of words in a language is ill-defined; best to just not mention it. (As far as Taki Taki, it's described as an English-based creole; I find it nearly impossible to believe its vocabulary doesn't number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands.) – chepner Nov 15 '19 at 21:32
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    Going through a Taki Taki-to-English dictionary, I hit 340 words less than halfway down the "B" page. A highly-synthetic language might have a core morpheme count that low, but there's no chance an English-derived creole will. – Mark Nov 16 '19 at 01:26
  • There is an issue with their very first statistic: "Number of living languages: 6912". How can I be so certain? Because there is no agreement of what constitutes a language and what constitutes a dialect. Each "expert" will have a different number. It's somewhere around 7000-7500 living languages. If they are being so authoritative about that, I don't trust the rest of their statistics. Another poor example is "Language which has won the most Oscars: Italian" Languages don't win Oscars, people and films do, and there are more English winners than Italian winners. – CJ Dennis Nov 16 '19 at 04:50
  • "The 1971 Guinness Book of World Records reports that the language with the smallest vocabulary is Taki taki, a South American language that uses only 340 words." - Go yell at them instead. – Valorum Nov 16 '19 at 06:07