
Cityspeak from Blade Runner (2002) - keiferski
http://www.brmovie.com/FAQs/BR_FAQ_Language.htm
======
bumbledraven
According to _Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner_ by Paul M. Sammon, the
actual words of _Cityspeak_ were put together by Edward James Olmos, the actor
who plays Gaff:

> [Second credited Blade Runner screenplay author David] Peoples did not,
> however, come up with the mishmash of languages that Olmos speaks in the
> film. "That was pretty much all Eddie's doing," Peoples recalls. "All I'd
> done was indicate that Gaff was speaking some funny language in the script
> and then translated that into English."

> According to Olmos, " _Cityspeak_ was already a word being tossed around
> when I came onto the picture. I'm not sure who came up with the actual word
> -- I think it was David Peoples. But I guess I'm the guy who literalized it.

> "My first idea was to put a mixture of genuine Spanish, French, Chinese,
> German, Hungarian, and Japanese into _Cityspeak_. Then I went to the Berlitz
> School of Languages in Los Angeles, translated all these different bits and
> pieces of Gaff's original dialogue into fragments of foreign tongues, and
> learned to properly pronounce them. I also added some translated dialogue
> I'd made up myself. All that was a bitch and a half, but it really added to
> Gaff's character."

------
kps
As the linked PDF just contains a small amount of text, here it is in full:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CITYSPEAK (from Bladerunner)

Sushi Master: Nani ni shimasho ka. [Japanese: "What would you like to have?"]

Deckard: {Points} Give me four.

Sushi Master: Futatsu de jubun desu yo. [Japanese: "Two is enough!"]

Deckard: No. Four. Two, two, four.

Sushi Master: Futatsu de jubun desu yo. [Japanese: "Two is enough!"]

Deckard: {Resignedly} And noodles.

Sushi Master: Wakatte kudasai yo. [Japanese: "Please understand!" (Actually
implying sarcastically, "Can't you understand?")

Policeman: Hey, idi-wa. [Korean: "Hey, come here."]

Gaff: Monsieur, azonnal kövessen engem bitte. [French-Hungarian-German: "Sir,
follow me immediately please!" "azonnal" \- means immediately; "kövessen"
means follow imperative; "engem" \- means me. And of course "Monsieur" is
French for Sir and "bitte" is German for please.)]

Sushi Master: He say you under arrest, Mr. Deckard.

Deckard: You got the wrong guy, pal.

Gaff: Lófaszt, nehogy már. Te vagy a Blade ... Blade Runner. [Hungarian:
"Horsedick, no way! You are the Blade ... Blade Runner."

Sushi Master: He say you 'Brade Runner'.

Deckard: Tell him I'm eating.

Gaff: Captain Bryant toka. Me ni omae yo. [Japanese: "Captain Bryant wants to
see your mug in front of his immediately!" (This is a loose translation. "Me
ni omae yo" is a sort of pun. "Me ni mae" means to meet someone. "omae" is the
very informal use of "you" \- in Japanese, this is significant. "yo")

Deckard (V/O): The charmer's name was Gaff, I'd seen him around. Bryant must
have upped him to the Blade Runner unit. That gibberish he talked was city
speak, gutter talk. A mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you. I
didn't really need a translator, I knew the lingo, every good cop did. But I
wasn't going to make it easier for him.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
I’ve always wondered why the food vendor wanted to sell him less food and make
less money.

~~~
Iv
Quotas and incentives. There may be incentives to serve many meals instead of
serving a lot of food.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Is the Bladerunner universe not capitalist?

~~~
progre
You can get that effect in any system if the bean conuters count the wrong
thing. Source: have worked in a Ford factory.

------
polytely
Very fun, it kinda reminds me of Belter creole from the expanse books/show.

[https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole](https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole)

[https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_dialogue](https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_dialogue)

Some of my favourite works of fiction include made up languages, maybe because
only people obsessed with world building (which is the stuff I like most about
fantasy/scifi) would ever consider constructing a language just to flesh out
their world.

~~~
amingilani
After a few seasons of Expanse, I couldn't stop mixing Belter Creole. It's so
fantastically interwoven into their culture. I absolutely love how it's much
more relatable and easier to pick up than something like Dothraki or Valyrian,
which may as well have been Parseltongue for me.

My only wish is that fictional worlds use more Urdu/Hindi phrases, but I'm
sure bilingual person whishes their favorite world used both their languages.
Although Belter Creole does use some familiar Urdu words, they're often paired
with completely unfamiliar words. For example, _setara mali_ or little star
(literally "star little") uses the Urdu word sitara for star, but pairs it
with—what I think is—the Polish word for small.

~~~
jacobush
Setar äre bara star...

