Star Wars: Linguistic Expert Claims That Yoda is Hawaiian

Following his debut in The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda quickly became a fan-favorite character thanks to his quirky sense of humor, wisdom and unique manner of speaking. The Jedi Master’s species may still remain a mystery, but one linguistic professor claims that, based on the syntax of his speech patterns, he is undoubtedly Hawaiian.

“All the other creatures in Star Wars speak their own languages,” David Adger, from Queen Mary University of London revealed recently. “With the Ewoks, Wookiees and Jabba The Hutt they subtitle a chunk of it, so they’re all speaking their own language. Yoda comes from a mysterious planet and George Lucas never tells us anything about Yoda … he’s meant to be this mysterious Jedi Master. But he’s obviously speaking English as a second language … His real language, which I’ve called ‘Yodish,’ we don’t know anything about.”

According to “linguistic detective work” and the ways in which his phrases are worded, his dialect would translate into a syntax most similar to the Hawaiian language.

“He’s speaking English but changed the structure of it to be like his native language,” Adger points out. “We can find out something about Yoda’s native language by looking at how he speaks English, in the same way as I can find out about a French person’s native language by looking at how that French person speaks English.”

“Yoda says things like ‘the greatest teacher failure is’… If you were to say that in a language like Hawaiian … it would be almost exactly the same … putting the predicate before the subject,” the professor used as an example.

It is worth noting, however, that Adger clarified that it’s possible Yoda merely “grew up speaking” Hawaiian, even if he wasn’t necessarily born there.

With 900 years worth of backstory, many fans are hoping Lucasfilm one days creates a spinoff Yoda film to explain more about the character.

“Yeah, he is going to,” Frank Oz, voice of Yoda, jokingly told Yahoo about his character getting a spinoff. “He is going to. He’s going to be a chorus girl. He’s changing sex. He will become — he won’t kick that high, I think he’s a little too old for the extensions, but he’s going to do his best.”

Possibly to avoid any speculative theories, Oz didn’t want to take the comments too seriously.

“I think I’m not going to talk about Yoda here,” Oz admitted. “I think that’s all I’m going to say! … And by the way, I’m happy to talk about Yoda another time. It’s just that if I get into Yoda, then all of a sudden this will be The Yoda Story. And I mean, I think I’ve given you enough of a scoop with the chorus girl thing.”

Fans will have to stay tuned to see if a Yoda spinoff ever comes to fruition.

[H/T Metro]