Naʼvi language

The Naʼvi language (Naʼvi: Lìʼfya leNaʼvi) is a fictional constructed language originally made for the 2009 film Avatar. In the film franchise, the language is spoken by the Naʼvi, a race of sapient humanoids indigenous to the extraterrestrial moon Pandora. The language was created by Paul Frommer, a professor at the USC Marshall School of Business with a doctorate in linguistics. Naʼvi was designed to fit moviemaker James Cameron's conception of what the language should sound like in the film. It had to be realistically learnable by the fictional human characters of the film and pronounceable by the actors, but also not closely resemble any single human language.

When the film was released in 2009, Naʼvi had a growing vocabulary of about a thousand words, but understanding of its grammar was limited to the language's creator. However, this has changed subsequently as Frommer has expanded the lexicon to more than 2600 words and has published the grammar, thus making Naʼvi a relatively complete, learnable and serviceable language.