CONSTRUCTED LANGUAGES

The Na'vi languague is a constructed languague created for the Na'vi in the movie Avatar with fictional purposes. It was created by Paul Frommer, a professor at the USC Marshall School of Business with a doctorate in linguistics. Naʼvi was designed to fit James Cameron's conception of what the language should sound like in the film, to be realistically learnable by the fictional human characters of the film, to sound alien but pleasant and appealing to audiences, to be a language that humans could plausibly learn to speak, and to be pronounceable by the actors, but to not closely resemble any single human language.

The Naʼvi language has its origins in James Cameron's early work on Avatar. In 2005, while the film was still in scriptment form, Cameron felt it needed a complete, consistent language for the alien characters to speak. Based on Cameron's initial list of words, which had a "Polynesian flavor" according to Frommer, the linguist developed three different sets of meaningless words and phrases that conveyed a sense of what an alien language might sound like: of the three, Cameron liked the sound of the ejectives most. When the film was released in 2009, Naʼvi had a growing vocabulary of about a thousand words. However, this has changed subsequently as Frommer has expanded the lexicon to more than 1,500 words and has published the grammar, thus making Naʼvi a relatively complete and learnable language.