Star Wars Grammar By Yoda - A Grammarian's Delight

Something for Star Wars grammar lovers.

There is nothing better than a little inverted Yoda grammar to get the purists’ teeth gnashing. The fantastic infographic below gives a few examples of Yoda speak, which I have to admit I love.

From inverted word order, or inversion, to dropping auxiliaries, moving modifiers, all the way through to dropping the negative auxiliary or fronting. What fun.

He even changes the verb-subject order when the fancy takes him.

Article Contents

Grammar rules

While this is a fun little read, what this infographic below illustrates, is that grammar is a flexible set of general rules.

They can be modified, changed, and interpreted in many ways.

We all recognize Yoda speak, but is it grammatically correct?

Yes, it is.

However, the heavy use of inversion gives it a unique style.

For example, Yoda says, Adventure. Excitement. A Jedi craves not these things.

Here’s what a typical sentence would be without inversion.

A Jedi does not crave adventure or excitement.

You can see how he drops the auxiliary verb does, which is unusual.

But it pays to know the rules first before you try to bend them.

Yoda Grammar

Enjoy this taste of Yoda Star Wars grammar, courtesy of Grammarly, and try not to gnash your teeth too much.

Star Wars Grammar By Yoda Body — Courtesy of Grammarly

Explaining Yoda Speak

There’s also a great article in the Atlantic that goes into the details of the construction of Yoda language.

You should read the whole article, but here is a snippet.

But what’s actually going on with Yoda, linguistically? First, let’s examine how Yoda doesn’t speak. Many of the world’s most-spoken languages—English, Mandarin—are built around constructions that go subject-verb-object. An example would be: Yoda grasped the lightsaber.

Another common construction, and one you’d find more commonly among speakers of Japanese, Albanian, and many other languages, goes subject-object-verb: Yoda the lightsaber grasped. More rare is a verb-subject-object construction, but that’s how people who speak Hawaiian and some Celtic languages do it: Grasped Yoda the lightsaber.

Even more unusual is the way Yoda famously speaks, ordering his sentences object-subject-verb, or OSV: The lightsaber Yoda grasped. Or, to use an example from an actual Yoda utterance: “Much to learn, you still have.”