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.

It’s no Esperanto, but “Toki Pona,” a lingo invented by Canadian Sonja Elen Kisa, has people talking. Based on an intentionally minimal lexicon of 120 words, Kisa created the “simple language of good” during a period of depression.

An article explains that her method is backed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that language affects the way people think and behave. A psychiatrist quoted in the article says that Toki Pona “is meant to focus on the positive, so negative thought patterns and cognitions can be transferred and eliminated by simply using the language.”

More about Toki Pona:

Its minimalism is attracting a growing following of Toki Ponians. Since publishing the tenets of her language on the Internet in 2001, Ms. Kisa, 28 and based in Toronto, estimates several hundred people have dabbled in it - and at least 100 speak it fluently, mostly in online chat rooms and blogs.

A Colorado programmer is developing an apocalyptic computer game with Toki Pona as the spoken language. An Israeli-German singer and member of the Stuttgart Chamber Choir is including it in a concert of musical pieces composed in constructed languages, alongside Esperanto and Star Trek’s Klingon.

Click here to read the full article by Siobhan Roberts.