Star Words! Star Wars is an ‘integral part’ of the English language, scientists claim – with words like ‘padawan’, ‘lightsaber’ and ‘dark side’ now used in everyday conversations

Not everyone will know how many languages ​​C-3PO can speak or debate the merits of The Phantom Menace endlessly – but chances are Star Wars is now part of your everyday conversation.

One study suggests that people routinely use the words Yoda, Jedi, Padawan, and lightsaber, and talk about crossing over to the “dark side,” much like Darth Vader himself.

Professor Cristina Sanchez Stockhammer, a German linguist, set out to find out how common these five terms, used in the Star Wars films, are in everyday life.

It found 7,752 references in linguistic databases of British and American texts including books, magazines and newspaper articles.

Phrases such as “Jedi mind trick”, used to refer to an act of manipulation, have crept into the language, as has “young Padawan” as a way of addressing a young or naive person receiving a lesson or valuable advice.

One study suggests that people routinely use the words Yoda, Jedi, Padawan, and lightsaber, and talk about crossing over to the “dark side,” much like Darth Vader himself. Professor Cristina Sanchez Stockhammer, a German linguist, set out to find out how common these five terms, used in the Star Wars films, are in everyday life.

Just over a third of the references to Star Wars terms were completely unrelated to the movies – showing that even people who don’t have the first clue what a Wookie or Ewok are may have picked up a language from a galaxy far, far away.

Professor Sanchez Stockhammer, from Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany, said: ‘I’ve been a Star Wars fan for a long time, but I really realized how important Star Wars is in everyday language when US politician Nancy Pelosi accused the former of being a fan. Speaker of the House of Representatives goes to the ‘dark side’.

We’ve long been accustomed to this trope of darkness being evil and light being good – but the idea of ​​”crossing over” to the dark side has gained momentum since the famous conversation between Luke Skywalker and his father.

“This study shows that Star Wars is inescapable – even if you haven’t seen it, you know about it, it exists in language, and we can all understand what many words mean.

“It’s a testament to the popularity of this fictional universe.”

The study, published this month in the journal Linguistics Vanguard, focused on the words lightsaber, Jedi and Padawan – referring to an aspiring young Jedi knight – after they were added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2019.

Yoda has been included in the dictionary since 2016, and the phrase “dark side” was included in 2021.

The villain Darth Vader famously told Luke Skywalker, in Return of the Jedi, to “turn yourself over to the Dark Side” and “turn to the Dark Side,” to which Skywalker replied “Never.”

“Fear is the path to the dark side,” Yoda said in The Phantom Menace.

Yoda has been in the dictionary since 2016, and the phrase “dark side” was included in 2021

The five Star Wars terms were searched in the British National Corpus, a collection of British texts from the 1980s, and 11.5 million words recorded from conversations in British homes for another linguistic study between 2012 and 2016.

Terms were also considered in the Contemporary American English Corpus, which includes more than a billion words from texts such as books, newspapers, and magazines dating from the 1820s to the 2000s, and in a separate database of historical American English texts.

The study suggests that the dark side, which was used literally in the past to refer to a shaded area such as the dark side of the moon, has come to have much stronger associations between “evil” and “immorality” because of the Star Wars films.

It is now often used to talk about someone moving into a new role at work, which pays more money, such as one text describing an employee who has “crossed over to the dark side” of marketing.

More than half of the uses of the dark side were not Star Wars related, even though the term is coming from the films.

This was the case for about 40% of the uses of the words Padawan and Jedi, which are now often used only to describe someone skilled such as “Financial Jedi” or “Sexual Jedi”.

Padawan are often used as a joke, such as one example found in research from the recent superhero TV show The Flash, where a character says “That’s how it’s done, young Padawan” to congratulate someone on getting a date.

The use of Padawan in the lingua franca has been shown to have increased between 2015 and 2020, when the latest Star Wars trilogy was released.

The study found that this is also the case for the words Jedi and lightsaber, which are usually used literally to refer to a real game.