How Fans Make Fictional Languages Real

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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.

In various corners of the internet—and some places in-person—you can find people chatting in Klingon or High Valyrian, writing poetry in Elvish, singing in Dothraki, or writing fic in Na’vi. Some use conlangs as a sort of linguistic cosplay to feel more immersed in their favorite imaginary worlds, while others feel more fannish about the languages themselves. Conlangs may not offer the full breadth of expression that natural languages do, but fans do use them for genuine communication and, in some cases, drive the evolution of fictional languages to meet their real-world needs.

People have invented languages throughout history for artwork, international communication, and other purposes. The oldest recorded conlang is thought to be Lingua Ignota, created by twelfth-century German nun Hildegard von Bingen. The most popular conlang in history is probably Esperanto, which L.L. Zamenhof invented in 1887 as a universal language to promote world peace. It is now estimated to have more than 100,000 speakers around the world, including some multilingual people who have learned it as one of their native languages.

The first person to craft conlangs for fictional characters that drew a big modern fandom was J.R.R. Tolkien. He started working on the tongues spoken by elves, dwarves, orcs and other beings in The Lord of the Rings long before writing the books and continued to develop them throughout his life.

“Tolkien himself never created a definitive version of the languages that he wrote down that people could work with,” says Strack, who’s known in the fandom for creating Eldamo, an online lexicon of Tolkien’s languages. This ambiguity has historically made those languages quite tricky to study. In the 1960s, fanzines were already curating what precious fragments of Elvish they could. Strack grew up reading Tolkien in the 1970s and ’80s, when there still wasn’t much known about Middle-earth languages. It wasn’t until the 2000s, when Strack decided to brush up on Elvish for a role-playing game, that he discovered how much had changed since his childhood.

“In the intervening 20 years, there was a massive amount of interesting material that had been published,” Strack explains. Posthumously published books and journal articles based on Tolkien’s manuscripts had helped flesh out his languages. As scholars have unearthed more details on Elvish from the author’s archives, fans have been able to dig deeper into the languages—particularly Quenya and Sindarin. “Quenya, in Tolkien’s fictional world, was the language of the High Elves, so it was like Latin [in Medieval Europe],” Strack says. “Sindarin was sort of like the ‘normal’ Elvish language that people used in day to day speech.”

Star Trek fans never had to suffer that kind of slow excavation to study Klingon. About a year after the language debuted in the 1984 film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Klingon creator Marc Okrand published The Klingon Dictionary. “[Okrand] is seeing the Klingon language spring to life,” one California newspaper reported in 1986. Fans were writing letters, designing license plates, and staging plays in Klingon. This was just “the latest fad” among those quirky old Trekkies, the paper claimed. But Klingon proved its staying power, gaining enough cultural notoriety that decades later, speaking Klingon has become a sort of stock trait that other TV shows use to convey characters’ nerd cred.

Over the years, Okrand has expanded the language in other books, learning software, and batches of new words; Duolingo launched its Klingon course in 2018.  Today, the Klingon Language Institute (KLI)–a global network of fans studying the language–has nearly 9,000 members.

“I had a sense, mainly from Klingon…that there might be some people who would want to embrace the language and use it for communication,” Na’vi creator Paul Frommer told me in an interview for Science News on how these languages are constructed. But even Frommer was shocked when, days before the first Avatar film’s U.S. release in December 2009, he received an email written entirely in Na’vi. “I was just totally blown away, as you can imagine,” he said. The stranger had studied interviews where Frommer described Na’vi grammar, and he wasn’t the only one itching to learn the language.

Within days of Avatar’s premiere, more than 100 fans had filled the forums of LearnNavi.org. Within weeks, some 2,000 others had joined their ranks. “People were actively engaged in picking apart and figuring out the language,” says Corey, a Na’vi speaker in Missouri who joined LearnNavi as a college freshman in January 2010. “That was even in an era when almost nothing about the language was published.”

