The Naʼvi language () is a constructed language originally made for the 2009 film Avatar. In the film franchise, the language is spoken by the Naʼvi, a species of sapient humanoids indigenous to the extraterrestrial moon Pandora. The language was created by Paul Frommer, a professor at the USC Marshall School of Business with a doctorate in linguistics. Naʼvi was designed to fit moviemaker James Cameron's conception of what the language should sound like in the film. It had to be realistically learnable by the human characters of the film and pronounceable by the actors, but also 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 2600 words and has published the grammar.
Roots 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. He had written approximately 30 words for this alien language but wanted a linguist to create the language in full. His production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, contacted the linguistics department at the University of Southern California (USC) seeking someone who would be interested in creating such a language. Edward Finegan, a professor of linguistics at USC, thought that the project would appeal to Paul Frommer, with whom he had co-authored a linguistics textbook, and so forwarded Lightstorm's inquiry on to him. Frommer and Cameron met to discuss the director's vision for the language and its use in the film; at the end of the meeting, Cameron shook Frommer's hand and said "Welcome aboard".
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: one using contrasting tones, one using varying vowel lengths, and one using ejective consonants. Of the three, Cameron liked the sound of the ejectives most. His choice established the phonology that Frommer would use in developing the rest of the Naʼvi language – morphology, syntax, and an initial vocabulary – a task that took six months.
Development The Naʼvi vocabulary was created by Frommer as needed for the script of the movie. By the time casting for Avatar began, the language was sufficiently developed that actors were required to read and pronounce Naʼvi dialogue during auditions. During shooting Frommer worked with the cast, helping them understand their Naʼvi dialogue and advising them on their Naʼvi pronunciation, stress, and intonation. Actors would often make mistakes in speaking Naʼvi. In some cases, those mistakes were plausibly explained as ones their human characters would make while learning the language in-universe; in other cases, the mistakes were incorporated into the language.
Frommer expanded the vocabulary further in May 2009 when he worked on the Avatar video game, which required Naʼvi words that had not been needed for the film script and thus had not yet been invented. Frommer also translated into Naʼvi four sets of song lyrics that had been written by Cameron in English, and he helped vocalists with their pronunciation during the recording of James Horner's Avatar score. At the time of the film's release on December 18, 2009, the Naʼvi vocabulary consisted of approximately 1,000 words.
Work on the Naʼvi language has continued even after the film's release. Frommer is working on a compendium which he plans to deliver to Fox in the near future. He hopes that the language will "have a life of its own," and thinks it would be "wonderful" if the language developed a following. Since then, it has developed a following, as is evident through the increasing learner community of the language. The community's Lexical Expansion Project, together with Frommer, has expanded the lexicon by more than 50 percent.
Frommer also maintains a blog, Na’viteri, where he regularly posts additions to the lexicon and clarifications on grammar. Naʼviteri has been the source of the vast majority of Naʼvi growth independent of Frommer's contract with 20th Century Fox.
Structure and usage
The Naʼvi language was developed under three significant constraints. First, Cameron wanted the language to sound alien but pleasant and appealing to audiences. Second, since the storyline included humans who have learned to speak the language, it had to be a language that humans could plausibly learn to speak. And finally, the actors would have to be able to pronounce their Naʼvi dialogue without unreasonable difficulty. The language in its final form contains several elements which are uncommon in human languages, such as verbal conjugation using infixes. All Naʼvi linguistic elements are found in human languages, but the combination is unique.
Phonology and orthography Naʼvi lacks voiced plosives like , but has the ejective consonants , which are spelled px, tx, kx. It also has the syllabic consonants ll and rr. There are seven vowels, a ä e i ì o u. Although all the sounds were designed to be pronounceable by the human actors of the film, there are unusual consonant clusters, as in "metal"."Naʼvi, la langue d'Avatar" , L'express, 1 December 2009
Naʼvi syllables may be as simple as a single vowel, or as complex as "moron" or above (both CCVC).
The fictional language Naʼvi of Pandora is unwritten. However, the actual (studio) language is written in the Latin script for the actors of Avatar. Some words include: "year", "ceremonial challenge", "first" (’aw "one"), "fair", "spirit animal", "rock", "territory", "avatar" (dream-walk-body).
Vowels There are seven monophthong vowels: front backHigh ~ Mid Low
There are additionally four diphthongs: aw [aw], ew [εw], ay [aj], ey [εj], and two syllabic consonants: ll [l̩] and rr [r̩], which mostly behave as vowels.
Note that the e is open-mid while the o is close-mid, and that there is no *oy. The rr is strongly trilled, and the ll is "light" (plain), never a "dark" (velarized) .
These vowels may occur in sequences, as in the Polynesian languages, Swahili, and Japanese. Each vowel counts as a syllable, so that tsaleioae has six syllables, , and meoauniaea has eight, .
