The Gungans of Naboo speak a funny kind of Basic which incorporates lexical items as well as some grammatical ones from the ancient Old Gungan language. This is typical of so-called pidgin and creole languages.

Pidgins and creoles are mixed languages that often arise when two cultures meet and start communicating with each other. Typically such contact situations arise when one people moves into a region inhabited by speakers of a totally different language. The reasons for communicating with each other and subsequent rise of mixed languages are many, but they often involve either trade between the cultures or some kind of merging of the cultures typically involving intermarriage and/or assimilation of one of them into another. In any case, they will enter a process of cultural exchange, involving exchange of, for instance, artifacts, myths, ideas, religious elements etc. And as part of this process of exchange is an exchange of linguistic items. Depending on the nature of the contact between the cultures, linguists often speak of two different kinds of exchange, or borrowing, of linguistic items. Ordinary borrowing implies a mutual give-and-take lexical borrowing between the languages in contact which is in tandem with the exchange of cultural elements (perhaps language A borrows a word from language B for a certain artefact, because that artefact, and hence its name, does not exist in the culture of language A). This type of borrowing often appears in contact situations of trade. Intimate borrowing imples that the two cultures are forming one single political community, and it is often the result of conquest or assimilation in which one of the pleoples dominates the other. Typically, the language associated with the dominant group - which may or may not be the mixed language - becomes the acrolect, or high standard language.

So, what happens linguistically speaking? After the initial contact, and if the social situation prompts the existence of a mixed contact language, a pidgin language is created via a process called pidginization. What typically happens is that one of the languages serve as a superstratum language providing the bulk of lexical and sometimes also grammatical elements, while the other language is a substratum language, providing only certain linguistic elements - often labels for those cultural units that do not exist in the culture of the superstratum language. The pidginization process typically involves reduction of the grammatical system of the superstratum (i.e. removal of inflectional affixes and those kind of things), admixture introducing phonetic and grammatical as well as some lexical elements into the contact language, and simplification of irregular conjugation systems by a complete removal of irregular forms. Pidgins, if used often enough, will become relatively stable and systematic, since it is easier with communication based on a stable system, and they are often used within certain functional spheres. Pidgins do not have native speakers. However, speakers of pidgins may eventually have children who aqcuire the pidgin as their native language, as could be the case of intermarriage, or in communities where the original substratum language is ousted completely by the pidgin. With the arrival of a substantial group of native speakers, pidgins go through a process called creolization by which they develop into creoles. Now, a language that is restricted to certain functional spheres is insufficient, and thus the use of the language goes through a process of expansion into areas that exceed the original restricted functional spheres; areas that are essential to everyday life. Creolization also, in tandem with the expansion process, involves a repair and further systematization of the simplifications that arose in the pidginization process. Often, the grammatical system becomes an analytic one, which is primarily based on word order rather than inflection, but grammaticalization may also occur inwhich lexical units are turned into grammatical ones (grammaticalization is actually pretty normal in all ltypes of languages). Finally, the creole may go through a decreolization process which implies that the creole starts approximating one of the initial languages involved in the contact situation which is then called the target language. The target language is typically the socially dominant of the original languages. Decreolization normally involves purification of the system, whereby the admixture is repaired by movement towards the target language, and complication in which the simplified forms are de-simplifies (often via grammaticalization). Normally, the result of decreolization is a so-called post-creole, which is considered a new variety or dialect of the target language, which has traces of the substratum language.

I should mention that all the italicized terms stem from the literature on language contact, and that I did not invent them - in fact, there are some of the terms that I don't really feel comfortable with.

So, how does this (grossly simplifying and generalizing) overview (out in the real world things are much more complicated of course) of what linguists call the creole-contimuum relate to Gunganese?

Well, firstly Gunganese fits the characterization of a creole or pidgin. It seems to have Basic as its superstratum language with some lexical and grammatical elements from Old Gungan. The question is then 'is Gunganese a pidgin, a creole, or a post-creole?' I think we can exclude the possibility of it being a pidgin, because Gunganese clearly has native speakers. In fact all members of the Gungan societies that are depicted primarily in the movies, but also in other sources speak Gunganese - not just to outsiders but also to each other. Also Gunganese has several terms relating to all aspects of everyday life in the Gungan community (as exemplified several times by Jar Jar Binks). This, indeed, suggests that most, if not all, Gungans are native speakers of Gunganese and also that Gungan culture and society is intertwined with Gunganese. That leaves us with the choice of it being a creole or a post-creole, and this can be a difficult choice. One thing thats point in the direction of Gunganese being a post-creole would be that the syntactic structures are basically the same as in Basic, yet Gunganese is full of particles and affixes that, presumably, originate from Old Gungan. Another aspect of the language system which indicates that Gunganese is not a fully fledged post-creole is that there seem to be very few irregularities. For instance, the verb 'besa' (to be) is manifested as the ubiquitous suffix -sa which is added to the pronoun of the subject (for instance 'you are' would be 'yousa'). But then Jar Jar Binks can be heard saying 'Whosa a yousa?', with 'a' mirroring Basic 'are'. This could be an instance of the decreolization proces of repairing irregularities by appropriating grammatical aspects of the superstratum language. However, there does not seem to be any intimate relation as whatsoever between the Naboo, whose language is Basic, and the Gungans in the early Rise of the Empire Era, and without such a relationship, there is really no motivation for having Basic as the target language - rather it should be Old Gungan. Of course if Old Gungan has ceased to exist, it is an impossibility for it to be the target language. Thus, Gunganese is full of features, some of which point in the direction of it being a creole, and some pointing in the direction of it being a post-creole, which suggest that it is in some intermediate state between creole and post-creole on the creole continuum.

Since Gunganese is a mixed language, and since is probably not a pidgin according to the creole-continuum theory, it presupposes that there must have been contact between the Gungans and speakers of Basic extending beyond mere trade. If it only involved trade, then the Gunganese pidgin would be based on ordinary bowworing and would not be likely to spread into the rest of Gungan society and develop into a creole. There must have been a more intimate contact, involving intimate borrowing, and since Basic appears to be the superstratum, we may infer that the speakers of Basic were the dominant or prominent of the two groups. By the time of the Trade Federation's invasion of Naboo, no Basic speakers are found Gungan society, so they must have disappeared, or the contact must have broken off again. Is it possible that there was once a close relationship (perhaps so close that they at one point formed one single community) between the Naboo and the Gungans in which the Naboo were the most influential ones, which at some point in history was broken? The Gungans' dislike of the Naboo, and Nass' comment that "dey tinke dey so smarty" would suggest that the Naboo did have so dominating role over the Gungans at some point. Or could it be possible that the Gungans were once in contact with another group of Basic speakers, perhaps some that came from accross the stars many millennia ago? There are the Gungslabs with old Corellian engravings on them which suggest that they did at some point have contact with Corellians. Indeed, Old Corellian is very similar to Basic, and is probably related to basic, either being derived from Basic as a dialect-turn-language or perhaps Basic is based on Old Corellian. The thing is, however, that the Basic elements of Gunganese are more similar to moderns Basic than to Old Corellian. This suggests that Gunganese is based on a newer variant of Basic and that the contact situation appeared recently - after Old Corellian became extinct. In any case the contact was broken off during the decreolization process, leaving Gunganese as something in between a creole and a post-creole.

Gunganese clearly is the result of intimate contact between the Gungans and a Basic speaking culture. The question is: 'who were the Basic speakers, what was their role in Gungan society, and how (and why) was the contact broken?' Gunganese is indeed one of the mysteries of the galaxy.