Chakobsa language

Chakobsa is a language created for the Dune movies from Legendary directed by Denis Villeneuve, which are adaptations of the book series by Frank Herbert. In the books, Herbert drew on several real-world languages for his Chakobsa, most notably Arabic. However, the name of the language is taken from a real Northwest Caucasian language. While David Peterson developed the language for the first film, he and Jessie Peterson worked together to extend the language for part two.

Given the setting of of Dune being tens of thousands of years in the future, any similarity of Chakobsa to a current language on Earth would be highly unlikely. This posed a problem for Peterson in making it a naturalistic constructed language, given the many instances of Chakobsa which had been lifted verbatim by Herbert from real-world languages. His solution to this was to give other, less literal meanings to some of the phrases given by Herbert. For example, the phrase Lisan al-Gaib, given by Herbert as meaning “The Voice from the Outer World”, is from the Arabic لسان الغيب (Lisān al-Ḡayb, “Tongue of the Unseen”), which in the romanization is rendered by Peterson as lisaan al-gayib, a clipping of the phrase lisaanaha al-gayib (“the universe is whispering”). For more information about the language, use the links provided below:

• Phonology
• Grammar
• Vocabulary
• Dinlih, the script used for Chakobsa
• Dune dialogue