How Fans Make Fictional Languages Real

Almost any day of the week, you can attend a class on Na’vi, the language spoken by the Pandoran aliens in James Cameron’s Avatar films. Despite being designed for fictional speakers and only appearing in short exchanges onscreen, Na’vi is a fully functional language. People were angling to study it before the first Avatar movie even came out; now, some 16 years and two sequels later, the Na’vi learning community is bigger and busier than ever.

One Monday afternoon class, led by 29-year-old Avatar fan Nätikey, is organized around a game. She explains the rules as students trickle into the Discord voice chat. People who want to practice speaking Na’vi will take turns describing a word in the language for the others to guess. Anyone who’s not comfortable talking is welcome to listen in, armed with a bingo sheet where they can fill in spaces for catching an adverb, a plural word, and so on. 

With the class full of about 10 speakers and 10 listeners, Nätikey kicks off the first round. “Txo fko kem s(iv)i pxìm nìtxan nìtxan,” she begins, “tsun fko sivar fìlì'ut fte tsat sliva'tsu.” (“If one does something very, very often, you can use this word to describe that.”)

The first guess comes almost at once. “Srake lu ‘nìfrakrr?’” someone says. (“Is it ‘as always?’”)

“Srane!” Nätikey cheers. Yes! She offers a verbal clap on the back—“seysonìltsan!”—and calls on the next player.

Nätikey has been teaching classes in voice chat on Kelutral, one of the two main Na’vi Discord servers, for over a year. “It’s all volunteer,” she explains. “It’s very casual.” The listening bingo class is probably the most fun to lead, she says, but teaching grammar has its own rewards. “I like it when somebody goes, ‘Oh! Now I get it!’”

Between Kelutral and LearnNavi, the community’s other main home base, people who want to talk like Pandoran natives can find lessons and conversations at a range of levels. And there are an awful lot of those people: both Discord servers currently have more than 20,000 members, and are gaining lots of new ones each day.

The Na’vi crowd might be the fastest-growing group of fictional language speakers right now, but it’s certainly not the only one. Tolkien fans have been playing with the Elvish languages from his Middle-earth stories for more than half a century. Perhaps the most widely known fictional language in pop culture, Star Trek’s Klingon, has had a speaker base for decades. More recently, the Dothraki and High Valyrian tongues from HBO’s Game of Thrones have drawn their own bands of merry language learners.

“None of the fictional languages are complete to the level of a living human language,” says Elvish aficionado Paul Strack. These constructed languages, or conlangs, typically have only a few thousand words, whereas a natural language might have hundreds of thousands. But the conlangs featured in big franchises were engineered by linguists to have grammar rules, vocabularies, and other trappings of true language—and there’s a lot you can do with even a few thousand lexical building blocks and a good set of grammar tools.