Is that it's just a matter of taking an english dictionary

and making up forms for it.

You can do that, but what you're doing

Is essentially just creating

a really bizarre way of speaking English.

Frommer: With finite means,

we can create an infinite number of messages.

Okrand: It's not bringing to life something that i've created.

It's bringing to better life something that somebody else has created.

Peterson: "Conlang" means a constructed language,

and that's what we do.

The first thing i do

when i'm creating a new language for a new project

is I sit down with either the show runner, or the director if it's a film, and the producers.

I grill them about who is speaking this language,

Who are the people, where are they from.

I came to work on "Thor: The Dark World"

because the director, Alan Taylor,

had worked with me on HBO's "Game of Thrones."

what they wanted was a language for the dark elves --

kind of one of the bad guys in the Thor universe.

Malekith: [speaking Shivaaisith]

Frommer: The world that James Cameron created on Pandora

is so incredibly detailed.

it's up to me as a language creator

to understand that world to the best of my ability.

And then to create a language which would be appropriate for people living in that environment.

Okrand: In making up Klingon, i tried very, very hard

to not make it resemble anything.

Because klingons, at the time --

all we knew about them is they're mean, horrible,

awful people.

So, i didn't want somebody

To come up to me afterwards and say,

"How come you made the Klingon language like my language?

What's that saying about me? That's an insult."

Kruge: [speaking Klingon]

Peterson: The first discussion that we have

is for the sound of it.

I created a language called Shivaaisith,

which, when you hear it,

it's reminiscent of the Finnish language.

They have a bunch of top-heavy words

where there's nice prominence right at the beginning.

Frommer: In terms of the sound system,

I didn't start from absolute zero.

James Cameron had, in fact,

come up with a few words on his own.

These were mainly names of characters,

names of places on Pandora.

Sully: [speaking Na'VI]

Frommer: In the Na'Vi sound system,

there are sounds

Which you can find in Polynesian languages.

But also sounds which are not found in those languages --

the -- the best known ones are called ejectives,

which are sort of popping sounds.

they sound like "[pops lips] ah" or "[clicks] eh"

or "[clicks] ooh."

Okrand: for Klingon, the script said explicitly

that the language was guttural.

Well, guttural can mean a lot of things,

but the way i interpreted it

is "hch" kinds of sounds.

I've had two kind of basic things in mind.

One was it had to sound weird and alien and not like anything,

and two, the actors had to be able to learn it and say it.

So, the thing was pronounceable and learnable.

Which means success. That's my favorite word.

Peterson: When you actually get into it

and start creating a language,

the first thing that you have to do

is create the grammatical system,

and that thing pretty much has to be complete.

Frommer: the Na'Vi parts of speech

are not unlike parts of speech in more familiar languages.

so, we have nouns, we have verbs,

we have adjectives, we have adverbs.

And this means,

"Eytukan gave Neythiri this beautiful necklace."

Okrand: For klingon, for example,

there was already some Klingon.

There was Klingon in "star trek: the motion picture."

So I kind of imposed a grammatical structure on it.

For example, a three-syllable phrase --

[speaking Klingon]

Is that one word or two words or three words?

So, I just arbitrarily decided.

"Cha" was one word. "Yighus" is another word.

It's supposed to be an alien language unlike anything else.

The three basic elements of a sentence

are the subject, the verb, and the object.

There are six possible combinations,

and the least common is when the object comes first.

So, that's the one I chose for Klingon.

Peterson: when I actually translate a line,

What I do is there's the English line up top,

then there's the translated line,

then there's a line below that shows them

where the emphasis is supposed to be.

So, it breaks up every word by syllables,

and the one that's supposed to get the big emphasis

is in all caps.

Frommer: In addition to that, I made little recordings.

[speaking Na'Vi]

Okrand: Most of the time, I'm on the set.

And will work with the actors prior to any take,

sometimes a day before, even a week before,

sometimes minutes before.

But especially in the early days of Klingon,

since no one had heard the language before,

if the actor made a mistake and said "toe" instead of "too,"

I'd say, "that's fine," and make myself a note.

"Okay, next time that word comes up,

He's gonna say 'toe' and not 'too.'"

So, the language changes as a result of movie making.

Man: [speaking Klingon ]

Peterson: I think one of the great things about creating a language

is that you get a level of fan interaction.

That you never would have expected.

Like, for example, with the Na'Vi language in "Avatar,"

There are people that speak it fluently now.

frommer: I'm continually getting suggestions from the Na'Vi community for new vocabulary.

I'm still the gatekeeper.

I'm still the only one who can say, "This is fantastic. This is in the language."

But this collaborative process, it's been very satisfying to me.

Okrand: Klingon continues to grow.

These days, I mean, every once in a while, if there's a new film or a TV show --

the last J.J. Abrams "Star Trek" movie

had Klingon in it and had a lot of new vocabulary.

There's Klingon speakers all over the world.

Some of them are beginners.

Some of them are absolutely fluent.

I have people all over the world who are mad at me

because I'm not producing vocabulary quickly enough.

It's part of linguistics curricula.

I never thought that anything like that would happen.

Peterson: when you speak a language

and you learn it to fluency, that becomes a part of you.

And so, that, I always thought,

was just the most fascinating thing,

the most awesome thing about adding a created language to a production

because you can get that constant, deep level of interaction

that you can't with anything else.