------
ilamont
I rewatched this the other night. Cityspeak was great as a concept and the way
it was portrayed in the film, but the poorly done Chinese graffiti that
appeared on walls and buildings at various points harmed the cinematic vision
of this future city (well, for me at least). It was clearly drawn by someone,
probably not a native speaker or writer, copying simple phrases or making up
sentences from a dictionary (中國人好，美國人不好, "Chinese good, Americans bad").

Chinese has a long history of slogans, 4-character idioms, and graffiti. How
hard could it have been to find someone -- an artist, calligrapher, or even a
non-artist who grew up in Asia (almost everyone learns calligraphy basics
using brushes in secondary school) -- to do it better?

Or is the idea cityspeakers are clumsily writing random Chinese stuff on the
walls?

~~~
mgbmtl
Sometimes it's on purpose: [https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2015/oct/15/homelan...](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
radio/2015/oct/15/homeland-is-racist-artists-subversive-graffiti-tv-show)

~~~
TheGallopedHigh
That was interesting, thanks for the link. Within, street artists from Berlin
were asked to add realism to the background of scenes in a Middle East refugee
camp by painting Arabic graffiti. The artists painted criticisms of the show
and no producers checked what was painted before it aired.

------
wool_gather
Not sure which is the original, but there's a much fuller essay that contains
the text from this PDF here:
[http://www.brmovie.com/FAQs/BR_FAQ_Language.htm](http://www.brmovie.com/FAQs/BR_FAQ_Language.htm)
It includes a bunch of background information.

It also has the "cityspeak" (I think it's solely German) from a later scene,
where a gang attacks a police car outside JF Sebastian's apartment.

~~~
thrax
"Warte bist die bollen weg sind!! Warte bist die bollen weg sind!!"

-means "wait till the cops are gone!"

That movie was incredible.

~~~
jacquesm
Bullen. [https://www.dict.cc/german-
english/die+Bullen.html](https://www.dict.cc/german-english/die+Bullen.html)

Boll = round or spherical.

------
keiferski
I've always found the mismash of languages used at the beginning of Blade
Runner to be fascinating. Japanese, Korean, Hungarian, French, German, and of
course English.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcwOApqmJMQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcwOApqmJMQ)

~~~
ragebol
You might be interested in Belter Creole [0] or Lang Belta from The Expanse.
It's spoken by people living in/on the asteroid belt, roughly a century after
it being colonized by people from all over Earth.

[0]
[https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole](https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Belter_Creole)

------
foobar1962
EJ Olmos, in his role as Adama in Battlestar Galactica, refers to the Cylons
as "skin jobs".

------
jgrahamc
There's good historical prior art for 'cityspeak':
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca)

------
nsxwolf
Why does Gaff use cityspeak when talking to Deckard in the beginning? The
original narration shows that Deckard understands, but pretends not to, to not
"make it easier for him".

Gaff speaks English, why didn't he just switch to English?

~~~
ilamont
Maybe to challenge Deckard. Deckard refuses to play by Gaff's rules (street
rules) then, but by the end of the film Gaff _does_ speak English with him
("Too bad she won't live!").

In Blade Runner 2049, I don't recall cityspeak being used at all, and the
scene with Gaff being interviewed by the new Blade Runner is entirely in
English.

~~~
shadowgovt
If the lack of cityspeak in 2049 is intentional, that by itself is
interesting. Language phenomena do evaporate overnight from time to time.

~~~
aatharuv
On at least one occasion, the CC says a person is speaking in city speak, but
the language is a Semitic language, probably Amhara.

------
ASlave2Gravity
Gaff: Lófaszt, nehogy már. Te vagy a Blade ... Blade Runner. [Hungarian: _"
Horsedick_, no way! You are the Blade ... Blade Runner."

Horsedick, is that a call/ref to VALIS? I.e. Horselover?

~~~
thrawa567
Do you mean VALIS? PKD? I don't believe it is. Lofasz is just your all weather
Hungarian swear word.

~~~
ASlave2Gravity
Yes, have corrected! Yeah, I just thought PKD liked that Horselover imagery so
much, that Greek version of the name. (Philippos, lit. "horse-loving" or "fond
of horses"). Just thought this might have been a bit of a nod towards that!
Guess it's a bit of a stretch.

------
stevenwoo
From just last week, LAist did a retrospective interview with some of the
creators. [https://laist.com/2019/11/05/blade-runner-
november-2019-los-...](https://laist.com/2019/11/05/blade-runner-
november-2019-los-angeles-future-is-here.php)

------
peterwwillis
> {Rainy, busy street scene. Deckard reading newspaper while waiting for a
> spot to open up at the White Dragon Noodle Bar.}

I've visited the White Dragon Noodle Bar about two dozen times at burns; never
realized where it came from!

------
masonic
_Firefly_ used a mishmash of English and Mandarin (?).

------
zanderz
Warte bis die Bullen weg sind!

------
eti
404's

