Story by Tiana Bouma
Illustration by Nate Makuch 
The mythical creatures of Middle Earth, the galaxy-trotting aliens of Qo’nos, and the blue natives of Pandora are some of the world’s most compelling fictional characters, partially because of their unique languages. The Elves, Klingons, and Na’vi each have a distinctive voice that helped establish their individual spots in the sci-fi and fantasy hall of fame. Like any language, each has evolved over the years, finding new ways to be expressed. The result is a treasure trove of linguistics just waiting to be explored.

Elvish
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the hugely successful The Lord of the Rings series, was a philologist by profession, studying the evolution of languages. It should be of little surprise then that this lover of language ended up creating his own. Elvish was the first element Tolkien constructed in his now beloved stories, which he wrote to provide a world for his languages.
From the early 1900s until his death in 1973, Tolkien continually worked on Elvish, undertaking countless revisions in grammar, especially conjugation. During this time, Tolkien also authored a number of works on the language including The Early Quenya Grammar, which provided the fundamentals of Quenya, a dialect based on Finnish spoken by the Elves in the land of Eldamar.
Many of the Elven cultures that appear in The Lord of the Rings stories have their own language (in all, there are believed to be at least 15 different dialects). No matter which version, however, Tolkien rarely disregarded a word once invented. Rather, the author kept refining its meaning and forging new synonyms.
Today, two magazines—Vinyar Tengwar, published by the Elvish Linguistic Fellowship (ELF), and Parma Eldalamberon—continue on the tradition of the languages by sharing and analyzing Tolkien’s mass of unpublished linguistic papers. And of course, audiences across the world heard Elvish spoken in the Peter Jackson film series based on Tolkien’s work.
Bringing the author’s fictional tongues to life on the big screen (many of the dialects were not created to be actually spoken) was the task of linguist David Salo. In explaining Jackson’s choice to include parts of the languages, Salo wrote fans: “The Elvish in the movie is addressed to the minority of viewers who know something about the languages. Part of my intention, my particular vision and contribution to this movie was to create sentences which would be intelligible to the people who study the languages.” The result was a resurgence in interest in both Elvish and the stories about them that Tolkien first created more than 100 years ago.
Klingon
Klingon, invented in 1984 by American linguist Marc Okrand for the popular sci-fi television and movie series Star Trek, is a language complete with vocabulary and grammar but with its own uncommon features. It was deliberately designed to be “alien,” but includes aspects inspired by Earth languages, particularly of some indigenous languages from North and South America.
The result is a highly aggressive dialect laden with words involving spacecraft and war. Indeed, Okrand was specifically hired by Paramount Pictures to develop a language for the sci-fi show’s bad guys. His work with Klingon led to the publishing of The Klingon Dictionary, which has sold thousands of copies since its debut in 1985. Today only words and grammatical forms introduced by Okrand are considered canonical Klingon by the premiere Klingon Language Institute (KLI).
With a mission to bring together individuals interested in the study of Klingon linguistics and culture, the KLI has provided a forum for discussion since 1992. Members include Star Trek fans with questions about the language, gamers wishing to lend some authenticity to Klingon characters, and scholars in the fields of linguistics, philology, computer science, and psychology. Every year, KLI members congregate from around the globe for the qep’a, the KLI’s official conference.
Beyond the qep’a, Klingonists find many a way to express their love for the alien tongue. One of the more popular forms is the Chicago-based theater company Commedia Beauregard’s staging of A Klingon Christmas Carol. Since 2007, actors have performed the traditional Christmas story in Klingon with English supertitles provided for non-fluent audience members. The Star Trek dialect has also made appearances in The Cleveland Show and is used as a form of secret communication between the lead characters of the 2011 film Paul (also starring an alien). Translations are available for such famous works as Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Musicians also lay claim to Star Trek’s most famous language. The members of Portland-based death metal band Stovokor, named for the Klingon afterlife of the honored dead, insist that they are members of the alien race. They refuse to make appearances out of costume, go by names derived from the language, and use Klingon words in such songs as “Life in Exile” and “For the Glory of Qo’nos.”
Na’vi
The 2009 release of James Cameron’s Avatar garnered such a strong fan base that people used Photoshop to color images of themselves blue like the film’s alien stars, the Na’vi. Part of what made the movie’s fictional planet, Pandora, seem so real was the language Cameron developed specifically for the natives. Determined to create a dialect easy for the film’s human actors to learn but still distinctly out of this world, Cameron went to Dr. Paul Frommer, professor emeritus of Clinical Management Communications at the University of Southern California.
In an interview with YouTube, Frommer, who has a doctorate in linguistics, admits he was amazed by the world’s reaction to the language he helped develop.
“I never thought that in the space of just about three months that the language would have exploded the way it has,” Frommer says. “People are learning it remarkably well.”
Frommer, who in the wake of the movie received emails written completely in Na’vi, took four years to develop the language with Cameron. Between 2005 to 2009, the pair went from around 30 words (which Frommer describes as having a “Polynesian flavor”) to more than 1,000. The language was created, Frommer says, in “stops and starts” and on an “as needed basis” depending on what the movie’s script demanded.
The language itself is composed of 20 consonants, seven vowels, four diphthongs (where a vowel blends easily into another, like in the word “boy”), and two “pseudovowels,” rr and ll. Na’vi was created with greater number distinctions than those in most human languages, with gender only occasionally marked. In addition, when conjugating a verb to reflect the time of the action—past, present, or future—the change occurs in the middle of the word and not, as is common in many human languages, at the beginning or end.
All the linguistic elements in Na’vi are found in human languages, but the final combinations are unique. For example, the Na’vi equivalent to “LOL” would, Frommer says, be something along the lines of “HRH.”
For fans of The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, and Avatar the languages of these worlds are as real as those on Earth. They, like English or French, Arabic or Chinese, can hinder conversations, create mutual ground, or provide scientific, legal, or ecclesiastical functions. You may not be hearing Elvish, Klingon, or Na’vi on the street any time soon, but they still hold a treasured place in the lexicon of humanity.

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Fantasy Phonetics