Na’vi learners had nothing like the Klingon dictionary at their disposal, but what they did have was Frommer’s public faculty profile at the University of Southern California. “People were emailing him a lot of questions,” Corey recalls. By February, one LearnNavi user had cobbled together data from interviews, emails, the film script, and other sources to produce a 60-page guide to Na’vi. The community’s pool of knowledge has since grown as Frommer publishes new aspects of the language.

Dothraki stirred up a similar sort of fannish anticipation before Game of Thrones premiered in 2011. In the lead-up to the show, fans took to Dothraki.org to discuss what they knew from interviews and messages with David Peterson, the conlang’s creator. Peterson, a cofounder of the Language Creation Society, is a prolific conlanger who has been tapped to devise languages for a range of films and TV shows, from Dune to The 100 and The Witcher. In the 2010s, media coverage of his conlangs and his 2015 book The Art of Language Invention^[1] helped bring the idea of language creation into the public consciousness. Peterson also published the language course Living Language Dothraki in 2014, and a Duolingo course for his High Valyrian language—spoken both in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon—followed in 2017.

Over time, networks of conlangers have evolved much as fandoms in general have: connecting online, first through mailing lists and forums, then via social media and Discord. Today, there are conlang learners across the world of all different ages. It’s hard to say just how many people are actively studying any fictional language right now, but you can find internet communities with thousands of members for most of these conlangs. More than 400,000 people have started Duolingo’s Klingon course, and nearly a million have started the app’s High Valyrian track—hinting that at least a passing interest in a fictional language is more common than it might seem.

Chris Lipscombe was first introduced to Klingon as a teen in the early 1990s. One day, a school friend handed him a copy of the audiotape Conversational Klingon. Lipscombe, who’d been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with his dad, was fascinated. “I listened to it over and over again,” he says, “and I would try and copy the sounds.”

Lipscombe’s friend was doing the same thing. “We’re both just listening to these tapes and using it as a fun language at school, so that other people didn’t understand what we were talking about,” says Lipscombe, now 47 and based in Kentucky. “Then I found out there was a Klingon dictionary, and I got a copy for my birthday, and the rest is history.” Lipscombe was soon hiding the Klingon dictionary behind his French textbook in class (“I failed that class, as you can imagine”), and the first website he ever visited was the homepage of the KLI, which he now leads.

Lipscombe’s arc from Trekkie to Klingonist is probably how most people assume someone gets into a fictional language. And to be sure, the canon-lover to conlanger pipeline is quite real. But not every Klingon learner is a die-hard Star Trek fan. Some just think conlangs are cool, or enjoy learning languages in general. “They come in, and they learn 2,000 words and they learn the grammar well enough to be able to communicate, and then they’re off again to another language,” Lipscombe says. “And it’s like, ‘It’s nice knowing you! Come back sometime!’”

That’s the case for other conlangs, too. There are Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and Avatar fans who use conlangs to feel closer to their favorite characters or add a new dimension to their experience of canon. There are others who could take or leave the canon their conlang came from—or haven’t even seen it.

AWRyder, a 35-year-old member of LearnNavi based in Portugal, vaguely remembers watching the first Avatar a long time ago. But he’d basically forgotten about it until one day in 2023, he came across the song “The Storm” on YouTube. “I was like, ‘I don’t know what this language is, but it sounds really nice,’” AWRyder says. After a quick internet search revealed it was Na’vi, he decided to start learning. It wasn’t just the sound of the language that appealed to him. “Most natural languages, the way they evolve leads to having silly grammar rules that are exceptions of exceptions,” he explains; the intentional architecture of Na’vi, in contrast, is “so clean.”

