In the universe, it was spoken by Belters, inhabitants of the asteroid belt and the moons of outer planets of the Solar System.
[1][2][3] As a result of his work, Farmer had created over 1000 words for his language, adding more to the list if requested by the show's producers and fans.
[4] The vocabulary used in the books was chosen by the authors on the basis of aesthetics and was not originally intended to form a real language.
[5] Nick Farmer, a linguist and a polyglot, was commissioned to develop the constructed language for the television series, during the production of its first season between 2014 and 2015.
[1][6] Inside the universe of The Expanse, which is set around 200 years in the future,[2] the language is used by Belters, the inhabitants of the asteroid belt and the moons of outer planets of the Solar System.
According to Farmer, the vocabulary and grammar rules, present in the show, and revealed by the author himself, were a dialect used on Ceres.
[1][2][3] As the result of his work, Farmer had created over 1000 words for his language, adding more to the list if requested by show's producers and fans.
[1] The pronunciation of the language was developed by Nick Farmer and Eric Armstrong, a dialect coach.
As a result, Armstrong suggested that Farmer make various modifications to the phonological, morphological, and lexicological characteristics, such that the language's overall sound gave an impression that it derived via an amalgamation of several existent languages and cultures of a near-future, homogeneous working-class population.
They accomplished this goal by fusing together various elements of multiple real-world cants, dialects, and accents to form distinct types of Belter drawls or sounds and then encouraged the actors to choose one which fit their character.
Additionally, the producers were advised to deliberately create a cast of actors and actresses who spoke in varying accent types so as to illustrate real-world concepts observed in societies and cultures where creole and pidgin languages are spoken.
[2][3] For example, in Season 3, actors Dominique Tipper and Cara Gee would introduce to the show the concepts of code switching and English spoken as a second language as paradigms of Belter Creole and culture.
Then, actors would learn and shoot all three variants of the scenes, and later the producers would choose which version they wanted to use.
[9] Since the production of the pilot, looping voice actors were taught belter language by Armstrong.
[10] As the language gained popularity, Nick Farmer had started regularly revealing new words and grammar functions on his Twitter account.
As an exception, the letter ⟨c⟩ is sometimes used in place of ⟨k⟩, for example in words such as copeng ("friend") and condenashang ("condemnation"), which usually are spelled, respectively, as kopeng and kondenashang.
Farmer also uses the turned alpha (capital: ⟨Ɒ⟩, lowercase: ⟨ɒ⟩) as an alternative spelling of the digraph ⟨ow⟩, which is used to represent the open back rounded vowel sound.
[23] The continuous aspect specifies incomplete action or state in progress at a specific time.
[24] The sentence structure of Belter Creole is subject–verb–object, which means that the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third.
The concept of the language had appeared for the first time in the 2011 book Leviathan Wakes, published under the pen name James S. A. Corey, used by the collaborators Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.
[2] The vocabulary used in the books was chosen by authors on the basis of aesthetics and wasn't supposed to form a real language.
The languages used as a basis of the language vocabulary include: English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Estonian, Esperanto, French, Korean, Chinese, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, Dutch, Arabic, Catalan, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Turkish.
For example, words laa and la from Arabic لا (laa, meaning no), na from English nah and ne from Serbo-Croatian ne/не, all meant no, while both gato from Japanese ありがとう (arigatō) and aituma from Estonian aitäh meant thank you.
Tu run spin, pow, Schlauch tu way acima and ido.Go spinward to the tube station, which will take you back to the docks.As the language was later developed for The Expanse television series, novel writers had discouraged fans from learning their version of the language in favor of the television one.
A few songs were written in Belter Creole, which include covers of the "Tighten Up", "Highway Star", and "All by Myself", renamed to "I'm All Alone".
[9][27] The cover of the "Highway Star", originally by Deep Purple, was performed by Cory Todd.
[26][27] In January 2022, Twitter accounts of space agencies NASA and ESA posted in Belter Creole.