What Language Do Minions Speak?
By: Shahzad Bashir Posted on Thu, 14-06-2018
We have all seen the Despicable Me Series—and loved them, mainly because of the tiny, yellow, bespectacled creatures called Minions. With their oh-so-cute playfulness and words, they have secured a place in the hearts of millions of fans worldwide—from young kids to teenagers and even older people.
The Minions have their own movie now, but before 2015, they were seen starring alongside the villain Gru in Despicable Me movies. After their premiere on the big screen, they have delivered some quotes that have been picked up and imitated by fans worldwide.
Minion talk gained immense popularity after the release of the movie ’Despicable Me’. It became an instant favorite of everyone, from kids to adults. Many people have tried decoding their words. That's why we are here with the following minion language chart that will decode their words for you:
But Have You Ever Stopped to Think about What Languages Do Minions Speak?
But Have You Ever Stopped to Think about What Languages Minions Speak?
To answer this fun question, you will have to turn to the linguists and language creators of this movie. Many people wonder Is minionese a real language — you might be surprised to know that it is a borrowed one from existing languages that have been mashed up together to create the gibberish that these cute, lovable creatures speak. So now you know how do minions talk.
Read: Most Useful Languages in the Future
The History of Invented Languages in Movies
Humans throughout history have devised ways to suit their needs of the hour. In this case, to stand out from the rest of the movies, certain linguistic changes had to be made—from formulating of new languages to devising new meanings of existing words.
When it comes to inventing new languages exclusively for a movie, Hollywood has no dearth of linguists hired to do this job. Star Trek’s producers hired a linguist to create the Klingon language, the famous Game of Thrones had Dothraki language exclusively made for the series while a new language called Na’vi was produced especially for the Avatar series.
How was Minion Language Created?
Press reports point out to the fact that the film’s directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud had created the language themselves, who are not language experts, yet they came up with the genius idea of recording the Minion voices themselves, dubbing them to give a realistic tone.
That means that neither Universal Cinemas hired a language expert to invent a new language from scratch nor a minion language translator was required.
But the directors of the movie could not have imagined that this language would achieve such heights of fame and popularity—that too in such a short time.
Let’s come back to our topic—what languages do Minions speak?
Words in the Minion Language
To your surprise, the Minions’ language is a combination of different languages.
If you listen closely to the Minions, you will come to an interesting conclusion. Fans of the movies have picked out words that seem to have a specific meaning of their own. The language spoken by Minions includes words from French, English, Spanish, Hindi, and Korean.
Apart from the hurried stream of words that they speak, some words stand out from the others—particularly the word Minions love to say—“banana!”. This word has been spoken so frequently that Minionese is often referred to as “banana language”. When Minions say “banana”, they mean the banana fruit but there are plenty of other food words in their vocabularies such as the song featuring banana and potato, and the words “poulet tiki masala”; poulet means chicken in French while tikka masala is a spicy Indian chicken dish. They count 1,2,3 in the Korean language and say thank you as “Tank Yu”. Another food word such as ice cream is spoken as “gelato” in Minion.
How to Speak Minion?
The little yellow creatures speaking their own language look super cute. The way they talk and their body language make them more lovable. We all like them, don’t we? Have you ever tried to mimic the way they talk? Wish to speak as they do? That won’t be an easy thing to do!
Inspired to speak Minionese? It is not as easy as it seems.
Speaking like a Minion isn’t only a matter of making incomprehensible sounds with words from different languages thrown infrequently. If observed carefully, Minionese has a lot of resemblance with baby-talk. Anyone who has heard babies cooing in the first years of development will notice that they speak the alphabets “B” and “P” a lot—as do Minions when they say “ba-na-na”, talking in cute little voices with uplifting tones. Just like babies do.
How many languages do the minions speak?
Since the language minions speak is a mixture of a couple of languages, people can often identify words from Spanish, and French, and at times minion language seems English even. However, as we mentioned above it's a combination of all these languages. Creative, right?
Common Misconceptions About Minion Language
You might have heard questions like do minions speak Spanish. You might have even seen questions like why do minions speak Spanish on social media. But now you know that it seems like Spanish or French sometimes because it is heavily inspired by multiple languages. Next time someone asks do minions speak French, you can share with them this interesting piece of information.
Afterword:
Minions and the movie series are loved by all fans across the world of entertainment. The fact that they are cute and speak in a fun, uplifting language is what sets them apart from others. Maybe that is why the Despicable Me and Minions series has such a huge cult of fan following.
When the directors of these series dubbed the voices in their own designed languages, they could not have imagined that it would one day become so popular so as to be loved by kids worldwide. What started out as a random combining of words from different languages, turned into gibberish that answered the question frequently pondered upon about what languages Minions speak?
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