Have you ever heard about Na’vi?

For those fanatics of movies and specifically for those who have seen Avatar, this is an easy question to answer, but for those who don’t have any idea of what it means, let me introduce you a little bit in the Na’vi’s  world.

Na’vi  is a community of indigenous inhabitants of Pandora, a fictional world created by James Cameron In the movie Avatar that is referred as a moon of the Polifemo planet. But this word, Na’vi, also stands for the language this community uses, which was created by Paul Frommer, a professor of Marshall School of Business with a doctorate in linguistics, Tis specialist was brought in by te movies director “to create an entire functioning language for the tribe of 10-foot-tall blue aliens” ( (Boucher, 2009).

Frommer accepted to design the language but it had to be created according to the director´s idea about how it should sound and that it had to be learnable for the actors and easy to pronounce, but it couldn’t seem or sound like any other human language.

So thinking on to those specifications, Paul created the language like this: Na’vi has 20 consonants, 7 vowels, 4 diphthongs, and 2 syllabic “pseudovowels,” rr and ll. It actually counts with more than 1.000 words and it keeps growing because of the fans that create new expressions under Froom’s supervision.

Na’vi is a language that doesn’t count with letters like B, D or G; but it has these vowels:  a, ä, e, i, ì, o, u. For creating the vowels, Froom inspired in Japanese, in which each vowel represents a syllable, for example: the word tsaleioae has six syllables: tsa-lɛ-i-o-a-ɛ. (Zimmer, 2009)

According to the numbers, this language has some similarities with French, because it counts with an octal system taking into account that Na’vis only have four fingers. Some of the numbers recognized in the movie are: Aw’ (1), “Mune” (2), “Tsìng” (3), “Vofu”(16) y “Tsìvol” (32); what takes us to conclude that they use the root of four, which is “tsi” and the root of 8,  which is “vo”

Next I will give you some examples of words in Na’vi for you to have an idea of how it works:

Kaltxì: Hello

Irayo: Thank you

Mìso: Far

Lok: Close

Tutean: Man

Tutee: Woman

Atan: Light

Eyktan: Leader

Fya'o: Road

Hiyìk:Funny

Kerusey: Dead

Lehrrap: Dangerous.

So that is why I would like to conclude with these words: “Fictional languages are by far the largest group of artistic languages. Fictional languages are intended to be the languages of a fictional world, and are often designd with the intent of givin more depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated, and to have their characters communicate in a fashion which is both alien and dislocated” (Milani, 2009)

By: Alejandra Ospina