Star Wars: 10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Jabba The Hutt
4. He Speaks Kind-Of Quechua, Kind-Of English
The languages of Star Wars have stories all of their own. many of them are recordings of Earthly languages sped up or played backwards. The language of the Jawas, for instance, was based on sound designer Ben Burtt's phonetic notes on Zulu words re-recorded and altered.
Most alien tongues in Star Wars aren't full languages like Tolkeinian Elvish or Klingon, but use the sounds of different Earth languages to make them sound distinct.
Ben Burtt based Jabba's language, Huttese, on the sounds of the central Andean language Quecha. The puppeteers needed a script to read so they knew when to move Jabba's mouth and so during filming, one of the puppeteers said Jabba's lines in English.
Jabba's eventual dubbed language therefore has the same number of syllables as the English translation, as Huttese needed to match up with the movement of the crime lord's mouth.