Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/March 2013

The Naʼvi language is the constructed language of the Naʼvi, the sapient humanoid indigenous inhabitants of the fictional moon Pandora in the 2009 film Avatar. 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, and to be pronounceable by the actors, but to not closely resemble any single human language. When the film was released in 2009, Naʼvi had a growing vocabulary of about a thousand words, but understanding of its grammar was limited to the language's creator.

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. Find out more...