The search for a primary writing system in ‘Star Wars’ has a history almost as old as the saga itself.
In the beginning there was the word, and that word was Basic. But just how you approach writing the primary language of the galaxy far, far away, has been a fascinating topic of exploration in Star Wars from its start. The need to flesh out Star Wars into a wider universe after the original film exploded into popularity created a worldbuilding problem that would take decades to “solve”—and in doing so created a rich variety of writing systems to populate its galaxy.Basic: The Language of Star Wars
Before you even get to how to even write it, you have to know what Basic (also known as Galactic Basic, or Galactic Basic Standard) represents in Star Wars. Although we as an English-speaking audience hear it as English—and of course Star Wars is a fictional universe created by English-language speakers—Basic itself is not meant to be a direct equivalent to spoken English.
Although we have seen that multiple languages exist across the Star Wars galaxy—Rodese, Shyriiwook, Huttese, Sith, Ghor, and so on—Basic is essentially a lingua franca, a common language adopted on a broad level by galactic society. But when we watch Star Wars, we are not really hearing Basic, but instead Basic’s translation into English, or whatever language you are watching a Star Wars project in: the Japanese dub of A New Hope is as canon to Star Wars as its English-language version is, even if there are subtle differences due to the nature of translation.
But that generalized view of Basic was not fully formed when Star Wars was created—not in its spoken form, as that didn’t really matter for the most part. Its written form, however, quickly became an issue.
The original Star Wars is covered with English signage and written words on displays, something that would change in the wake of the film’s blockbuster success. Both Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi would, with the confidence that audiences had accepted the galaxy far, far away, move away from putting English text on-screen, instead creating unique writing systems—reams of text that were not just left untranslated, but were never given meaning behind the symbology beyond the graphic design.Enter Aurebesh
That would begin to change with the arrival of the Expanded Universe in the early 1990s and Aurebesh.
