Fremen language

The Fremen language was a descendant of ancient Arabic and of Chakobsa, spoken on Arrakis by the Zensunni wanderers who came to be the Fremen. Carried across thousands of years of migration before it settled in the deep desert, it became a tongue shaped above all by the priorities of survival in an arid world.

Evolution#

Fremen derived mainly from Arabic but distanced itself greatly from that ancient language, enriched by other tongues and tending toward simplification. The emphatic consonants, the pharyngeals, the glottal stop, and vocalic length all disappeared, and a complex mutational morphology simplified toward a syntactically isolating language. Along the way the speech of House Corrino, the standard Galach of theological and legal concepts, and the speech of the dilaubite miners of Rima all contributed to its vocabulary.

When the Fremen gathered at last on Arrakis in 7193 AG, the climate was so ferocious that an awareness of it hovered in the background of every conversation, and the language mirrored that priority. Its vocabulary multiplied the distinctions needed for survival, producing many terms for variations of sand and wind. Pardot Kynes noted that the Fremen were the first people to express climate in a semi mathematical language, and that their written symbols embodied external relationships. During the reign of Muad'Dib, Fremen became the sacred language of the Imperium, used in philosophy, theology, law, and education.

Dialects#

The two major dialects of Fremen were Eastern and Western. The Eastern group extended from Arrakeen to the False Wall West and the Habbanya Erg, taking in the sietches beyond the Plastic Basin, the rock outcroppings of the Funeral Plain, and Sietch Tabr. The Eastern dialect employed the plural markers at and an. The Western group extended from the Sihaya Ridge to the False Wall South and included the sietches of the Ridge, Hole in the Rock, and Pasty Mesa, and it borrowed terms from the smugglers near the edge of the Minor Erg. Its plural marker was u, and Arabic adjectives retained their gender distinctions.

Writing and phrases#

The Fremen alphabet derived from the Arabic and was written from right to left, though some dialects, such as that of the Sihaya Ridge, wrote boustrophedon. Unlike the Arabic script it represented full vowels, an innovation attributed to Ali ben Ohasi, and it was later streamlined into an alphabetic script with a single form for each phoneme, a reform attributed to the planetologist Liet-Kynes. A sign called the shadda indicated a doubled consonant.

The everyday and ceremonial speech of the Fremen preserved many memorable phrases. Greetings such as subakh ul kuhar, are you well, and subakh un nar, I am well and you, marked daily encounters, while ya ya yawm meant now hear this. The Fedaykin battle cry Ya Hya Chouhada translated as long live the fighters, and the title Lisan al-Gaib named the voice from the outer world. Familiar terms of Fremen life entered the wider language as well, among them sietch, a meeting place in time of danger, hajj for pilgrimage, and the name Muad'Dib, the desert mouse.