Beyond simple aesthetics, someone might be drawn to a conlang because of the worldview built into it. Every language is embedded with the cultural perspectives of its speakers, fictional or otherwise. In Klingon, for instance, there is no verb “to be.” “Klingons don’t say somebody is happy. They say you are going through the experience of happiness,” Lipscombe says. “You are happy-ing. You are sad-ing. That’s a temporary thing. It’s not something you are.” Na’vi performs a similar twist of perspective for English speakers by making the word “tok,” which describes being somewhere, a verb that takes an object. In Na’vi, you do not simply exist in a space—you happen to that place. Those elements of a fictional culture might resonate with someone regardless of their attachment to the fictional characters.

“I heard it described once as learning a new language gives you a new soul,” says Fiona Jallings, a 39-year-old Tolkien linguist in Montana. “In Tolkien’s languages, strong emotions, impulses, and dreams aren’t things that you do. They're done to you,” she says. “If you’re moved by the beauty of a sunset, in Sindarin you say, ‘Pessas nin,’ or ‘Change happened to me’ … If you had a dream last night, you say, ‘Olthas nin,’ or ‘A dream was given to me.’” Jallings also likes that Quenya offers five different words to describe concepts that, in English, are all lumped under the word “heart,” distinguishing the physical organ from concepts such as a person’s intent, their conscience, and the seat of their deepest feelings.

The reasons people stick with conlangs for years or decades are similarly varied. For some, there’s a simple joy in playing pretend. For others, amassing knowledge of a fictional language is satisfying the same way that cultivating a stamp or rock collection might be. Still others describe language learning as a fun puzzle to solve or a game they like getting better at. But perhaps the most common reason people stay active in conlang spaces is pretty standard for fandom: they make friends.  

Mikaelon, a Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon fan in France, stumbled on the High Valyrian Duolingo course while trying to learn some Malagasy for work in 2024. While he really enjoys the shows and finds High Valyrian quite beautiful, he says that the language really got its hooks into him once he found company among other High Valyrian learners on Discord. “It’s a quite small but very dedicated community, with very kind and helpful spirits,” Mikaelon says. “People love to share their enthusiasm for the language.” Conlangers generally get excited to see a beginner coming; the more people learn their language, after all, the more opportunities they have to use it. That kind of vested interest in each other’s success often makes fertile ground for friendship.

When asked why spend time learning a made-up language that they could spend learning a more useful, real-world one, the first thing many conlang learners will point out is that they have studied real-world languages. Sometimes, learning a conlang is even helpful for this. The word order of Klingon, for example, is in some circumstances similar to Japanese, and High Valyrian has noun declension like Latin and Greek. Getting familiar with those grammatical structures while studying a conlang can make them easier to pick up when studying a natural language. 

Conlang aficionados will also note that the definition of a “useful” language depends on who you want to communicate with. Sometimes, that’s a friend with a different native language, or the people who live in a country you want to visit; other times, it’s the people in your fandom. That doesn’t just make a conlang useful. “Once it starts to have real speakers,” Mikaelon says, “in a way, it becomes a real language too.”

Tekre and Wllìm try to speak only Na’vi at home on Fridays.

The couple, who have both studied the language since the 2010s, first got to know each other in an online Na’vi conversation group in 2018. As other members gradually dropped out, “it was every single week just the two of us speaking Na’vi for an hour,” says Tekre, 26. “Then, the speaking practice hour became a weekly speaking practice for hours.” When Tekre later moved from Germany to the Netherlands where Wllìm, 32, happened to live, they started meeting up and are now partners. “We speak Na’vi enough to each other that we’ve kind of developed slightly our own dialect,” Tekre says.

Household conlang conversation may be a rarity, but people talk and type to each other in fictional languages all the time. Chris Lipscombe regularly plays board games with friends in Klingon. Mikaelon has a standing Sunday call with an American friend to chat in High Valyrian. On the LearnNavi server, a group of English and Portuguese speakers used to get together for online multiplayer gaming. “Some didn’t speak English, and [others] didn’t speak Portuguese, so sometimes we would use Na’vi words to fill the gaps,” says Palu, a 21-year-old Avatar fan from Brazil.

