This is the key to my explanation. In-universe, the language they speak is called “Basic”, and isn’t actually English; it’s just rendered as English for us watching the movies to make it more relatable to us. In the same way, there is one species that dominates the galactic polities and is found on many planets, and most of the major characters are unsurprisingly members of that dominant species. That species is not actually human, but is presented as such for the same reason that Basic is presented as English.
In one of Clarke’s short stories, he has one of the characters riding a beast “that it is convenient to refer to as a horse”. Same idea: The precise species was not a detail that was important to the story.
Why did C3P0 need to be fluent in six million forms of communication? For that matter, why can Wookies understand Basic but not speak it, while humans understand Wookiespeak but not speak it?
Canon explanation is that Wookiees’ vocal cords are structured in such a way that they aren’t capable of speech in Basic.
In Solo: A Star Wars Story, shortly after meeting Chewbacca, Han does speak some Shyriiwook (“Wookieespeak”), poorly, but is able to convey a plan to Chewie in a way that the guards near them apparently can’t understand. One might guess that humans’ vocal cords are structured in a way that makes speaking Shyriiwook difficult.
Also, Hutts apparently can speak Basic; conceited bastards that they are, they just don’t deign to speak the languages of lesser creatures.
There was an Imperial in season 2 of The Mandalorian who had a southern accent (audio samples can be found at the link). The Ghormans of Andor are very French-coded, including the accent. Cassian, being from Kenari, has a unique accent because Galactic Standard wasn’t his first language.
In an episode of The Acolyte, one character tells another “see you in Hell” and I assume this was a metaphorical equivalent rather than how we the audience would commonly interpret it. Upon looking it up, I see hell has been said in Star Wars many times but that one really stuck out to me.
Over in another galaxy, Star Trek Picard gave us Irish Romulans and hard cussing, making for a hilarious moment when one character described Romulan spies as “cheeky fookers”. Mileage varies as to whether or not this made Star Trek better or worse.
It’s sometimes said that the Force is the religion of the Star Wars galaxy, but people are often syncretic, and they might not even think of the Force, with its obvious and visible effects, as being religious. People might well believe in the Force, and also believe in an afterlife, or afterlives, or morally-sorted afterlives.
C3PO includes in his ‘languages’ the ability to ‘speak to’ (program) moisture vaporators. From that we can infer that the non-Empire freeware community of the Star Wars universe has gone hog wild in producing application-specific versions of whatever their equivalent of embedded Linux is, and each has a special macro language to program the system to the point that no system can directly interact with another, hence why Rebel fighters require R-type droids just to hack the various onboard systems into communicating with one another. Imperial ‘TIE’ fighters, designed with a single unified Ada-like programming don’t have this problem and interact with each other fluently; however, the complier is so moribund and inefficient that the code has serious latencies and often jumps in cycles, making it terribly error-prone and incapable of tracking even a large, slow target like the Millennium Falcon.
Wookiespeak is basically the Star Wars version of Magyar where however well you may learn to read and understand it (albeit imperfectly) you will never learn to speak it in a way that Hungarians will acknowledge.
Funny how what was so obvious to all of you completely opened my eyes. Watched a couple more eps of Andor yesterday, and in the back of my mind I kept thinking, “Those human appearing creatures are not humans.”
Unfortunately, after the second ep last night (S2.5), my wife and I agreed that we had no idea what was going on, didn’t care enough to try to figure it out, and didn’t care to finish the season.
Last night I was sorta trying to figure out the “loyalty” of various characters depending on whether they spoke with British accents or not. Seemed to hold true that most hardcore Imps were British. But some Imp-allied folk sounded British and others didn’t. And the non-Imps’ speech seemed pretty much all over the map.
The British accents seem to have evolved into more of class distinction than an imperial one in Star Wars.i think the original distinction was just an accident of casting mostly due to minor characters being hired in London near where the films were being shot.
As for threepio’s “six million” number, I would note he spoke fluent Ewokese, as should be expected. Did our intrepid human heroes even know they existed before getting captured by them?
OTOH he also said “I’m not much of a storyteller”, yet held the Ewokkers in thrall with his heroic tale. Maybe that says more about their level of sophistication than his?
As a diplomat, it’s unsurprising his character is humbly self-effacing. I take the “I’m not a story teller” comment to be just that; him diplomatically moving the focus off humble himself and onto the story being told.
Ewoks might still be rather stupid creatures with a primitive culture. But I don’t think we can conclude that from C3PO’s comment or the Ewok’s enjoyment of the story.
IIRC, he didn’t quite precisely speak fluent Ewokese, but he recognized the language as being very similar to one that he did already know, similar enough that he was able to very quickly pick it up.
He also said that the moisture vaporators were very similar to the language of a different piece of industrial equipment that he had had a lot of experience with. So there probably was some widespread machine language, just with minor variations for different applications (compare, say, Arduinos being programmed in a variant of C, just with a few custom libraries).
In different ways, both Threepio and Artoo were very good at lying through their