Barsoomian: Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian Language, Explained

Barsoomian is the language of the Martians in Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series, which ran from 1912 to 1964 across 11 novels. It is not a constructed language in the modern sense. Burroughs scattered words and phrases throughout the books without building a grammar, a phonology, or a consistent lexicon. What he built was a mood, a sense that Mars had its own names for things, and that was enough for pulp fiction readers in 1912.

Burroughs is better known as the creator of Tarzan, but the Barsoom series was his first major success. "A Princess of Mars" was serialized in The All-Story magazine in 1912 under the pen name Norman Bean, and it established the template for planetary romance fiction that influenced Flash Gordon, Star Wars, and Avatar over the following century.

If you want to play with the vocabulary, our Barsoomian Translator converts English text into Barsoomian-style output using the words Burroughs left behind. It is a fragmentary tool for a fragmentary language, and that is the honest description.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was one of the most popular pulp fiction authors of the early 20th century. He was born in 1875 in Chicago and worked a string of unsuccessful jobs before selling his first story at age 36. According to the Wikipedia biography of Burroughs, he wrote "A Princess of Mars" between July and September 1910, and it was serialized in The All-Story beginning in February 1912. The story appeared under the pen name Norman Bean, which Burroughs used because he thought the story was outrageous enough that he did not want his real name attached if it failed.

The Barsoom series eventually spanned 11 novels, published between 1912 and 1964. The last two novels, "John Carter of Mars" and "Skeletor of Mars" (also known as "Skeleton Men of Jupiter"), were published posthumously. Burroughs wrote the series alongside his Tarzan novels, and both series made him wealthy. He purchased a large ranch in the San Fernando Valley in 1919, which he later named Tarzana, and the surrounding community took the name.

Barsoom is the Martian name for Mars in the series. The word itself is one of the few Barsoomian terms that appears consistently across all 11 novels. Burroughs used it as a proper noun from the first chapter of "A Princess of Mars," and it became the shorthand for the entire fictional world. The Wikipedia article on Barsoom describes the series as a foundational work of planetary romance, a subgenre of science fiction that focuses on adventure on other planets rather than hard scientific speculation.

Barsoomian was never developed as a learnable language. Burroughs included words and phrases when the story called for them, and he repeated some terms often enough that readers could recognize them. But there is no Barsoomian dictionary that Burroughs maintained. There is no grammar. There is no consistent phonology. The language exists as a collection of proper nouns, interjections, and a handful of common nouns scattered across 11 books.

Some of the recurring terms include "Barsoom" (Mars), "Jed" (a prince or chieftain), "Jeddak" (an emperor or king), "padwar" (a lieutenant or officer rank), and "sasum" (a unit of distance). Burroughs also gave names to the various Martian species and their leaders, which function as Barsoomian vocabulary by extension. The Green Martian city of Thark gives its name to the Thark tribe. The Red Martian city of Helium gives its name to the Heliumites. These are place names and titles more than a functioning language.

This approach was standard for pulp fiction of the era. Burroughs was writing for magazine readers who wanted adventure, not a linguistics textbook. The invented words added color and exoticism without requiring the reader to learn a system. Compare this to J.R.R. Tolkien, who was working on Quenya and Sindarin around the same period with actual grammatical rigor. Tolkien was a philologist by profession. Burroughs was a pulp writer who had failed at every other job he tried. The difference in approach reflects the difference in both intent and training.

You can see the same scattered-vocabulary approach in other pulp-era languages. Our Atlantean Translator covers a later Disney-created language that took a more structured approach, and the Quenya and Sindarin Translator handles Tolkien's properly constructed Elvish languages. Barsoomian sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Tolkien, closer to a naming convention than a language.

The Barsoom series features several Martian species, and their names constitute a large portion of the Barsoomian vocabulary that exists. The Green Martians, called Tharks, are tall, green-skinned, four-armed warriors with tusks. They are the first species John Carter encounters on Mars, and they are the ones who capture him when he arrives. The Tharks are nomadic and live in abandoned cities, and their society is built around combat and survival.

The Red Martians are the dominant civilized species on Barsoom. They have red skin, are humanoid, and build the great cities and canal systems that Burroughs imagined based on the astronomical observations of his time. The canals of Mars were a real scientific controversy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported observing linear features on Mars in 1877, which he called "canali" (channels). The American astronomer Percival Lowell interpreted these as artificial canals built by a dying civilization, and published his theories in the 1906 book "Mars and Its Canals." Burroughs drew directly on Lowell's work for the Barsoom setting. Lowell's canals became the Red Martian irrigation system that keeps the dying planet alive.

Other species include the White Martians (Therns), who live at the South Pole and consider themselves the apex of Martian civilization, and the Black Martians (First Born), who live near the South Pole and have a complicated relationship with the Therns. There are also the Plant Men, a non-humanoid species, and the Kaldanes, which are disembodied brains that the narrator encounters in "The Chessmen of Mars" (1922). Each species gets Barsoomian names, and those names are most of what the language consists of.

