The impact of Star Wars on the English language: Star Wars-derived words and constructions in present-day English corpora

1 Introduction

For many users, popular culture represents an important aspect of their everyday life – and thus also of their everyday linguistic input. Fans who watch series like The Simpsons or Star Trek over a long period of time are therefore highly familiar with the main characters’ repeated catchphrases, such as Homer Simpson’s “D’Oh” or Mr. Spock’s “Live long and prosper”. Through frequency of exposure and salience, these catchphrases are stored in the language users’ minds and thus, through their entrenchment in the users, become part of the language in general (cf. Schmid 2020). Their widespread use and popularity means that the catchphrases can be alluded to, for example, in jokes, newspaper headlines, or memes such as “Live long and prospurr” (where Mr. Spock is petting a cat; Leroy 2022). To understand the point, readers need to be familiar with and recognize the original catchphrase. However, the linguistic items in question are usually full sentences or interjections (cf., e.g., the list of the 100 greatest catchphrases in TV compiled by TV Land cable network; Associated Press 2006); they are linked to one particular character, for example, from a popular-culture film; and through their use the original context is evoked on purpose. In this sense they differ from neologisms entering a language, since the widespread use of individual words in many different contexts usually makes it necessary for successful new words to become (more) independent from their original context of coinage. This is possibly also the reason why Crystal (2011: 249–250) concludes that while “films have introduced hundreds of catchphrases into English, such as Make my day! and May the Force be with you”, they have only occasionally provided “new words, or new senses of old words”. One of the few counterexamples he mentions is the word mini-me (“a person closely resembling a smaller version of another” according to Crystal’s 2011: 250 definition). This word with now widespread use in fashion, where it typically refers to mothers and their little daughters with matching clothing (e.g., Pursglove 2020), originates in the Austin Powers films – and one may assume that most celebrities and their followers indulging in mini-me fashion are unaware of the term’s origin lying in the name of Dr. Evil’s clone in the Austin Powers films.

The importance of popular culture as the subject of empirical linguistic research is increasingly recognized in recent publications about linguistic aspects of popular culture (e.g., Schubert and Werner 2022; Werner 2018). However, one very important universe is still barely explored – that of the Star Wars saga, an “epic space-opera media franchise” (Wikipedia 2022a) whose core consists of the three films A New Hope (1977), The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and Return of the Jedi (1983) as well as three prequels (1999–2005) and three sequels (2015–2019). This is highly surprising in view of the fact that the Star Wars universe is extremely widely known, that it already encompasses the second generation of viewers, and that it has expanded considerably ever since Disney obtained the rights for the Star Wars franchise, both in terms of spin-offs like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and the series The Mandalorian (since 2019) and in terms of the increased amount of merchandise in the form of toys and theme park attractions (such as Galaxy’s Edge in Disneyland; Wikipedia 2022b). The Star Wars saga is much more than a simple worldwide box office success, as this pop-culture phenomenon incorporates films, computer games, books, and merchandise, and the most ardent fans even understand Star Wars as a quasi-religious philosophy (see Davidsen 2016). Still, the search for “Star Wars” in the Scopus database reveals that linguistic research on Star Wars is only a relatively recent phenomenon and that it mainly focuses on language use in the films themselves (e.g., Yuliyana and Bram’s 2019 syntactic analysis of Master Yoda’s unusual word order; Allen’s 2019 onomastic analysis of the characters’ names in the spin-off Star Wars Rebels; and Kleiven’s 2021 study of attitudinal language use).

There is as yet no research on the extent to which words and constructions from Star Wars have become part of the English language and are used in present-day English beyond the confines of their original usage context. The present study therefore fills this gap by investigating the domains in which Star-Wars-derived words and constructions occur in actual speech data as recorded in corpora of present-day English. The assumption underlying this research is that the establishment of lexical items and constructions from popular culture in the English language should be reflected (a) in their general frequency of use in general-language corpora and (b) in their use in contexts and with meanings without direct reference to the films and books that they originate from.

2 Star Wars-derived words and constructions in present-day English corpora

3 Results and discussion

Table 1 provides an overview of the total number of occurrences of Jedi, lightsaber (with spelling variants), Padawan, Yoda, and to the dark side in BNC, BNC Spoken 2014, COCA, and COHA. With a total of 7,752 uses in the corpora under consideration, one may draw the conclusion that Star Wars-derived words and constructions are frequent enough to constitute a relevant phenomenon for general English.

If we examine the frequency of use of the Star Wars-derived items across time, as is done in Figure 1 for all COHA hits (including repeated hits within the same document) of all search items for five-year periods, we notice an increase in the use of Jedi, lightsaber, and particularly Padawan, whereas the frequencies of Yoda and to the dark side are more evenly distributed.

Figure 1:

Diachronic development: Frequency of Star Wars-derived items in COHA (1975–2020).

The first six uses of Jedi in COHA (from 1978 to 1984) all refer to the films – either by direct reference to the film title Return of the Jedi, to the films’ actors, as in (29), or to the filming process, as in (30).