Conversation is only one of the uses people find for fictional languages. Some write original stories, journals, or poetry in them. Others translate well-known texts, from Shakespeare plays to parts of the Bible. “I love translating songs into Na’vi,” says Palu, noting that she especially likes doing Portuguese ones that already have English translations, where she can bring something new to the piece. She also started translating the entire Owls of Ga’Hoole movie. Sometimes, translation projects make a fun crossover between fandom interests. Other times, fans undertake a translation for the sheer challenge of it. “People want to see how far they can take the language,” Palu says.

Of course, fans have used fictional languages to decorate fanart, narrate fanvids, and create other works in their conlang’s home franchise, too. When Jallings started studying Elvish in high school, one of the first things she did was create a list of plausible Elvish names to use in fanfiction. 

This was the early 2000s, when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies were coming out. “This fanfiction community was very quickly growing,” says Jallings. “Everybody wanted to have authentic-sounding original characters, and they wanted to have dialogue.” What started as a list of names on her fanfiction.net profile eventually snowballed into the site RealElvish.net, a library of word lists, phrasebooks, pronunciation guides, and other resources on Tolkien’s languages.

Those kinds of fan-made resources are often vital for casual Elvish students, since many of the primary sources for Tolkien’s languages are incredibly dense linguistic texts. Fan-made lessons and references have been the lifeblood of Na’vi learning, too. 

“When I joined LearnNavi, the kind of people that were in here were mostly academic linguists and conlangers,” says Corey, the Na’vi speaker who got in on the ground floor in 2010. “Over the years, we’ve really done across the board a lot of work in simplifying our documentation to at least the level of a high-school English speaker.” These days, a lot of Na’vi students are teens and young adults–many of whom are taking their first serious crack at learning a second language.

Making conlang resources more accessible doesn’t just mean translating them from linguist-speak to something a layperson can read. Because the conlangs for Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and Star Trek were all devised by English speakers, fans have traditionally needed to know at least some English to study their foundational documentation. But fans keep translating learning materials into new languages to expand their reach.

In some cases, fans are also working to expand fictional languages themselves. The Klingon Language Institute keeps a wish list where fans can request new words, and each year Marc Okrand releases about 100 new terms at the KLI’s annual meeting. Klingonists now have about 5,000 words to work with, compared with the original dictionary’s 1,500—which skewed heavily toward sci-fi terminology. “Thirty-five years ago, if I wanted to talk about my car needing an oil change, it was incredibly difficult,” says KLI head Lipscombe. Now, “I feel like the vast majority of everyday conversations can be held in Klingon.”

Avatar fans take an even more active role in shaping Na’vi. Through the Lexical Expansion Project (LEP), fans can come up with new words based on Na’vi’s linguistic properties and submit them for consideration. Those anonymous submissions first go to a committee of about a dozen randomly selected fans, who check that the words follow the wordbuilding rules of Na’vi before passing them along to Paul Frommer, who periodically reviews submissions. “If Paul likes it, it’s in the language,” Corey says. “He posts on his blog about it, then everybody starts using the word.” The LEP has given Na’vi terms for a wide range of concepts, from “well-rested” to “fictional character” to “chaos.” The Na’vi dictionary now has about 3,000 entries.

When it comes to conlang expansion, Tolkien fans have the most work cut out for them, with a long-dead conlang creator who left only scattered pieces of his languages behind. If studying Klingon or Na’vi is like observing a living animal, studying a Tolkien language is more like trying to imagine what an extinct creature looked like based on its fossils. Only tiny fragments are known of the dwarvish and orcish languages. The most complete skeletons exist for the Elvish tongues Sindarin and Quenya, but even they have only around 1,400 and 2,700 canon words, respectively (not counting words in versions of the languages that Tolkien created before publishing The Lord of the Rings).

