Zendaya as a Fremen in a scene from “Dune: Part Two.” Warner Bros.

Creating a tongue for ‘Dune’

The Indigenous sandworm riders of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic “Dune” speak Chakobsa. But the book only has a few words of this fictional language. So when the novel was being adapted to the big screen, the question was: What does Chakobsa sound like?

That’s where colangers, or professional language constructors, came in. Conlangers have long given life to fictional voices in series like “Game of Thrones” and films like James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

For the “Dune” series, a specific grammatical structure was created for Chakobsa, as well as roughly 700 basic vocabulary words — not including those that are made possible by adjustments, such as when lija (to eat) becomes lijjin (a snack).