Anyone who’s seen the box office hit Avatar and listened to the exotic-sounds of Pandora’s inhabitants might have wondered: where did that language come from?

“Na’vi,” as it’s called, is a constructed language (like Esperanto or Star Trek’s “Klingon.”) It was invented by University of Southern California professor Paul R. Frommer, commissioned by James Cameron to create a functioning language for the film. Frommer spent 4 years working on the grammar, vocab and sounds of the alien tongue, which currently contains a 1,000-word lexicon.

“The constraint, of course, is that the language I created had to be spoken by humans,” Frommer said. “I could have let my imagination run wild and come up with all sorts of weird sounds, but I was limited by what a human actor could actually do.”

“Cameron wanted something melodious and musical, something that would sound strange and alien but smooth and appealing.”

According to a LA Times article, the actors were less charmed—learning a truly alien language was one of the most difficult parts of their training.

To read more about the constructed Na’vi language in the LA Times, click here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Constructed languages, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.