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Sokovian

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 11:39 am
by vlad
In Marvel comics, Wanda Maximoff is Serbian. But in the movies they decided to change it to the fictional country of "Sokovia".

In the movie Age of Ultron, they just used Serbian as a stand-in for the Sokovian language. But for Wandavision, someone (possibly dialect coach Courtney Young? it's not clear) created a conlang to represent Sokovian. The only official written sample we have is this (which is in IPA, not orthography):
We’ve been waiting for you
'tie mi t͡ʃaˈjaɫəm

Now you are here
ˈʃiɪdeŋ ˈti e ˈʃte

More perfect than I imagined
ˈdrage wo t͡sto ˈmisliɫəm

Our house is now a home (our house is now a nest)
ˈdom naʃ ˈʃiɪdeŋ ˈgnieʒdo

No matter where you go
bez veˈdeɪ̆ doˈkude ˈjit͡ʃiʃ

Sunlight shines on you
ˈʃiʒa ˈsunt͡so nad tiˈe
(There's a small amount of other Sokovian dialog in the show, but it hasn't been transcribed or subtitled.)

Could someone who knows Slavic languages tell us: what is this based on? what is it closest to? where it would fit in the tree (if anywhere)? does it make sense grammatically? is it just gibberish?

Re: Sokovian

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 3:36 pm
by Zju
Vocab seems either random, or random alternations on common Slavic vocab. At least [ˈsunt͡so] is based on Serbian, but [ˈmisliɫəm] looks like taken straight out of Polish. It does seem to have its own grammar and isn't gibberish (words generally match their translations).

I wonder what word is [ˈʃiɪdeŋ] based on. Only Ukrainian contrasts /i/ and /ɪ/, but no Slavic language has /ŋ/.

Re: Sokovian

Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2021 4:29 pm
by WeepingElf
Probably a frankenlang stitched together from various Slavic languages.