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"Mandalorians struck me as adopters," Traviss says. "What little we already knew about them said they weren't the original Mandalorian race -- they seemed to borrow a culture from another species -- and we know that they adopted kids like Jango Fett. I thought those two things made sense if I viewed their whole culture as being that way it's about what you do not where you were born. In general, Mandalorians don't sit around and talk about it -- they do it."

Adds Traviss, "If you're willing to adopt a culture as well as people, you're clearly more concerned with behavior than with simple bloodline. If you look around, you'll see that even late into their history there are non-human Mandalorians around. It might seem odd for a people with such a violent reputation, but they're actually very tolerant. They don't care who your parents were. They don't care how much money you have or how many titles you've got. All they want to know is if you're prepared to live by a Mando code. If you do, then you're in -- regardless of species, disability, age or anything. All welcome -- but you better live up to the code."

This equal opportunity mentality crosses gender lines, and Mandalorian women are expected to follow the code as well and be ready for battle, whether it's alongside the men on the battlefield or defending the homestead. "If you want to sit around and file your nails, the Mando life isn't for you," Traviss says. "Keeping a home going when your menfolk are away for long periods is very, very hard -- even if you're back on Mandalore. It's not a wealthy world and there have been long periods of struggle and poverty You have to be able to defend yourself and your family, too. There's a Mando proverb I use in Legacy of the Force. Bloodlines -- 'Teach your sons to be strong, but your daughters to be stronger.' They're very much a frontier people at heart. It's self-selecting; wimps need not apply A Mando male knows the value of a tough woman."

With the Mandalorian preference for less talk, more action, dating is considerably streamlined and to-the-point. "If you want to do more than just get to know the Mando guy or gal you fancy, or gaze at each other over a pint of net'ra gal, then you better be serious about it or else you might get the prospective parents-in-law showing up with blasters," Traviss warns. "These folks are regarded as adult at 13, and they tend to settle down early Mandos don't like to lose people from the community, either, so 'marrying out' is a blow to them: they want people to enter the culture rather than leave it. The cultural pressure is to get hitched, because strong family units are the core of the community They're a lot more relaxed within a Mandalorian community, but if you're from outside, attempts at casual romance of the physical kind will be seen as a threat until you show signs of joining them."

You might as well forget any idea of a lavish wedding, too. As seen with their rather blunt vows in the Insider article, long celebrations to declare undying adoration isn't their way "Mandos know what they want and they don't beat about the bush: they get on with it," Traviss says. "Why have a long ceremony? Commitment to each other, whether together or separated, and to the kids you bear or adopt, is everything. Husband and wife have equal responsibilities. They don't need to say any more than that. They'd be appalled by our western tradition of spending more time planning the wedding gown, the guest list and the flowers than working out what to do with the rest of your lives together I can almost hear them: 'All this effort and waste for one day?'"

The Mandalorian way of life may seems very specific, but according to Traviss this doesn't mean the only profession for a Mando is that of a soldier or bounty hunter "They do what most societies do -- back on Mandalore, many would be farmers or work in factories," Traviss says. "They design weapons and vehicles. They're doctors (battlefield medicine is their specialty) and engineers. But they can all fight. They all learn to be warriors. It's their core skill, and their pride. Think of it almost like a nation where everyone does military service at some time, only more so. Military skills are skills for life.

A big part of the Mando'a culture also includes an elaborate, yet easy-to-learn language. When Traviss was asked to write her first Star Wars novel, Hard Contact, it was up to her to expand on the Mandalorian language with only a song to get her started. "LucasArts game producer Ryan Kaufman sent me a copy of Jesse Harlin's lyrics and asked if they were any use to me in writing the book," Traviss recalls. "I jumped on them right away Language and culture are indivisible. If I wanted to understand the characters, I needed to know their language. So I built it."

To tackle the project at hand, Traviss deconstructed the Republic Commando game lyrics to look for the language's structure and patterns. "Jess had to create lyrics that could be sung, because that was his primary objective, so he needed to get syllables to fit rhythms. But I needed to reconcile that with a structured grammar Jess shared his thoughts with me about how he developed the sounds and I stuck with that softer sound he'd created. He took his sounds from Latin and Hungarian, and I added on some sounds from Urdu, Gurkhali and even Romany I gave it a Hebrew rhythm and the end result sounds almost like Russian and Gaelic crossed with Hebrew From one or two words -- I started with structuring singular from plural and adding adjectival endings for Hard Contact -- it just took me over completely It's a living language to me."

