We have all seen the Despicable Me Series—and loved them, mainly because of the tiny, yellow, bespectacled creatures called Minions. With their oh-so-cute playfulness and words, they have secured a place in the hearts of millions of fans worldwide—from young kids to teenagers and even older people.

The Minions have their own movie now, but before 2015, they were seen starring alongside the villain Gru in Despicable Me movies. After their premiere on the big screen, they have delivered some quotes that have been picked up and imitated by fans worldwide.





But Have You Ever Stopped to Think What Languages Do Minions Speak?

To answer this fun question, you will have to turn to the linguists and language creators of this movie. Minionese, the language of the Minions, is not a real world language—rather it is a borrowed one from existing languages that have been mashed up together to create the gibberish that these cute, lovable creatures speak.


Humans throughout history have devised ways to suit their need of the hour. In this case, to stand out from the rest of the movies, certain linguistic changes had to be made—from formulating of new languages to devising new meanings of existing words.

When it comes to inventing new languages exclusively for a movie, Hollywood has no dearth of linguists hired to do this job. Star Trek’s producers hired a linguist to create the Klingon language, the famous Game of Thrones had Dothraki language exclusively made for the series while a new language called Na’vi was produced especially for Avatar series.
So Did Universal Cinemas Hire a Linguist to Produce Minionese?

Press reports point out to the fact that the film’s directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud had created the language themselves, who are not language experts, yet they came up with the genius idea of recording the Minion voices themselves, dubbing them to give a realistic tone.

That means Universal Cinemas did not hire a language expert to invent a new language from scratch.

But the directors of the movie could not have imagined that this language would achieve such heights of fame and popularity—that too in such a short time.

Let’s come back to our topic—what languages do Minions speak?

Words in the Minion Language

If you listen closely to the Minions, you will come to an interesting conclusion. Fans of the movies have picked out words that seem to have a specific meaning of their own. The language spoken by Minions include words from French, English, Spanish, Hindi, and Korean.

Apart from the hurried stream of words that they speak, some words stand out from the others—particularly the word Minions love to say—“banana!”. This word has been spoken so frequently that Minionese is often referred as “banana language”. When Minions say “banana”, they mean the banana fruit but there are plenty of other food words in their vocabulary such as the song featuring banana and potato, and the words “poulet tiki masala”; poulet means chicken in French while tikka masala is a spicy Indian chicken dish. They count 1,2,3 in Korean language and say thank you as “Tank Yu”. Other food word such as ice-cream is spoken as “gelato” in Minion.
How to Speak Minion?

Inspired to speak Minionese? It is not as easy as it seems.

Speaking like a Minion isn’t only a matter of making incomprehensible sounds with words from different languages thrown in frequently. If observed carefully, Minionese has a lot of resemblance with baby-talk. Anyone who has heard babies cooing in the first years of development will notice that they speak the alphabets “B” and “P” a lot—as do Minions when they say “ba-na-na”, talking in cute little voices with uplifting tones. Just like babies do.
Afterword:

Minions and the movie series are loved by all fans across the world of entertainment. The fact that they are cute and speak in a fun, uplifting language is what sets them apart from others. Maybe that is why the Despicable Me and Minions series has such a huge cult of fan following.

When the directors of these series dubbed the voices in their own designed languages, they could not have imagined that it would one day become so popular so as to be loved by kids worldwide. What started out as random combining of words from different languages, turned into a gibberish that answered the question frequently pondered upon about what languages Minions speak?

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