Naʼvi does not have vowel length or tone, but it does have contrastive stress: túte "person", tuté "female person". Although stress may move with derivation, as here, it is not affected by inflection (case on nouns, tense on verbs, etc.). So, for example, the verb lu ("to be") has stress on its only vowel, the u, and no matter what else happens to it, the stress stays on that vowel: lolú "was" (lu), lolängú "was (ugh!)" (lu), etc.
Consonants There are 20 consonants. There are two Latin transcriptions: one that more closely approaches the ideal of one letter per phoneme, with the c and g for and (the values they have in much of Eastern Europe and Polynesia, respectively), and a modified transcription used for the actors, with the digraphs ts and ng used for those sounds. In both transcriptions, the ejective consonants are written with digraphs in x, a convention that appears to have no external inspiration, but could potentially be inspired by the Esperanto convention of writing x as a stand-in for the circumflex.
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal Nasal Plosive Affricate Fricative Approximant
The fricatives and the affricate, f v ts s z h, are restricted to the onset of a syllable; the others may occur at the beginning or at the end (though w y in final position are considered parts of diphthongs, as they only occur as ay ey aw ew and may be followed by another final consonant, as in "moron"). However, in addition to appearing before vowels, f ts s may form consonant clusters with any of the unrestricted consonants (the plosives and liquids/glides) apart from ’, making for 39 clusters. Other sequences occur across syllable boundaries, such as Naʼvi and ikran "banshee".
The plosives p t k are tenuis, as in Spanish or French. In final position, they have no audible release, as in Indonesian and other languages of Southeast Asia, as well as in many dialects of English in words such as "bat". The r is flapped, as in Spanish and Indonesian; it sounds a bit like the tt or dd in the American pronunciation of the words latter / ladder.
Sound change The plosives undergo lenition after certain prefixes and prepositions. The ejective consonants px tx kx become the corresponding plosives p t k; the plosives and affricate p t ts k become the corresponding fricatives f s h; and the glottal stop ’ disappears entirely. For example, the plural form of po "s/he" is ayfo "they", with the p weakening into an f after the prefix ay-. Technically:Frommer (Language Log), Phonetics and Phonology: 5. Phonetic detail and phonology: Lenition px (/p'/) → p tx (/t'/) → t kx (/k'/) → k p → f t or ts → s k → h ' (/ʔ/) → ∅ Conventional notation uses + to denote a prefix that causes lenition.Miller, p.1
Lenition has its own significance when the plural prefix can optionally be omitted. In the above example, ayfo can be shortened to fo. Similarly, the plural of "brother" can be (from ).
Since Naʼvi does not make the distinction between long and short vowels,Annis, § 2.1.4.3 if the application of an affix results in two of the same vowels in a row, it usually is shortened to one.Annis, § 2.3.1See exception with -ey- in the noun section There is also some nasal assimilation of place.Annis, § 2.3.4 Specific affixes listed hereafter will list there variants. Many prefixes combine with each other to form slight variants.
Grammar Naʼvi is a tripartite, primarily affixing agglutinative language. It has free word order. For example, the English "I see you" (a common greeting in Naʼvi) can be written as follows in Naʼvi:
As sentences become more complex, some words, like adjectives and negatives, will have to stay in a more or less fixed position in the sentence, depending on what the adjective or negative is describing.
"Today is a good day"
In this case, the adjective (good) will need to stay with the noun trr (day), therefore limiting the sentence to fewer combinations on the construction of the sentence, but as long as it follows or precedes the noun, the sentence is fine. By putting the attributive a before the adjective, the adjective can be put after the noun:
Nouns
Nouns in Naʼvi show greater number distinctions than those in most human languages do: besides singular and plural, they not only have special dual forms for two of an item (eyes, hands, lovers, etc.), which are common in human language (English has a remnant in "both"), but also trial forms for three of an item, which on Earth are only found with pronouns. Gender is only occasionally (and optionally) marked.
The plural prefix is ay+, the dual is me+,the trial is pxe+ and the general plural is ay+. All trigger lenition (indicated by the "+" signs rather than the hyphens that usually mark prefix boundaries).Annis, § 3.1.3 In nouns which undergo lenition, the plural prefix may be dropped, so the plural of "body" is either or just . Such plurals are known as short plurals.Frommer (Language Log), Word Classes and Morphology: 1. Nouns: Number: Short plurals
The prefix fra- means "every".Annis, § 3.3.4
The prefix fì- indicates proximal deixis. When used as a plural, it becomes fay+.Annis § 3.3.1
The prefix tsa- indicates distal dexis. When used as a plural, it becomes tsay+.Annis § 3.3.2 There is also the prefix fne- which means a type, sort or class of the noun it is attached to. The suffix -o marks the noun as indefinite (i.e. "some").
The suffix -tsyìp is used as a diminutive/endearment suffix.