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LINGUA NA’VI: Paul Frommer ’65 created the language spoken by the Na’vi people in the Golden Globe Award–winning James Cameron film Avatar. (Photo: © 2009/Los Angeles Times/Mel Melcon)Paul Frommer ’65 may be one of the world’s most recognized linguists—at least to fans of the movie Avatar. Frommer is the creator of Na’vi, a language developed specifically for the extraterrestrial, human-like creatures of the fictional planet Pandora that’s the setting for the latest box office smash from director James Cameron.
“I’ve studied quite a few languages,” Frommer says. But he still searches for just the right English words to describe his experience working on Avatar, calling it “remarkable,” “amazing,” and “quite extraordinary.”
Frommer got hooked up with Cameron in 2005 when the director approached the University of Southern California linguistics department looking for a scholar to create the language for the fictional Na’vi people who would be the subject of a sci-fi drama he then called Project 880. A member of the department forwarded Cameron’s e-mail to Frommer, who has a doctorate in linguistics, but teaches in the university’s business school.
“When I saw it, I said ‘whoa!’,” Frommer says of the e-mail. “I jumped on it.”
Cameron supplied a few words to give a sense of what he wanted the language to sound like, Frommer says. But the rest was pretty much in Frommer’s hands.
“You want to come up with something that has some sort of distinctiveness,” he says. “One way you do that is by deciding what sounds go into the mix, but just as importantly, what sounds are going to be left out.”
Na’vi, for example, does not have the -b, -d, and hard -g sounds that are common in English. And although some sounds that appear regularly in English, such as the -ng sound, also appear in Na’vi, in the movie’s language, that sound appears at the beginning of words—words such as ngop (create) or nga (you)—rather than at the end, as in the English word ending -ing.
As a result, it takes practice for English speakers to say Na’vi words. Frommer’s role was not only to create the language, but to assist the actors with their Na’vi lines. “Being on the set was really quite an extraordinary experience,” he says.
And the final result?: “Astonishing.”
Cameron “lavishes this incredible detail on everything he does. And that detail includes the language as well,” says Frommer.
“The reaction I’ve gotten from a number of people who aren’t linguists is, ‘you know, that sounds like a real language.’ And that makes me happy.”
