You Can Learn How to Speak Na’vi
Retired USC professor Paul Frommer created the Na’vi conlang (an invented language intended for human communication), which Cameron memorably invoked when he won his second Golden Globe for directing in 2010, translating what he said as, “I see you, my brother and sisters.”
To align with Cameron’s vision, “Na’vi had to be entirely new,” Frommer told Campfire Writing in 2024. “It had to sound ‘nice’; it had to stay consistent with the thirty-some-odd words he had already come up with—mainly names of characters and animals.”
It had to be a language humans could actually learn, as some do in the film. And, since Frommer figured a few people might see Avatar, “I wanted to make sure it was interesting, unusual and would stand up to scrutiny.”
The professor made workbooks, including “a word-for-word gloss and an English-y ‘phonetic’ transcription that some actors found useful,” he said. “But the crucial tools were the mp3 recordings, which they could download and use for practice.”
Then he tutored them in person, he said, to “fine-tune the pronunciation and make sure the sentence intonation was appropriate. On a few occasions, a spontaneous sound an actor came up with became a canonical war cry. And one time, an actor unwittingly coined a new word.”
