Na’vi: The alien language of the Avatar universe!
When James Cameron’s sci-fi film Avatar had release in 2009, it had created a worldwide rage. And now, 13 years down the line, its sequel Avatar: The Way of Water is all ready to release on 16th December, celebrating the year-end. In fact, its much-anticipated trailer was recently unveiled that rendered the fans across the globe confounded and nostalgic.
While the sequel of Avatar makes you wait for another rollercoaster ride through the fictional land of Pandora, with the indigenous humanoid species, Na’vi, trying to make it through life’s ups and downs, let us offer you a sneak peek into the special language of the Avatar universe. For the unversed, this language is also called Na’vi.
Born in the hands of an American linguist
Not many know, the birth of Na’vi language is quite a story in itself. Turns out, when the Avatar was in its pre-production stage, filmmaker James Cameron realised that his alien characters needed an alien language, that will be both complete and consistent throughout the film. His goal was simple: To coin a language that will not only be realistic, but also be picked up by the fictional humanoid characters and easily pronounced by the actors, while not closely resembling any human lingo. He even started scripting this alien language. However, thirty words later he figured it wasn’t his cup of tea.
As a result, he reached out to the linguistic department at the University of Southern California seeking assistance in the matter. Long story short, this project of constructing an alien language for an epic sci-fi movie resonated well with a linguistics professor named Paul Frommer. When Cameron conveyed his vision to Frommer, Frommer got right to it. He took over Cameron’s initial list of words having a “Polynesian flavour” and developed three sets of meaningless words and phrases, something that an alien tribe would speak. He based them on Latin script and was also greatly influenced by the Maori language (dialect of a native tribe of New Zealand). The first set contained contrasting tones, the second has varying vowel lengths and the final one had ejective consonants. Guess which one Cameron liked the most? The ejective consonants!
Na’vi over time: To speak and not to write
As soon as Cameron finalised his choice, Frommer started developing the rest of the language. He closely referred to languages heavy in ejective sounds, such as Amharic (national language of Ethiopia), Persian, Chinese, Hebrew and a bit of Indonesian. What he tried was simple: To make something that will be a unique blend of all these, yet completely distinct and new.
Over the course of six months, he came up with its morphology, syntax, pronunciation and vocabulary. When auditions began, the actors were allowed to read out the language, and often ended up making mistakes. Guess what Frommer did then? At times he corrected them, other times he also implemented the errors into his language to give it a more human touch. Frommer became so involved in the process, that he also expanded on the Na’vi vocabulary while working on the Avatar video game as well as the film songs, all of which released before the grand motion picture.
In fact, by the time the film released, Na’vi was almost a whole language, having more than a thousand words. However, back in 2009, the grammar of Na’vi could only be understood by the creator. This is when Frommer decided to keep working on the language, the result of which is a set of 2600 words with published meanings and grammar, making Na’vi an almost finished, learnable and serviceable language.
With the aim of making Na’vi “have a life of its own”, Frommer has also come up with a blog called ‘Na’viteri’ where he regularly posts additions and alterations to the language. There are also websites dedicated to Na’vi where one can go and learn it. Cool, right? What’s more interesting however is that, Na’vi is meant to be a spoken and not a written language. Do remember!
Fun fact: When Frommer heard that Cameron named the indigenous Avatar people as ‘Na’vi’ he was greatly inspired and named his fictional constructed language the same.