What is Aurebesh? The Star Wars alphabet explained

In the world of Star Wars, you may have realized that there is a special alphabet that’s used and is only unique to the Star Wars universe. These boxy letters are a completely made-up alphabet for Star Wars, and it even has a name: Aurebesh.

Aurebesh wasn’t around during Star Wars’ inception in 1977, but it has been around for quite a while nonetheless. According to Wookieepedia, its first appearance was in Star Wars — Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. But (to make a long story short) the alphabet was further developed through the years and refined until it became what it is today. And yes, under Disney, the alphabet is canon.

Though, note that Aurebesh is just the alphabet and not a language all on its own. The language that Aurebesh is written for is simply called Basic. And this is just Star Wars’ own name for the English language. Hence why so many characters speak English in the franchise — they just rationalized it as a basic language that many people in the galaxy could speak.

So, knowing that, just how does this alphabet work? Well, it’s quite simple. For the most part, each letter in the English alphabet has a corresponding Aurebesh character. Sometimes, there are single characters for two letters (“ng” for example), but otherwise, that’s about it! Check out the reply tweet below from AurekFonts to see a full Aurebesh chart!

How to learn Aurebesh

Learning to read and write in Aurebesh is quite simple, especially since it all comes down to memorizing the alphabet. There are just a few more characters to learn than the standard English alphabet, so it’s not like other languages where there are many different characters for consonant and vowel combinations.

If you need a helpful resource, you’ll want to check out the website Aurebesh.org. It’s a free, fan-created resource that will help you learn the alphabet. You can study using the chart they provide and then practice your reading and writing with the various prompts.

So, of course, practice makes perfect. And once you’ve gotten that down, you can begin writing hand-written notes to your friends, making decorations, and even typing in Aurebesh. (If you Google it, you’ll come across some fonts that you can install on your computer, just be vigilant about what you download!)

Happy learning! And follow Dork Side of the Force for more!