Minderico, Avatar and languages from beyond

In this latest epic – already one of the most seen (and lucrative) films in the history of world cinema – humans invade planet Pandora in search of a valuable mineral, and don’t hesitate to use their military superiority to subdue the natives. Some analysts are calling it a critique on North America’s foreign politics – and compare the plot with the invasion of Iraq and oil interests.

The alien race in the film speaks “Na’vi” - a language specially created by Professor Paul Frommer, a doctor of linguistics at the University of California. Cameron wanted a language with grammatical structure and real words. Frommer worked on the project for several years and developed a language based on sounds. In Na’vi, sounds are produced with the tongue or lips, without the help of the lungs – very much like Xhosa, the South African dialect.

Fiction? That’s debatable - there are those that are turning it into reality. Already on the Internet, there are a number of sites that offer courses in the alien language. For example: on http://www.learnnavi.org, there’s a free “pocket guidebook” with basic vocabulary, around 1.000 words and some grammatical rules for the language from the other world.

In the end though, none of this is new. Na’vi isn’t the first language invented to catch the public. Trekkie fans have a whole institute dedicated to the “Klingon” language, and there are even famous works translated into “Klingon”, like Hamlet! J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Elvish” is also spoken – just as is “Newspeak”, the fictitious language created by the overbearing government in George Orwell’s literary masterpiece «1984».

Curiously, in central Portugal, there’s also a dialect called Minderico (or the Language of Minde). Its origins hark back to the 18th century – the fruit of a closed community that lived in a valley between two mountain ranges (the d’Aire and Candeeiros). Minderico isn’t recognised by the Portuguese state – even though it is threatened with extinction (with increasingly less speakers as time goes by).

Nonetheless, in March last year, Minderico was the only language to merit the attention of the Volkswagen Foundation’s Programme for the Documentation of Threatened Languages (DOBES), which finances just 40 projects throughout the world. This will give it a new lease of life among academics and local people – and already a number of educational programmes are underway.

But, returning to the celluloid universe... Who knows – perhaps the lilting accent of the Algarve will lure a world famous cine mogul to the future film studios of Portimão?