Newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reports that Sara Forsberg, known as Smoukahontas for her "What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners" YouTube video which went viral in 2014 (12 million hits), was asked to develop a new alien language for the blockbuster movie franchise.
The offer came through Forsberg's agent when Lucasfilm asked her to create a totally new language for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."
"I thought that such a large movie production company would use some super-experienced language person, but they wanted me," Forsberg told the newspaper.
Forsberg, 21, also known as the singer Saara, is from the small Finnish town of Jakobstad in Ostrobothnia. Following her YouTube success, she received several job offers and relocated to Los Angeles.
Forsberg said there were no special demands for the space language from the production company, just an email with a few pages from the script that needed to be translated into a new, made-up alien language.
"It was quite straightforward really. I developed words, then sentences, and then recorded them. I thought a lot about emphasis and other issues so that it would sound as much like a real language as possible and not just brskbrzt," Forsberg told the newspaper.
Then she sent the sound files to the studio so that the actors could practice them.
Everything related to the new Star Wars movie was top secret, so Forsberg had to keep mum about her role for close to a year and a half. Her manager Johannes Ylinen told the newspaper that Forsberg's work garnered praise from the movie's director J.J. Abrams at the premiere in LA on Tuesday evening.
It's been almost 40 years since the original "Star Wars" movie debuted in 1977.