Fans have taken to filling in the gaps with what they call “neo-Elvish” vocabulary—fan-made constructions of words that could have existed in Tolkien's languages, based on attested ones. Those neo-Elvish words aren’t pulled out of thin air, says RealElvish.net’s Fiona Jallings. “Pure invention is very, very much frowned upon.” Fortunately, Tolkien came up with not only the Elvish languages, but also histories for those languages. Fans analyze Tolkien’s ancient root words and make educated guesses about how those roots would have evolved over time to give rise to words in Sindarin and Quenya.

Fashioning neo-Elvish is not an exact science. People might disagree on what root to use for a certain idea, or how to simulate its evolution. “We’ll argue and discuss,” Jallings says, and come up with words together. Or someone might post a translation with a list of the neo-Elvish words they used at the bottom. “If other people like them, they’ll pick them up,” she says. “But every single person’s neo-Sindarin or neo-Quenya is different.”

Every conlang has gone through booms and busts in popularity. During the decade-long gap between Avatar movies, the Na’vi fandom really quieted down. But when the second film came out in 2022, longtime Na’vi speaker Corey says, “it was a flood zone.”

The Klingon cohort similarly shrank in the 2000s. Chris Lipscombe recalls one KLI meeting with only about a dozen people, where there might have been 50 to 100 before. But Klingon’s appearances on The Big Bang Theory and its Duolingo course raised the language’s profile in the 2010s. During the pandemic, Lipscombe says, “we had this influx of old folks coming back and new folks coming in, and Duolingo was the pipeline that would feed that.”

The conlang experiencing perhaps the most shrinkage right now is Dothraki. Unlike High Valyrian, Dothraki isn’t spoken in House of the Dragon, and it has no Duolingo course to bring in new speakers. Still, some devotees are keeping the language alive.

Reuben “Tihi” Hayslett, a 42-year-old fan in Mexico, has always been fascinated by the Dothraki people. “I’m multi-generationally mixed race, and racially ambiguous-looking for most people, so I was struck to see people with my skin tone and hair texture in a fantasy series,” he says. “That almost never happens!” So when he discovered in 2015 that Dothraki was a learnable language, he dove right in.

The language of the non-capitalistic Dothraki people—with no words for things like “job” or “money”—proved the perfect escape from Tihi’s high-stress, low-paying job in New York. “I also think the sounds of Dothraki are quite beautiful,” he says. “Some people may think it sounds like Russian or Arabic or even German, but it's not quite [any] of those. It has its own rhythm and flow.” Tihi enjoys translating songs into Dothraki and has even been known to sing them at karaoke on occasion. He knows the language so well that when he first moved to Mexico, he’d sometimes slip into Dothraki when trying to remember his Spanish.

The Dothraki community that Tihi remembers from before the pandemic was bustling. “We discovered how easy and expressive innuendos and double entendres are in Dothraki,” Tihi recalls. “For a while, a fellow Dothraki speaker and I were working on a Dothraki atlas, using the language as a primary source to recreate the Dothraki diet, Dothraki musical instruments, Dothraki astrology and cosmology, and folklore.” Now, he’d wager you could count Dothraki speakers on both hands.

That doesn’t mean the language is destined to die out. As Paul Strack notes, “The heyday of Elvish languages was basically when Peter Jackson’s movies came out.” But Tolkien’s languages still maintain a stronghold of old-guard fans and get their share of newbies.  

Tihi isn’t worried about Dothraki’s dwindling numbers. “For the first three years I studied Dothraki, I didn’t know a single other person who spoke it,” he says. “If there were no new speakers, or all the other speakers faded away, I'd be sad, but I also wouldn't stop translating my favorite karaoke songs…or short form writings for Black History Month every February. I'll keep the language alive for me because I love it.”

Dothraki, like other conlangs before it, may yet make a resurgence. Even if it doesn’t, Tihi says, “There's something special about being the custodians of the language, counting yourself among a select few to preserve the language and its treasures.”