Hollywood’s Love Affair With Fictional Languages
For big fans of James Cameron’s Avatar, the 13-year wait between the original and this year’s sequel probably felt near interminable. But die-hard fans might have counted with a bit more agony and say it’s actually been vomrra zìsìt, or “15 years.”
I’m not implying that Avatar rots the brain. Rather, the blue-skinned Na’vi people, who inhabit the planet Pandora in Cameron’s universe, have four digits per hand. As a result, their language—painstakingly built from scratch for the movies—uses base-eight counting instead of the human base-10. Fifteen in Na’vi actually means eight plus five (as opposed to 10 plus five in English), making it the equivalent of our 13.
During those “15” years, Paul Frommer—the business professor and linguist who developed a complete Na’vi language for the first movie, including its octal counting system—created a distinct dialect for the reef-dwelling clan introduced in Avatar: The Way of Water. Only a few snippets are audible in the three-hour sequel, and Frommer is waiting to release more details to the small but passionate community of Na’vi speakers here on planet Earth—he wants to give them the opportunity to puzzle over its lexical and syntactical variations first.
Commissioning an entirely new language, which felt special for the first , is becoming a staple for immersive science-fiction and fantasy worlds. We’ve seen the invention of Dothraki, spoken and sign languages for the recent remake, and bloodsucker-speak for , to name only a handful. These languages are as functional as English, with internally consistent rules. In turn, neuroscientists have been able to harness them to better understand how the human brain processes constructed and natural languages, giving us new clues into what, exactly, constitutes a language to begin with.
