Say It in Ghor: How Andor Brought a Brand New Language to Star Wars (2025)

[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Andor, Season 2 Episode 8, “Who Are You?”]

The second season of Andor, taking place over the four years leading up to the events of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, has spent a great deal of time focusing on the previously obscure planet of Ghorman, a peaceful world where spiderwebs become the galaxy’s most popular fabrics. Over the first half of the season, the Disney+ series has made a point of establishing Ghorman as a richly defined world with its own history, traditions, and language — specifically the language Ghor, a fully-developed brand-new fictional tongue spoken by Ghorman residents on screen.

“Language is such a part of any culture, of any country, or in the case of Star Wars, of any planet,” David Acord tells Consequence. “So if you have this well-fleshed-out language that characters are speaking on screen, and doing a great job of seeming very fluent and very believable, and then you’ve got this world built around that culture, it solidifies what you’re trying to achieve, which is this wholly unique culture here.”

Acord and Margit Pfeiffer were both supervising sound editors on Andor Season 2 in different capacities: Pfeiffer focusing on any human dialogue element you hear in the show, while Acord — as Pfeiffer puts it — “gets to have all the fun designing the spaceships and aliens, and then mixes it perfectly with all the music.” In short, they were both responsible for what you hear as you watch Andor — including bringing the Ghor dialogue to the screen.

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Marina Tyndall, Diego Luna’s dialect coach going back to Rogue One, created the Ghor language — “a fictional language with its own rules and sounds and grammar and pronunciations,” Pfeiffer says. She also confirms that creator Tony Gilroy based a fair amount of Ghorman on French culture, “from the beautiful set design to the sounds of the language, to the beautiful fabrics and tapestries and the whole production design centered around it. So the language followed.”

This means, she continues, that while “we tried to put in a little bit of Italian grammar, the phonetics [of Ghor] are purely French. A French person could read the lines on a sheet of paper, even though they wouldn’t make any sense in French — but it’s the French melodic tone that we wanted to keep.”

While the syntax might be familiar to French speakers, the vocabulary, Pfeiffer says, “is all made-up words. It follows strict rules — a noun is a noun, a verb is a verb — but the words themselves are made up.” The limits of the Ghor vocabulary might technically be determined by the scripts, and the words that needed inventing to replicate the writers’ dialogue. However, that’s still an awful lot of words.

“We recorded hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of lines,” Pfeiffer explains. “And if you look at the structure of a language, I think you could consider yourself to be somewhat fluent if you know about 2000 words — you can form basic sentences and the most common words.”

And then there are more specialized topics, she notes: “For a rebellion and a massacre, you’ll have different words than you’d use to check into a hotel.”

Unfortunately for the people of Ghorman, dialogue for all those scenarios was required. For as we learn over the course of the season, the planet isn’t just a fashion mecca — the increasingly powerful Empire has figured out that there’s a rare mineral just below the surface the Emperor requires. And what the Emperor wants, the Emperor gets by any means necessary.

This only accentuates the impact of Ghorman’s destruction in Season 2, Episode 8, “Who Are You?,” Acord says. “It’s important that we establish that there’s this rich culture on this planet that the fascist Imperial bad guys have decided is less important than the mineral rights underneath the surface. It builds the tension and the stress that you feel for these people.”