The impact of Star Wars on the English language: Star Wars-derived words and constructions in present-day English corpora

Abstract

Since George Lucas’s film A New Hope was first screened in 1977, the Star Wars saga has become a pop-culture phenomenon incorporating films, videogames, books, merchandise, and a quasi-religious philosophy, but linguistic research on Star Wars is scarce and has mainly focused on language use in the films. There is as yet no investigation of the impact of Star Wars on the English language, and the present study fills this gap using corpus-linguistic methods to investigate the extent to which characteristic words and constructions from the Star Wars universe have become established in English. Five Star Wars-derived items included in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), namely Jedi, Padawan, lightsabre (with spelling variants), Yoda, and the characteristic construction to the dark side were analysed regarding their frequency of occurrence in four corpora of present-day English (COCA, COHA, BNC, BNC Spoken 2014) and coded regarding their level of independence from the original films. The results show that over one-third of the uses of the investigated Star Wars-derived items are innovative (like the BNC example Other imbibers have gone over to the dark side of beer, rejecting the pasteurised lager produced by the breweries) and thus well integrated into the English language.