Much of the the second season of Andor takes place on the planet Ghorman. The language spoken there, Ghor, is striking. The folks who made the show had a clever idea: by casting only native or fluent French speakers to play the Ghor, they could construct an alien language around French phonology, making it sound very internally coherent while remaining entirely unintelligible to the audience.
Star Wars fans are, naturally, hard at work reconstructing it. They’ve assembled a corpus of Ghor sound samples from the show to analyze. Much of the work is being organized on the r/Ghor subreddit.
They’re also going over every line of written Ghor that appears on-screen. The show depicts two Ghor writing systems: Ghorelle and Dixian. But in Andor’s scripts and among fans Latin characters are used, with an orthography based on French. For example, these are the lyrics to Gambol dum Ghor (en: “We are the Ghor”), which is sung by a crowd of people at a key plot moment:
Ange dum èze va l'ave-glège Gambol dum Ghor Traspu flonde tem groque ouälonde Gambol dum Ghor
(Chorus) Va-leine! Mèje-gah! Dibe-mo laï moune laï sol lège-na
Béke tem brôles enforde-carole Gambol dum Ghor Paipes bi ouämes sti kren mikammes Gambol dum Ghor
Haberdache, vefan, prestache Gambol dum Ghor Navi-Mide eh Palmo Zide Gambol dum Ghor
Clarion, bi fé na fond Gambol dum Ghor Couffe tem ster dial sim per Gambol dum Ghor
When marking up runs of Ghor written using Latin characters, you should use the BCP 47 language tag art-Latn-x-ghor in HTML’s lang="" attribute. Breaking it down, that’s:
art, short for “artificial,” the code used for constructed languages (conlangs),Latn, meaning “written with Latin characters,”x, which conveys that the following subtags are not standard, but instead for private use,- and
ghor, for Ghor.
Or you can save yourself five characters by writing art-x-ghor instead, and leave the writing system unspecified. Since the in-universe writing systems don’t (yet) have any Unicode code points assigned—either in Unicode itself or in CSUR—that’s fine.
The :lang() pseudo-class is defined to match language tags using the Extended Filtering algorithm defined in § 3.3.2 of RFC 4647 which, unfortunately for conlangs like Ghor, intentionally fails to match when a private use subtag is present. So you can’t use :lang() to match elements containing Ghor text. (Chacleu!) Instead, you can combine the [att|=val] and [att$=val] selectors to style elements marked with either art-x-ghor or art-Latn-x-ghor. Here’s how I use this selector combo to apply French quotation marks to Ghor text:
/* French puts spaces between guillemets and quoted text.
* Let’s make Ghor match.
*/
:lang(fr), [lang|=art][lang$=x-ghor] {
quotes: "« " " »" "‹ " " ›";
}This isn’t a perfect substitute for the :lang() pseudo—it doesn’t match descendant elements—but it’ll do for now.