“This is a clever device for making him seem very alien,” said Geoff Pullum, a professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Or, to use an example from an actual Yoda utterance: “Much to learn, you still have.” Even more unusual is the way Yoda famously speaks, ordering his sentences object-subject-verb, or OSV: The lightsaber Yoda grasped. More rare is a verb-subject-object construction, but that’s how people who speak Hawaiian and some Celtic languages do it: Grasped Yoda the lightsaber. An example would be: Yoda grasped the lightsaber.Īnother common construction, and one you’d find more commonly among speakers of Japanese, Albanian, and many other languages, goes subject-object-verb: Yoda the lightsaber grasped. Many of the world’s most-spoken languages-English, Mandarin-are built around constructions that go subject-verb-object. To an English speaker, anyway, the way he orders his sentences sounds vaguely riddle-like, which adds to his mystique.īut what’s actually going on with Yoda, linguistically? First, let’s examine how Yoda doesn’t speak. There’s a narrative effect to the way Yoda speaks. “Found someone, you have, I would say, hmmm?” At first, Luke doesn’t realize the long-eared, wrinkly green creature is, in fact, the one he’s seeking. When Luke Skywalker first encounters Yoda, it’s on a swampy planet in The Empire Strikes Back.

Yoda sentence generator