While real-world cultures take a few centuries to develop a language, Traviss (in true Mando'a fashion) created a working new language in only 6 months. "I was surprised how fast it happened, and how organic it became right away," Traviss says. "I didn't make up words out of the blue, bar two or three specific ones. They evolved. Knowing the Mandalorians (in my head) told me what I needed to know about how they saw the world, and that shaped the language -- just as it does in the real world. I'm not an academic linguist, just someone who learned a lot of languages over the years. (And promptly forgot most of them.) As long as I stuck to thinking, 'If I'm a Mando, what do I think when I look at this object, or when I do this action?' then it just flowed."

Traviss adds, "I did use Mando'a to pay homage to a few things, though. For example, the word dinii is taken from 'dinny,' my local Portsmouth (UK) dialect for idiotic or mad. We also use the word dinlo -- a mad or stupid person -- which some sources believe comes from the Romany language. (Readers may spot that word in my upcoming book Triple Zero, but I'll leave the explanation of Skuumaa for later!) I also called a military backpack a birgaan because a Royal Marine calls his a bergen, which is in fact a trade name. A Bergen pack is brammers (the best), as we say in Portsmouth."

As the language developed and evolved, Traviss also looked for helpful advice from her fans and colleagues. "An Insider reader, Ray Ramirez, is one of my beta testers," Traviss says. "I started corresponding with Ray after he had a letter in Insider about the military detail in Hard Contact (he served in Iraq as a sniper) and we became good friends. The other tester was Ryan Kaufman. I gave both of them the dictionary at various stages and asked them to see what they could make from it. Ray wrote military op orders; Ryan wrote epic poetry and the pre-hunt chant quoted in the feature; and I wrote vulgar drinking songs, conversation pieces, legal documents and translated text like the Revenge of the Sith crawler Once I'd seen just how flexible it was, I started putting a few words online on my starwars.com VIP blog and fans joined in. It was fascinating to see how differently people used it, and even with the few words I released, people were making up coherent sentences and really getting into the spirit of the language. It wasn't easy for them because they didn't have enough words to work with, but they were making excellent guesses. It was really exciting to see a language evolving with real speakers, just like a real language but with the process speeded up."

The Mando'a language remains unique to fans not just for its multi-cultural influences but also for its gender-less vocabulary and focus on the present tense. "I decided to scrap gender for three reasons," Traviss says. "It makes the language simpler; I couldn't see the Mandalorians having the patience to worry about nouns with different genders; and it fitted the Mando view that gender was one of those things that didn't matter The fact that buir means both mother and father ended up as a neat reflection of the fact that both parents -- all parents -- have the same responsibilities. Also would a Mando want to bother with the subjunctive or the pluperfect? Nah. They live in the simple present. Their past is always with them, and they don't know if they'll be around tomorrow So they started with present tense only, and other Mandos understood what time period they meant. They added the tense prefixes later in history because the aruetiise got confused, and that was bad for business. All that contributed to a really simple, logical and colorful language that depended on word order rather than cases and other complex grammar "

Of course, even though the Mando'a language was made to be easy to learn, readers may come across a few phrases that simply cannot be directly translated into English, such as Oya Manda. "It's an expression of Mandalorian solidarity and perpetuity emotional and assertive, like 'Hey, we're Mandos and we're proud and we're going to be around forever!'" Traviss says. "Oya on its own has many meanings. Literally, it's 'Let's hunt!', as Walon Vau does in Republic Commando: Triple Zero. It's derived from the verb oyacyir (to live) which is connected to the verb for hunt, oya'karir, as Mandos see life as a hunt. So it also means 'Stay alive!' -- the kind of farewell wish soldiers would make to each other But it's also 'Hoorah!', 'Go you!' and 'Cheers!' It's always positive and triumphant."

Traviss is eager to see how dedicated fans approach learning the new language she's created for a people she holds close to her heart. "I was determined to make this a natural language, not just a set of rules," Traviss says. "I wanted something flexible and full of idiosyncrasies and for it to feel lived in. No complex grammar, no difficult pronunciation, no silent letters, and lots of scope for making it your own language from the basic tools. It doesn't matter what accent you have; you can speak Mando'a and be understood by another speaker Even the punctuation and 'breath' mark -- the beten -- is variable and no Mando is going to mind if you use it differently There are all kinds of ways of expressing something. The Mandalorian written font has no capitals or lower cases, so Basic grammar is always going to be a foreign concept to them -- they don't get hung up about grammar It's primarily a spoken language, anyway This is just the first 1,000 or so words. The average well-educated English speaker uses a vocabulary of 2,000 words in a week, so I'm aiming for that total as the critical mass. I'll be adding to the language as I go and updating regularly"

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