Parlez-Vous Na'vi?' 'No, Kreegah Bundolo!
Despite such instances of language building barriers instead of bridges, humans have a gift of tongues, and concoct fictional dialects at the drop of a chat. Conlangs, or constructed languages, continue to be a growing industry in literary and cinematic realms. Linguists create these fictive forms of speech to add authenticity to exotic environments and cultures, distinguish between different groups and communities, and give the reader or viewer an immersive experience by opening magic casements on the foam of 'perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn', as the poet put it.
Conlangs not only have vocabularies — Na'vi, the invented idiom for James Cameron's Avatar films, set in the habitable satellite of the Alpha Centauri star system, Pandora, reportedly contains some 2,000 words — but also grammar and syntax rules.
Conlangs can be amalgams of words taken from real languages, such as Arabic, Turkish, and Hebrew, as in the film versions of Frank Herbert's 1965 SF novel, Dune, in which the Fremen who inhabit the desert planet Arrakis, speak Chakobsa.
Na'vi derives phonemes, distinctive sound patterns, from Polynesian and African lingual systems. Conversely, like the Dothraki and High Valerian tongues used in the Game of Thrones series, adapted from George RR Martin's novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, conlangs can be made up, just as Klingon was in Star Trek.
Conlangs need not have geographical or zoological boundaries. Undeterred by the minor consideration that he'd never visited the African continent, Edgar Rice
