A long time ago, in a language community far, far away, a bounty hunter negotiated with some desert nomads in a sign language....
Two episodes of Disney's The Mandalorian feature on-screen portrayals of a constructed sign language: Tusken Sign Language or Tusken Raider Sign Language. Since Star Wars is a Disney property now, and it is in fact Disney's The Mandalorian, I suppose this makes TSL Disney's fourth actual conlang, after Atlantian, Kumandran, and Barsoomian. The Star Wars franchise, however, is not really known for its linguistic sophistication (Greedo, whom Han shot, for example, just speaks random phrases of garbled Quechua; portrayal of alien languages in Star Wars generally has been the domain of sound designers rather than linguists or conlangers), and this bit of conlang representation came about essentially by accident: sign language was specified in the script, and someone on the crew suggested that, if they are going to portray signing, they really ought to get an actual Deaf person to consult, and that Deaf person (one Troy Kotsur, who also plays one the Tusken Raiders) decided to come up with a conlang!
Essentially all of the publicly-available information about this process comes from one almost-8-minute video interview (with English transcripts) done with Troy by The Daily Moth, a dedicated ASL news site. Of course, information about the language itself is also extractable from the scenes in which it occurs, and a Tusken Raider Sign Language Facebook group has been established to study and decipher it; as of now, very little deciphering has actually occurred, but Troy is a member of that group, which gives it some legitimacy, and leaves open the possibility that one might actually get authoritative answers if one asks questions there.
Of course, none of this would've happened if some sort of sign language had not been specified in the script in the first place, which raises the question of why anybody thought that signing should be in the script! George Corley of Conlangery suggested to me that it might be because the Tuskens' vocalizations were already established as the sounds of braying donkeys, which doesn't really lend itself to a proper language--but that presupposes that the writers actually cared about portraying a plausible language in the first place, an assumption that I find heavily suspect given the portrayal of Frog Lady's supposedly-linguistic vocalizations in the same show. Wookiepedia claims that the Tusken language is a multi-modal combination of vocalizations and sign, but that seems to be a retcon to explain the appearance of sign language in The Mandalorian, not a reference to a common source that The Mandalorian may have drawn from, and the questionably-canonical Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know (updated edition; note that these are, as usual, Amazon Affiliate links) already claimed consistent English translations for particular (transcriptions of) Tusken vocalizations. The most plausible explanation to me comes from this tweet by Star Wars Autograph News, which claims that it is "undoubtedly" a reference to Plains Native American Sign Language.
So, how is this new language actually used? As with Disney's previous use of Kumandran and The Dragon Prince's portrayal of ASL, The Mandalorian completely eschews the use of subtitles in favor of a combination of Making it Obvious and diagetic translations / explanations (with the shortage of direct translations in the on-screen source material making fan decipherment rather difficult!)
Unlike Raya and The Dragon Prince, The Mandalorian is clearly not aimed at a child audience, so they don't need to worry about the literacy level of their viewers. Why then, would they avoid subtitling? I expect a large part of it is just the biased expectation that audiences won't like them, but whether or not it was actually on purpose, I think the decision actually worked out for the best in this context. One could argue that subtitling of Tusken would be appropriate because Mando speaks Tusken and Mando is our viewpoint character--but, Mando is not a first-person main character, and there is essentially no dramatic irony in the series as far as Mando is concerned. If we, the audience, know something, then Mando also knows it, but the converse is not true; we do not know everything that Mando knows, and that is on purpose. He is supposed to be a mysterious figure. If The Mandalorian were a serial novel rather than a TV show, it would be told in limited third person, not first. Thus, we shouldn't necessarily have subtitles for the same reason that we don't get voiceover narrations in this show: we are not supposed to be inside Mando's head. If someone else in the scene is confused, we should be confused.
That said, let's get finally get into the nitty-gritty stuff!
Tusken Sign Language first shows up briefly in Chapter 5: The Gunslinger, with this conversation:
[Mando signs to the Tuskens.]
Calican: "What are you doing?"
Mando: "Negotiating."
[More back-and-forth signing.]
Calican: "What's going on?"
Mando: "We need passage across their land."
[More back-and-forth signing.]
Mando: "Let me see the binocs."
Calican: "Why?"
[Mando tosses the binocs to one of the Tuskens.]
Calican: "Hey! What?"
This already shows that mix of diagetic explanation and Making it Obvious. While some of the signs are pretty iconic, Troy is probably the only person who can give us a complete literal translation, but the context makes it easy to reconstruct a basic outline. Mando is negotiating, he hands over the binocs, they conclude--he must have agreed to trade the binocs as payment for passage across Tusken land.
While there's not much here, this minimal interaction is narratively necessary to establish in a low-stakes setting the fact that Mando knows the Tusken language and has reasonably amicable dealings with them, so that that skill can be employed with much higher stakes later on, and there is indeed considerably more representation of Tusken Sign, along with Tusken vocalization, in Chapter 9: The Marshal.
Initially, we see some signing with Irrelevant content during the desert crossing montage shot, while Mando sitting around campfire with Tuskens. This is just showing us the language for flavor, and to remind the audience that Mando has that skill.
For the most part, the remaining Tusken language is handled with minimal diagetic explanation, with the audience taking the point of the view of Cobb Vanth. E.g.,
[Mando engages in multi-modal communication with Tuskens]
Cobb: "Hey partner, you wanna tell me what's goin' on?"
Mando: "They want to kill the krayt dragon, too."
and later:
[Tuskens add more tokens to their battle map.]
Cobb: "That's more like it. Where are they gettin' the reinforcements?"
Mando: "I volunteered your village."
with a few instances of what may be more direct translation in the form of indirect reported speech:
Mando: "He says your people steal their water, and now you insult them by not drinking it."
"They know about Mos Pelgo, they know how many Sand People you killed."
Cobb: "They raided our village! I defended the town!"
Mando: "Lower your voice."
Cobb: "I knew this was a bad idea."
Mando: "You're agitating them."
and direct reported speech:
Cobb: "What are you telling them?"
Mando: "The same thing I'm telling you. If we fight amongst ourselves, the monster will kill us all."
Mando, SimComming with English, slowly: "Now, how do we kill it?"
And in one instance, they actually exploit the unique capacities of the visual modality to allow Mando to report on someone speaking in sign at an extreme distance, via binocs:
[Tusken signing at long distance]
Cobb: "What'd he say?"
Mando: "He says it's sleeping. If we listen carefully we can hear it breathing."
I somehow doubt that the show's writers planned ahead to introduce a sign language just to allow that one scene to work (if they hadn't, a walkie-talkie would've served just as well), but hey, now you know that that's something you can do!
So, that's Tusken Sign Language in The Mandalorian! If you liked this post, please consider making a small donation!
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