I Will Dance Among The Stars
March 27, 2018 11:46 PM   Subscribe

I Will Dance Among The Stars
"Pampa (Dansa Ere Da Setara)" is a song I wrote in Lang Belta, the Creole language spoken by the humans who live in and beyond the Asteroid Belt on the TV show The Expanse. Its a story of tough lives and hard choices in a harsh environment. The lyrics in both Belter & English.

Nick Farmer created Lang Belta (referred to in the books as "Belter Creole") for the TV when the authors realized that they could throw a few gibberish words onto the page and then switch to English, but that they'd get crucified if they put gibberish up on the TV show.

Lang Belta is an English-based Creole with ~30 "substrate" languages contributing. Similar to Hatian Creole, Afrikaans, Jamaican Patois, and other extant Earth Creoles, LB an imagined result of taking all these languages groups, isolating them far out in space, and letting the process of language development run wild in that pressure cooker.

Unfortunately, There Is not (yet) a published book on Lang Belta. The Expanse Is lacking in merch in general. There are resources online that some of my fellow students have put together, but a lot of it is just scouring twitting for everything Nick posts, and buying him drinks whenever I get a chance to see him.
Role: Poet, singer, translator
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey (6 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

I started watching this show recently and really enjoy it. It's unfortunate that where I am in season 2, the captions no longer have the actual Lang Belta but instead something generic like "[speaking foreign language]"
posted by exogenous at 2:15 PM on April 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


Found this via the podcast, and it's really neat and very catchy!
posted by capricorn at 10:37 AM on April 4, 2018


This is really, really good. I especially like how you didn’t just take some kind of generic song and turn it into Belter, but actually made a song that feels organic as well.
posted by corb at 7:11 AM on April 6, 2018 [1 favorite]


Which podcast?
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 11:29 AM on April 6, 2018


The MetaFilter Podcast!
posted by exogenous at 11:32 AM on April 6, 2018 [1 favorite]


I've done a second version of "Pampa", this time with music. It's a D-Grand strumstick.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 12:14 PM on May 30, 2018 [1 favorite]


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