The movie’s directors, Coffin and Kyle Balda, have said as much – the language isn’t gibberish as such, but a collection of funny-sounding words from around the world.
#Minion language series
Since the Minions come from a series of movies aimed at kids, to understand Minionese, it’ll mean as much to observe body language and tone as it would to try to make out every word. In studies of non-verbal communication carried out by Dr Albert Mehrabian and expounded in his book ‘Silent Messages’, it was found that only 7% of meaning is expressed through the words spoken, leaving 93% for vocal intonation, facial expression and body language. This is why our brains – from a young age – can usually figure out what’s going on between characters in film and television even with the sound off.
Like any language, the inflection or tone of voice used by the speaker carries as much meaning as the words themselves. But with a critical eye and quizzical eyebrow raised, it behoves us to be grown-ups and ask: how are we actually supposed to understand this gibberish? Of course, for the Minions movie’s prime audience of pre-teens this only adds to the hilarity, and it surely would have been more confusing for the characters to speak in an entirely unrecognisable nonsense language.
#Minion language movie
This is bound to have a mildly disconcerting effect on a grown-up audience, bringing back my baleful memories of when a high school teacher thought it would be a great end of term treat to watch a movie in French… without subtitles. It’s also why those parts of the world acquainted with curry will laugh for both recognition and absurdity when the phrase “Open sesame” is replaced with “Poulet tiki masala!”, a rough approximation of the most popular curry in the UK, chicken tikka masala. “Para ti” is “for you” in Esperanto (itself a mish-mash of other languages), extremely close to the Minionese “para tu”. The Minions’ word for “thank you”, “terimakasi”, is borrowed from Indonesian. “Gelato” from Italian means the same thing, ice cream when said by the Minions. Minionese is in fact a Frankenstein’s monster of a language, stitched together from odd phrases here and there which will be familiar to different people the world over. What’s intriguing is that the creators and voices of the Minions, Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud, haven’t actually made up a new language at all. In the movie we learn that they have served many masters the world over, so it makes a bit more sense that they couldn’t be held to just one earthly language.
Now they have become the stars of their own self-titled, full-length movie, the Minions are more inescapable than ever. Should we fear, or embrace, this new language? The internet is abuzz with Minionese-English dictionaries and this is exactly how it would have started with Klingon, if there were high-speed internet in the 1970s. It is known to a generation as Minionese – the virtually-incoherent language spoken by those googly-eyed yellow chaps, introduced to an unprepared world by the 2010 movie ‘Despicable Me’. Parents still reeling from the decimation of sanity caused by the soundtrack to ‘Frozen’ will be all too aware of a new plague, as the childless amongst us laugh uncomprehendingly at their misfortune.
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