Kaltxì!

Na'vi is the language of the blue-skinned people of Pandora in James Cameron's film Avatar (2009). You met it briefly in Constructed Languages 5 as an example of a language made for a story. In this course you will learn how it actually works, from its unusual sounds to the small pieces that are slotted into its words. Na'vi is a good language to study because it was designed to feel alien but to remain a real, learnable system, and a community of learners has since grown around it.

Where Na'vi Comes From

Paul Frommer, a professor at the University of Southern California with a doctorate in linguistics, was hired by Cameron's production team to build the language. Cameron had written about thirty words himself, and Frommer worked out a full sound system, word-building rules and grammar around them. By the time the film was released in 2009, the vocabulary stood at about a thousand words. Since then, a learner community has worked with Frommer to expand it, and it now has well over two thousand.

The language took on a life of its own. Fans built websites, dictionaries and forums (the best known is LearnNavi.org), and translated songs and stories into it. Remember the point from Introduction to Linguistics 8: once people use a constructed language, it begins to grow.

A Language for a Story

Na'vi belongs to the family of screen languages that Constructed Languages 5 described. Like Klingon, it is a priori: built from scratch and not derived from an existing language (Constructed Languages 2 introduced the term). Its purpose is dramatic: a language that sounds right in the mouths of actors, suits a forest-dwelling people and does not sound like English.

Writing Na'vi

Within the story, Na'vi is an unwritten language. For learners, it is written in the Latin alphabet, with a few special letters, and this course does the same. Three things are worth knowing now:

• Three sounds are written with two letters: px, tx and kx are sharp "popped" versions of p, t and k, called ejectives (Chapter 2).
• The apostrophe is a letter: ' stands for a catch in the throat, a glottal stop, as in the middle of "uh-oh".
• There are no b, d or g. Na'vi has no voiced stops, so any word you see with those letters is not Na'vi.

Some writers use the letters c and g for the sounds that are written ts and ng. This course uses ts and ng, which is the version most learners meet, for example in ngati "you".

Your First Phrases

Here are some phrases to learn by sight now. You do not need to analyse them yet; each one will be taken apart in later chapters. The respellings after each phrase give a rough idea of the sound (Chapter 2 explains them properly).

The little word ma is placed before a name or a title to address someone directly: Kaltxì, ma Neytiri means "Hello, Neytiri". You will see it in many forms of address.

How This Course Is Organised

The ten chapters move from the bottom up: sounds and spelling (Chapter 2), nouns (3), pronouns and greetings (4), verbs and the infix system (5 and 6), sentences and word order (7), questions and negation (8), numbers and time (9), and the people and the language (10). Every Na'vi example is given with a word-by-word gloss. At the end of each chapter, the Na'vi words and forms used are listed so you can check them against the community dictionary and Paul Frommer's own published notes.

Hands-On Exercises