Star Wars Finally Shows That Yoda Only Speaks Backwards Because He Wants To
A Star Wars comic recently showed that Yoda can actually speak in regular English and talks backward on purpose.
Yoda’s backward speech pattern, a grift it is. An upcoming issue of the Star Wars comic book Yoda reveals that the diminutive Jedi master chooses to speak the wrong way rather than reverse speech being a trait of his species. A bug it is, not a feature.
The revelation comes in Yoda #7 when the pint-sized Force-wielder is sitting around reminiscing about past adventures. The series so far has been an anthology of sorts featuring tales throughout different eras of Star Wars told through Yoda’s memories as he sits in exile on Dagobah, waiting for Luke Skywalker to grow up.
Issue #7 contains a scene where a cloaked individual is paying an unsavory character for information. “You said you had information for me?” the mysterious figure asks the informant in perfectly normal Basic (that’s Star Wars for English). Unbeknownst to the reader, that cloaked figure is none other than Star Wars’ little Jedi that could, Yoda.
Talking backward on purpose might seem like a weird hobby for someone whose main occupation is a teacher. After all, communication is the key to education. If your students can’t understand a lesson than they, how can you expect them to learn it?
But believe it or not, that’s exactly why Yoda does it. As an instructor of Force-sensitive individuals who regularly swing lightsabers around like they’re not the deadliest weapon in all of Star Wars, it’s important for Yoda to make sure his students pay attention to his words. What better way for a teacher to make sure kids aren’t tuning them out than to speak in a way that demands they listen closely to figure out what’s really being said?
And it honestly works. Imagine how forgettable it would have been if Yoda told Luke during his training, “Don’t try to do it, just do it” instead of the far more memorable “Do, or do not. There is no try.” By turning everything into an important-sounding riddle, Yoda can make sure that his lessons stick and that his students remember his words.
The backward syntax serves a real-world purpose as well. When George Lucas was coming up with Yoda’s personality for Star Wars: Episode V-The Empire Strikes Back, he decided he wanted the way Yoda talked to be both alien and recognizable at the same time. Lucas didn’t want to go with a made-up alien language that would require viewers to read a lot of subtitles, but he also wanted his tiny green sage to talk in a way that complimented the kind of Eastern mysticism that he was going for with Yoda.
Then it came to him. He would make Yoda talk backward. As Lucas himself explained when discussing Star Wars’ resident philosopher Yoda, “I had to come up with a language that was alien, but still understandable. So, I reversed everything around.”
Of course, observant fans figured out that Yoda’s species could talk normally a while ago. In an episode of last year’s Disney+ animated Star Wars, anthology Tales of the Jedi, a prequel-era Jedi of Yoda’s species spoke at length in normal, frontwards sentences. In the episode “The Sith Lord,” Bryce Dallas Howard voices Jedi Master Yaddle, who finds out about a Sith plot and has to face off against the evil Count Dooku.
Throughout the episode, Howard has several lines as Yaddle, and not a single one is backward. Yaddle, as a character, gets no respect (you can read all about her on the Star Wars database Wookipedia ). First appearing onscreen in Star Wars: Episode I- The Phantom Menace, Yaddle is the first indication we get that Yoda isn’t a one-off alien and that there are more of his kind out there.
Sadly the character has been all but forgotten in recent years in favor of another, cuter Yoda-variant. Fans should remember, however, that Yaddle walked so that Grogu could run…or float around in his hover-orb, as it were.