The ERBville fan site maintains reference material on Burroughs' works, including glossaries of Barsoomian terms compiled by fans over decades. These fan compilations are the closest thing Barsoomian has to a dictionary, and they reveal how thin the actual vocabulary is. Most entries are proper nouns. The common nouns and verbs are rare enough that you could not construct a sentence in Barsoomian without inventing most of the words yourself.

The 2012 film "John Carter" was Disney's attempt to adapt the Barsoom series for modern audiences. It was directed by Andrew Stanton, who had previously directed Finding Nemo and WALL-E for Pixar. The film starred Taylor Kitsch as John Carter and Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris, the Red Martian princess. According to the Wikipedia article on the film), the production budget reached approximately $263 million, and the film lost around $200 million at the box office, making it one of the biggest financial failures in cinema history.

The failure of John Carter is worth understanding because it explains why Barsoomian never got the full conlang treatment that other film adaptations gave their source material. When a film succeeds, the studio invests in worldbuilding infrastructure, including language development. When a film loses $200 million, the franchise dies and the language work stops with it.

The film's problems were multiple. The title was changed from "John Carter of Mars" to just "John Carter" because Disney's marketing department believed that films with "Mars" in the title performed poorly, citing the failure of "Mars Needs Moms" (2011). The marketing campaign failed to communicate what the film was about, and many potential viewers did not realize it was based on a century-old literary property that had influenced Star Wars and Avatar. The film itself received mixed reviews, with critics praising the visuals but finding the story convoluted and the pacing uneven.

Andrew Stanton had final cut on the film, which is unusual for a first-time live-action director. He had earned that level of trust through his Pixar work, but live-action proved to be a different challenge. The film's financial failure ended any plans for a sequel, and the Barsoom series has not been adapted for screen since.

Here is a detail that connects Barsoomian to one of the most successful constructed languages in film history. Paul Frommer, the linguist who created Na'vi for James Cameron's Avatar (2009), was considered for language work on the John Carter film. Frommer is a retired professor of clinical management communication at the University of Southern California, and Cameron hired him in 2005 to develop Na'vi from scratch. Na'vi became one of the most fully developed film constructed languages, with a complete phonology, grammar, and growing vocabulary.

The John Carter production apparently explored whether Frommer could do similar work for Barsoomian. This would have been a different challenge from Na'vi. Na'vi was built from nothing, with no pre-existing vocabulary. Barsoomian had Burroughs' scattered words as a constraint, which means Frommer would have had to reverse-engineer a grammar that fit the existing terms. That is harder than starting from scratch, because the existing words may not follow consistent phonological patterns, and you have to build around them rather than design freely.

Whether Frommer was seriously involved or just briefly considered is not entirely clear from public sources. The film's failure means the question is academic. If John Carter had succeeded and spawned a franchise, Frommer or another linguist might have built Barsoomian into a proper conlang. Instead, the language remains in its original pulp fiction state, a collection of names and fragments. Our Na'vi Translator covers the language Frommer did fully develop, and it is a useful comparison point for what Barsoomian could have been.

The Barsoom series influenced science fiction for a century despite never producing a full language or a successful film adaptation. The influence is structural rather than linguistic. Burroughs established the template for the planetary romance: a human protagonist transported to an alien world, encountering multiple species, navigating political intrigue, and falling in love with an alien princess. That template shows up in Flash Gordon (1934), which borrowed it almost directly. It shows up in Star Wars (1977), which George Lucas has acknowledged drew on the pulp serial tradition that Burroughs helped define. And it shows up in Avatar (2009), where a human goes to an alien world, encounters a different species, and sides with them against his own people.

The linguistic legacy is thinner. Barsoomian did not establish a model for constructed languages the way Tolkien's Elvish languages did, or the way Marc Okrand's Klingon did later. Burroughs' approach of scattering words without building a system was a product of his era and his background. He was writing fast for magazine serialization, and his readers wanted action, not grammar tables. The result is a language that feels real in context but falls apart under inspection, which is a fair description of most pulp fiction worldbuilding.

For modern conlang enthusiasts, Barsoomian is interesting as a historical artifact. It shows what fictional languages looked like before the field of constructed languages had any rigor. The International Phonetic Association was founded in 1886, and the idea of systematically documenting phonology was still new when Burroughs was writing. He was not engaging with that work. He was making up names that sounded good, and for his audience, that was enough.

The Barsoom series remains in print, and the fan community keeps the vocabulary alive through reference sites and tools. Whether Barsoomian ever gets a proper conlang treatment depends on whether someone adapts the series again, and whether that adaptation succeeds where the 2012 film failed. Given the cost of the last attempt, that may take a while.