Josh is right. Between him and Tyler Cowen, I’m seriously rethinking my relatively low opinion of the Star Wars series. For some reason, I had never thought of Star Wars as being India- or Nigeria-like, which makes the general approach to language (i.e., simply assuming that everyone can at least comprehend at least two or three languages) better than I was giving it credit for. District 9 takes a similar approach, to mostly good effect.
But it’s still far from perfect. One of my objections to Avatar’s phonetics is the assumption that the aliens have essentially human vocal tracts and auditory systems, but not making this assumption presents difficulties for the multilingualism approach of Star Wars and District 9. If the production and perception systems are as different as they appear to be in Star Wars and District 9, it’s harder to believe that people (or various aliens) can, in fact, comprehend multiple languages.
The more I’ve thought about this, the more convinced I am that the ideal xenophonetics is not very cinematic in nature. The ideal xenophonetics being, of course, all about the difficulties encountered by alien-to-one-another races trying to figure out what the hell the other is saying. I imagine that a good book, or short story, could be written about this (and maybe already has been), but if the difficulties of human-alien communication is the focus, it’s probably better rendered in written form than put to film. Solaris (the book) vs. Solaris (the movie[s]) is a good example of this. Solaris the book is all about trying to comprehend an alien intelligence that defies comprehension. I don’t remember getting that from the (second version of the) movie.
[cross posted at Language Module]