In the late 1990s, the COHA uses of Jedi are characterized by a large number of references to fan fiction or the Star Wars books. The picture then becomes more mixed, until the 2017 release of the eighth film in the franchise, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, makes references to the film title dominate the final years of the COHA sample again.

Lightsaber, by contrast, begins with many contexts of use that are related to Star Wars content – that is, fictional texts. It is only later that merchandising becomes more important on such a scale that it eventually becomes the dominant category.

As regards the contexts in which the Star Wars-derived items are used in the various corpora of present-day English, Table 3 in the Appendix provides an overview with examples for all categories. Figure 2 shows that the items differ in the extent to which they are used in more Star Wars universe-related or more innovative contexts.

Figure 2:

Type of reference in the use of Star Wars-derived items (BNC, BNC Spoken 2014, COCA, and COHA).

To the dark side stands out regarding the large number of unrelated or unclear uses. This is due to the archetypal association of darkness with something negative, as seen in (31):

Interestingly, however, none of the COHA hits for to the dark side from the time before Star Wars has this archetypal association of becoming immoral or evil (see Table 4). This permits the tentative explanation that at least in this particular construction, the archetypal use that we now experience as common or usual is a consequence of the use of to the dark side in the Star Wars films and the subsequent discourse.

Many corpus hits for Jedi are direct references to the film title Return of the Jedi, and lightsaber stands out in the extent to which it is used in contexts referring to merchandise. A new generation is now using lightsabres as toys representing a concept that is part of a shared cultural background, even in cases where neither the children nor their parents have watched the Star Wars films.

What also becomes immediately obvious from Figure 2 is the large number of items in the last category with innovative uses. The heatmap in Figure 3 shows that innovative uses of to the dark side represent the largest category (n = 73).

Figure 3:

Heatmap for the type of reference in the use of Star Wars-derived items across corpora (BNC, BNC Spoken 2014, COCA, and COHA).

If the relative proportions of use in the categories are considered (see Figure 4), we find that to the dark side leads with more than 50 % innovative uses, followed by Padawan and Yoda.

Figure 4:

Proportion of use types by Star Wars items (across BNC, BNC Spoken 2014, COCA, and COHA).

Of the innovative uses of to the dark side, many are related to professional contexts, as seen in (32) and (33). These usages suggest that some types of job have a bad reputation among particular restricted groups (of which developers are mentioned more than once as succumbing to the dark side and changing their job), and the dark side is associated with a higher income in many of these cases.

Another recurring context is a switch of brand in a particular hobby:

Otherwise, the expression is used in such diverse contexts as children’s behaviour, hockey playing, politics and playful advertising, for example in (36).

Padawan is used in COCA in innovative contexts to refer to different types of people, such as iTunes library novices, theological or political discussants, graduate students, and so on. The topics range from racing, motorbiking, and baseball to dressing style, dating, and successful communication, so that it can be considered very general in its meaning. It almost always occurs in combination with my or young, as in (37).

This use implies that the speakers put themselves in the position of a Jedi Master or an analogous higher-order mentor teaching a disciple the ropes. A considerable number of hits for Padawan in COCA are lower case, which implies a generalization of the term, for example in (38).

Many of the Yoda uses are about mentorship and wisdom, and they often quote Yoda or modify his quotes:

Many instances use a or the with Yoda, as in (41) and (42), and there are even uses with a personal pronoun, like in (43) and (44). This also seems to suggest a frequent generalized use of the term.

We can thus see that the outside-of-Star Wars uses of the search items depend on their possible level of semantic abstraction. Many of the uses can be considered metaphorical extensions of the original meaning or reference; for example, when Yoda is used to refer to a mentor or wise expert, or when Jedi is used for a skilled person and Padawan for someone who is being taught a lesson. Lightsabre stands out in this respect as the only physical object with many uses referring to battles with toys, and to the dark side as part of a construction with an introductory verb that expresses a change to a state that is evaluated (or known to be evaluated) as less virtuous.

4 Summary and conclusion

Language in science fiction often aims at estrangement (cf. Adams 2017), but director George Lucas mentioned in interviews that he wanted to create a “used universe” in his Star Wars films (Arango 2018) – with all the implications that this has regarding the familiarity of the setting for the viewers. This also seems to extend to the language used in the Star Wars films, some of which has become institutionalized (so that a lexical item is recognized by other speakers as known and thus item-familiar; cf. Bauer 1983: 48).

The corpus study reported here finds a substantial amount of Star Wars-related material, both vocabulary and constructions, in English-language corpora, with over one-third (34.3 %) of the annotated tokens showing innovative uses. The items in these contexts of use have arguably reached the highest level of integration into the English language through their relative independence from the Star Wars universe (which is taken for granted as a shared cultural background). These metaphorical extensions, whose status as general-language items in everyday discourse is often underlined by lower-case spelling, are complemented by another 11.7 % of usage contexts referring to merchandise or other real-world objects or concepts derived from the Star Wars saga. The data also suggests that the construction to the dark side has only been used with moral overtones since the advent of the Star Wars franchise.

We can therefore conclude from the corpus study that Star Wars has not only had an important and still ongoing impact on popular culture but also on the English language, in the sense that a substantial number of words and constructions from a galaxy far, far away have already become an established part of the English vocabulary.