The “Star Wars” entertainment juggernaut that erupted like a sci-fi supernova with George Lucas’s galaxy far, far-off remains to be alive and well over 46 years later. Its indomitable influence over popular culture has been well documented and shown to occupy every corner our modern digital age, especially the flexible English language.
To strengthen this notion of how much “Star Wars” dominates the media machine and on a regular basis Earth-bound existence, an illuminating recent research paper from a professor on the esteemed Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany explains how vocabulary originating from the vast “Star Wars” empire has turn out to be essential components of human communication.
“I wanted to search out out whether words from the ‘Star Wars’ universe have already turn out to be a part of our own universe,” says Prof Dr. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, chair of English and Digital Linguistics. “‘Star Wars'” has turn out to be such a crucial a part of popular culture that e.g. Yoda’s role as a mentor or the looks of lightsabers will be assumed to be familiar to large sections of the population and thus form the premise for progressive language uses.”
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Understanding the impact of “Star Wars” on the English language was the results of this geeky investigation through which Sanchez-Stockhammer dug deep to find the frequency of words reminiscent of Jedi, Padawan, Yoda, lightsaber and “to the dark side” appearing within the digital English text corpora and their inherent meaning.
This detailed paper, published as an open access document in the web journal Linguistics Vanguard, shows that the word “Jedi” occurs greater than 4 times per million words within the Corpus of Contemporary English (COCA), which collects 520 million English words as they have been utilized in speech, writing, academic studies, TV, and film between 1990 and 2015.
Sanchez-Stockhammer indicates that these “Star Wars”-centric words often pop up greater than many regular words, with no direct reference to movies in any respect, but are sprinkled throughout common kinds of expressive similes or metaphors, meaning that these specific “Star Wars” words have attained a complicated and colourful level of insertion into the English language.
As revealed within the university press release, many dictionaries currently list “Star Wars” vocabulary, with the Oxford English Dictionary harboring every word analyzed within the paper.
“The instance of ‘lightsaber’ shows that ‘Star Wars’ is now even one way or the other a part of our physical reality,” Sanchez-Stockhammer notes. “Most uses of the word discuss with tangible toy lightsabers, for instance in ‘I even have my lightsaber and my sci-fi toys.’
“While light and darkness were already used as metaphors for good and evil before the ‘Star Wars’ movies, not one of the earlier sources within the historical COHA corpus employs the development ‘to the dark side’ within the ‘Star Wars’ sense, i.e. to specific a change to a state evaluated as more immoral by the speakers.”
This study was published within the journal Linguistics Vanguard on Nov. 23.