Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Season 3 of The Mandalorian.Grogu set the internet on fire when he first appeared in the series premiere of The Mandalorian in 2019. Since then, questions about his origin and background have tantalized fans. The show has answered a few of them — at least we no longer have to call him “Baby Yoda” — but most are still a mystery. And although he’s over 50 years old, he’s only uttered a few syllables that might qualify as words, so one of the biggest questions that remain is how he will sound when he finally speaks. The creators might be tempted to make him talk like Yoda (Frank Oz), but everything we know about his species tells us that wouldn’t make sense.
Yoda’s Unique Grammar Isn’t Random
Yoda has a distinctive speaking style, one that English speakers tend to think of as backward. This is because declarative sentences in English usually use subject-verb-object (S-V-O) word order, as in, “You must have patience,” while Yoda often structures his sentences as object-subject-verb (O-S-V): “Patience you must have.” O-S-V word order is rarer but not unheard of in human languages, and it’s even occasionally used in English. Yoda doesn’t speak exclusively in this way; some of his most iconic lines sound like normal English, while others are neither ordinary English nor are they strictly O-S-V. For instance, he also sometimes splits up his verbs in a way that we might call verb-object-subject-modal verb, as in “Consume you, it will.” And his use of prepositional phrases is stranger still.
Of course, Yoda and the rest of the characters in the Star Wars universe don’t actually speak English at all. We, the viewers, hear it as English — unless we’re watching it dubbed in another language — but they’re actually speaking Galactic Basic, the lingua franca of the galaxy. And just as English speakers all over the world speak with a range of accents and dialects, individuals and species in Star Wars use a variety of accents and dialects when speaking Galactic Basic (some of which, like the dialects of Watto, Jar Jar Binks, and the viceroys of the Trade Federation, have been criticized for promoting racist stereotypes). But no other species shares Yoda’s unusual grammar. So why does he speak the way he does?
Why Does Yoda Talk Like That?
The simplest explanation is what linguists refer to as native language interference. When a human starts studying a new language as an older teenager or adult, it’s incredibly difficult for them to learn it perfectly enough to sound like a true native. They might become quite fluent, able to converse about any topic, but their pronunciation will nearly always carry some degree of foreign accent. And until they fully master the grammar, they’ll also make mistakes that reflect the grammar rules of their native language. For example, Russian speakers learning English sometimes leave articles (“the,” “a,” and “an”) out of sentences because Russian has no equivalent to these words. Similarly, English speakers often forget that in German, inanimate objects have genders just as humans and animals do, and will refer to things as “es” (“it”) rather than “er” or “sie” (“he” or “she”) like a native German speaker would.
We don’t know anything about the native language of Yoda’s species, but we can infer from Yoda’s speech that it uses object-subject-verb word order at least some of the time, and that Yoda’s other grammatical eccentricities are also the result of native language interference: they reflect the differences between that language and Galactic Basic. Of the few other members of Yoda’s species that we know from the expanded universe, some, such as Minch, speak like Yoda, while others, such as Oteg, use what we would consider normal grammar. This supports the theory that Yoda’s way of speaking is indeed native language interference, not something innate to his species — Oteg was simply more fluent than either Minch or Yoda.
Yaddle (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is probably the second most well-known member of the species aside from Grogu, uses normal grammar in Tales of the Jedi but speaks more like Yoda in the comics. We can chalk this up to inconsistency between writers, but it can be explained in-universe as well. When you speak a language other than your native one, your degree of fluency at any given moment can be affected by a number of factors: how alert or tired you are, how often you’ve switched between languages recently, how hard you’re trying, how distracted you are, how much you care. In canon, Yaddle may have simply been putting in more effort to use standard Galactic Basic grammar in her few Tales of the Jedi scenes than she was in her comic book appearances.
Grogu Should Use Standard Grammar
So far, we’ve only heard Grogu speak one word distinctly: “patu.” Peli Motto (Amy Sedaris) comments on it when Grogu and Mando (Pedro Pascal) arrive at her repair shop in Season 3’s second episode, but it wasn’t the little guy’s first time using it. He utters it a few times in Season 2 and The Book of Boba Fett as well, but it’s unclear what it means. It could be nonsense, just a collection of sounds that he’s latched onto for one reason or another, or it could be a word from his native language. Some commenters have speculated that it could mean “father” or “dad”; since this is a word he might have very good use for, but one that he doesn’t often hear in Galactic Basic, that’s not a crazy theory.
All this considered, it would be illogical for Grogu, when and if he starts speaking in sentences, to talk like Yoda. Grogu has been surrounded by fluent Galactic Basic speakers since he was prelingual. He might retain some memories of his species’ native language (and if he spent much time around them earlier in his life, he probably does), but if his language learning ability is anything like that of humans, he should grow up speaking the language of Din Djarin and his many compatriots with native fluency. If he does eventually get some real dialogue and ends up sounding like Yoda after all, we’ll have to assume that his species just don’t learn or use language in the same way that humans do, all evidence to the contrary. Or maybe the writers just know how adorable it would be and couldn’t resist the temptation.
New episodes of The Mandalorian come to Disney+ every Wednesday.
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