The Language of Avatar

James Cameron demands authenticity, whether it is the number of rivets on a model of the Titanic, or fully-functioning alien language:

It's telling that Cameron describes the resulting tongue as something that is "pronounceable" yet sounds "exotic and not specific to human languages." But if the phonetic elements of Pandoran are all derived from actual languages of the world, then how are they "not specific to human languages"? A charitable reading of Cameron's quote is that the sounds of Pandoran aren't specific to any single human language. Less charitably, one might wonder if Cameron thinks that the far-flung languages contributing to Pandoran don't quite sound "human" to him.

A possible giveaway is that the humanoid Pandorans are described by Cameron as "living at relatively Neolithic level ... very closely and harmoniously with their environment" but are also "quite threatening" to their colonizers. In other words, they're noble savages. Regardless of the relative level of sophistication that Frommer might impart to Pandoran, I have a sneaking suspicion that this alien language will serve much the same cinematic function as the language of the Skull Islanders in the original King Kong: primitivizing and exoticizing the linguistic "other."

--Language Log: Advances in cinematic xenolinguistics