The 2018 movie Alpha is an interesting exploration of life in the last ice age and the lasting bond between humans and their canine companions. The adventure movie follows a young man named Keda who decides to join his father’s hunting trip for the first time, only to find it much more dangerous than he expected. When Keda falls off a cliff during a steppe bison stampede, his father believes him to be ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, forcing Keda to make the heroic journey home all alone, save for a wolf he names Alpha.
Despite receiving positive reviews, Alpha never garnered too much attention upon its release seven years ago. Now, Alpha is one of the most visually impressive movies on Netflix and is finding new popularity. The movie showcases both sweeping visuals and close-up emotional sH๏τs, but one of the most impressive parts of the movie is actually one that audiences cannot see. Throughout the film, subтιтles are provided for the characters’ unknown language, which may sound convincing but is actually entirely made up for Alpha.
A Fictional Language Was Created For 2018’s Alpha Movie
A Linguistic Anthropologist Created The Language
The language that is being spoken in Alpha is actually a completely fictional language that was created for the film. The language, which is called Beama, was created by a professor of linguistic anthropology named Christine Schreyer. Schreyer, who is on the faculty at the University of British Columbia, worked with the film’s producers to create a language that would make sense for characters living 20,000 years in the past, which is very difficult since modern researchers have little evidence on the matter (via UBC News).
Prior to her time researching for Alpha, Christine Schreyer had previously developed the Kryptonian language for Man of Steel, which came out in 2013.
Schreyer was the perfect choice for creating the language as she has a history of working on Hollywood productions. Prior to her time researching for Alpha, Christine Schreyer had previously developed the Kryptonian language for Man of Steel, which came out in 2013. She also worked on language creation for the 2017 Power Rangers movie. UBC News also noted that Schreyer has helped maintain and even revitalize real indigenous languages too, beyond her work studying fictional languages. With her expertise, Alpha certainly succeeded in creating a language that felt very real.
The Inspiration Behind Alpha’s Beama Language Explained
Beama Was Inspired By Other Proto-Languages
Creating any fictional language is undoubtedly hard work, but creating one that sounds like a language that could have realistically been spoken 20,000 years ago is even harder. When taking inspiration for Alpha‘s language, Schreyer noted that it is impossible to know for sure what language was like so long ago “because we don’t have fossils of language,” but through research she created an estimate. The academic told UBC News that she researched the estimated languages Proto-Nostratic, Proto-Eurasiatic, and Proto-Dené-Caucasian.
Schreyer explained that the process was about taking “related languages and estimating them back in time.” Using inspiration from known estimated languages, Schreyer filled Beama out and made it sound more realistic by creating language patterns that would be identifiable both to the actors while saying their lines and to audiences who would come to understand the flow of the language as the movie progresses. Creating a fictional language from thousands of years ago takes time, patience, and thoroughness, but Alpha‘s language proves that the commitment was worth it.
Source: UBC News
