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Some people learn Klingon, some learn Elven. Now there is a new fan-based cult language joining the ranks: Na’vi.
The 1,000-word language created for James Cameron’s 2009 movie “Avatar” has exploded in the online community of learnnavi.org, a global Web nexus for those interested in learning Na’vi. CNN, Good Morning America and The New York Times have all featured the language and its online community — the University of Maine can now claim at least one devout fan.
Alexander French, an undeclared third-year student, said he saw the movie a few weeks ago at the insistence of a friend and discovered learnnavi.org soon after.
“I was just looking around online and I came across the community and it looked very interesting. Normally something like that I don’t get too much into, random fiction like that, but there was a lot to learn … about linguistics in general,” French said.
French said he’s not much of a language person. He studied German for two years in high school, but English is his main language. He said he tends to hang out in “geeky communities” and is a Linux user, but he found Na’vi intriguing because it is so different from English.
“A lot of the meaning of the language is implied by context, rather than explicitly stated. It’s just a very different system,” French said.
Na’vi is the brainchild of University of Southern California linguistics professor Paul Frommer, who Cameron commissioned specifically to create a language for the aliens in the film to speak. Frommer spent years working on Na’vi, which borrows from multiple natural languages and was designed to be pleasing to audiences and capable of being spoken by actors.
Unlike Klingon, which has had more time to grow — entire works of Shakespeare are translated into its guttural tones — Na’vi is just getting off the ground. The community at learnnavi.org has grown by the thousands over two months.
Sebastian Wolf, a film student at the University of California in Santa Cruz and the person who started learnnavi.org, said he never expected this kind of fan response.
“The site launched on the 19th of December, so that’s almost two months by now. I think our peak was when Fox linked to us, which was Jan. 11, [and there] was 31,000 people visiting the Web site on that day, and we still get around 10,000, and the growth is just tremendous,” Wolf said during a phone interview.
As of Thursday the Web site has 3,600 forum users from countries all over the map and speaking nearly every language — from Portuguese to Finnish, according to Wolf.
“We pretty much have visitors from every single continent, the majority being from North America, Germany, France and Spain and parts of Russia as well,” Wolf said.
Wolf, a big science fiction fan, said Cameron has been a heavy influence on his films as a student. He said he grew up bilingually learning English and German, and later took up Spanish.
French said he has been practicing Na’vi for not much more than two weeks. He said learning it has taught him a lot about language in general, and he agreed it makes it easier to learn other languages. The syntax and grammar of Na’vi is easy to learn — it can be covered in about an hour — but the tricky part is getting down the prefixes and affixes, and even infixes, as well as the vocabulary and pronunciation. One avid American Na’vi fan wrote that he managed to have online conversations with Russian and Ukrainian speakers — two of whom know very little English — entirely in Na’vi.
Jane Smith, a professor of French at UMaine, said compared to natural languages, Na’vi is different because it was designed specifically for the actors of “Avatar,” she said. No one knows exactly how languages develop cognitively because you can’t go back in time and hear how people speak them, and people disagree on whether such languages began in one area or several, but Na’vi is different because its history is laid bare.
“I haven’t seen the movie … but it’s the fact that it has this created language that would draw me to it,” Smith said.
Smith said language is a reflection and transmitter of culture — which Na’vi lacks — but which doesn’t disqualify it as a genuine language.
“It certainly doesn’t share all the features that thousands of other natural languages have,” Smith said.
Smith compared Na’vi to Esperanto, a language created in the 19th century by Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, a Jewish ophthalmologist, as a secondary language designed to become a universal form of communication. It currently has between 100,000 and 2 million speakers worldwide.
“There is a whole society, a number of people who have learned Esperanto in the hope that it would become sort of a lingua franca for the world,” Smith said.
Na’vi, however, is developing a culture to go with it — a YouTube search brings up dozens of videos on pronunciation and syntax — and Frommer hopes to expand it for the sequels to the movie, which Cameron is expected to develop into a trilogy.
In the meantime, people like Alexander French continue to expand their vocabulary in the alien tongue of Na’vi.
