dek

When asked how much of the alien language used by the franchise’s central hunter species he is able to speak, “Predator: Badlands” director Dan Trachtenberg quickly answers, “Zero.”

“My mouth will not even permit me to utter [even] a phonic from it,” Trachtenberg says of the language created for his film, praising his actors for learning it. Linguist Britton Watkins “really developed the language as if it had evolved from the mouth shape and the throat sounds that we have heard before from the ‘Predator’ [movies], but it really fits the ecology of the Yautja species. And my throat won’t allow me to do it.”

“Predator: Badlands,” which opened to a franchise record $40 million at the domestic box office, is the first “Predator” installment where one of the alien hunters is the hero. The movie follows Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young Yautja outcast on a quest to prove his worth to his clan by hunting a massive, nearly unkillable beast on a deadly planet.

Thia (Elle Fanning) and Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) meet on a deadly planet in “Predator: Badlands.”

(20th Century Studios)

During his hunt, Dek encounters Thia (Elle Fanning), an android that has been separated from the rest of her research party — as well as the lower half of her body — and is happy to provide helpful intel on the planet’s lethal flora and fauna.

For Trachtenberg, who rejuvenated the long-running sci-fi franchise with the 2022 prequel “Prey,” it was important that the Yautja and their culture feel “as authentic and archaeological” as the human ones he has featured in his “Predator” films, which also include this summer’s animated anthology “Predator: Killer of Killers.”

“I wanted to make sure that the Yautja species was treated seriously and with dignity,” the filmmaker says. “We’re asking people to empathize with a monster, with something that was the slasher in a slasher movie to some degree, decades ago.”

That meant consulting an expert to fully construct a language for the Yautja. Watkins was recommended to the “Predator: Badlands” team by Paul Frommer, the linguist who created the Na’vi language for the “Avatar” films. He was tasked with developing both the spoken and written Yautja language, first introduced in “Killer of Killers.”

Watkins understood that “Badlands” would involve both the type of action that audiences expect from a “Predator” film as well as more quiet moments where characters are just talking to each other. This meant creating a language that was as faithful as it could be to the trills and roars of previous “Predator” movies while also being “a tonal match and a kind of atmospheric match” to English for scenes when both languages are used in conversation.

“I started, rather than with a complete language and vocabulary and everything, a framework that I could build out as things changed with the production,” Watkins says, explaining that this involved creating both phonological and grammatical rules. “I built the framework for a language that was never going to have sounds that didn’t belong in it, but could expand in terms of vocabulary and grammar to suit whatever we needed over the long course of filming.”

He also knew that once Yautja was introduced, there would be fans eager to dissect and learn it just like there have been for other constructed languages created for sci-fi and fantasy movies and TV shows.

“I knew that … people would want to pause [the movie] and they’d want to rewind and they’d want to figure it out,” Watkins says. “So I wanted to keep it simple, but it’s not dumbed down. It’s culturally appropriate but it’s approachable as a language [for] people [that] want to learn it.”

Here are a few tips from Watkins for those interested in learning Yautja.

The alphabet includes complex consonant clusters

The Yautja alphabet can be seen in the writing on some of the objects in “Predator: Badlands.”

(20th Century Studios)

When designing the phonology of the Yautja language, Watkins took into account the aliens’ physiology.

“They don’t have lips, so they can’t make ma or ba or fa [sounds] because they don’t have the lips to do that,” Watkins explains. “To supplement not having F and V and Th and M, we have consonant clusters like jl and cht … that we don’t have in English, but they can be made lower in the throat.”

These consonant clusters comprise multiple letters when written out in the Roman alphabet, but are one letter in the Yautja alphabet. The Yautja word for prey, for example, starts with the letter hrr.

Their alphabet “is optimized for visual efficiency for their sound system,” Watkins says. Yautja writing can be seen on weapons and other objects in “Badlands.”

Basic sentence structure is the reverse of English

In Yautja, the structure of a declarative sentence — one that makes a statement, provides a fact or offers an explanation — is the reverse of those in English.

“The object or the predicate comes first, the verb is in the middle and then the subject comes at the end,” says Watkins. “Once you establish a rule like that, you have to keep it unless you have a legitimate reason to break it, like we do in English.”

Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) in “Predator: Badlands.”

(20th Century Studios)

Listen for recurring words

Yautja words are largely analytical, meaning “there aren’t 14 versions of a single noun,” Watkins explains. This includes the first-person pronoun ‘I,’ which in Yautja is chish.

“When it’s ‘me’ earlier in the sentence, it’s chish [and] when it’s ‘I’ as a subject at the end of the sentence it’s still chish,” Watkins says. “It doesn’t change.”

Another sound to try to catch is nga. Ngai is the Yautja word for ‘no,’ so nga occurs in any word that has a negative element in it, like “nobody.”

You can tell how Yautja feel about you by what they call you

Unlike chish, the Yautja use different words when addressing or referring to others based on respect and affection.

“The words for ‘you’ and the words for ‘he’ or ‘she’ change depending on who’s speaking about whom,” Watkins explains. “It’s culturally appropriate for Yautja, in the Yautja culture, [to] talk about other people pejoratively.”

Think of it a bit like the difference between using tú or usted in Spanish. When addressing someone they look down on or are disrespecting, the Yautja use wul, while someone they respect would be addressed as dau. Kai is the word used when addressing a close friend.

Yautja isn’t a gendered language (for the most part)

Unlike languages such as French and Spanish, Yautja has no grammatical gender, so nouns aren’t assigned gender categories.

There is, however, a pronoun gender distinction for he and she, much like in English. Similarly, all Yautja use chish for “I” and “me” regardless of gender.

One of the reasons Yautja has no grammatical gender is because that was most practical.

“There was not a lot of time [to create Yautja], and adding gender like that is going to add complexity to the language,” Watkins says, explaining that this complexity would have made it more difficult to quickly turn around any adjustments to the script that needed to be made over the course of filming.

That it also helps keeps the language accessible for Yautja learners is a bonus.