Does language determine reality? "Avatar"'s Dr. Paul Frommer talks to Matthew Rozsa
Matthew Rozsa talks with Dr. Paul Frommer, the creator of the constructed Na'vi language used in James Cameron's "Avatar" film series.
For a Na’vi language dictionary, please click here.
In capitalist societies, people link money with everything else worth possessing: Power, social status, luxurious material possessions. It therefore follows that Hollywood — that most hyper-capitalist of cities in our most hyper-capitalist of countries — exalts über alles its list of all-time highest grossing movies.
Guess which film earned more money than any other in American history? “Avatar”
Even when you adjust for inflation and then account for “Gone with the Wind,” which had been released 70 years earlier (1939 vs. 2009), guess which movie accumulated the most money post-inflation adjustment (and second only to the aforementioned “Gone with the Wind”)? “Avatar”
The rest of this article will break down a recent conversation I had with Dr. Paul Frommer, a linguistics consultant and communications professor from the University of Southern California who worked on the “Avatar” movies. As you read it, please keep in mind the fact that “Avatar” is ostensibly an influential work of pop culture based on its historic box office haul.
Back Seat Socialism discussed how Frommer created Na’vi, the constructed language or “conlang” developed for the “Avatar” universe at director/writer James Cameron’s behest. To make the themes involved in creating a language for “Avatar” movies relevant to our larger shared non-fiction world, Frommer and I also explored a novel concept known as linguistic relativism. Linguistic relativism is the theory that the language a person speaks influences how they think and perceive the world.
“Language is almost a prison, almost a straitjacket,” Frommer said. “It determines how you’re going to look at the world and what kind of thoughts you can have. The person that comes to mind that really took up this idea and ran with it is George Orwell in his famous dystopian novel ‘1984.’”
Frommer went on to explain how, in Orwell’s 1949 literary classic, a totalitarian superstate controls how people think by manipulating language through a conlang called Newspeak.
“It’s a version of English which is deliberately diminished and contracted,” Frommer explained. I told Frommer his observations reminded me of Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” wherein the British intellectual pointed out that “in our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” As such when “defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets,” we justify it by dubbing it “pacification.” After millions are deprived of their homes and property before being displaced, it’s dubbed as merely transferring populations “or rectification of frontiers.” Smoking thousands of sapient beings out of their ancestral and sacred home to steal resources from under their ground is “more or less” humane. Coercing a businessman into participating in military atrocities merely involves saying, “I’ll be nice once, then I won’t.”
The first two examples came from Orwell’s essay. The last two are lines from Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the antagonist in “Avatar” and its 2022 sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.” The key to effectively creating this type of conlang is detachment, indirection, even passive aggressiveness. In a world where a presidential press secretary unironically dismisses scientific analysis of a president’s first inaugural crowds by promulgating “alternative facts,” there is little linguistic difference between whether this tool is used to enrich industries that overheat our climate or commit genocide, on the one hand, or merely lying about the president’s crowd sizes or strong-arming interplanetary whalers on the other. All of the atrocities mesh together into a big grey blur, in which the thoroughly ludicrous and the thoroughly horrifying are no longer easily distinguishable.
This, of course, is the whole point of those who (knowingly or otherwise) wield the concepts behind linguistic relativism to their advantage.
“We see it in our own environment today, the way people manipulate language,” Frommer said. “The Department of Defense is now the Department of War, things like that. It’s just channeling people’s thoughts in the direction that you want them to go.” I then offered an example that I’ve learned through years of covering climate science.
“Denying the reality of man-made climate change as just ‘alternative facts,’ that sort of thing,” I posited.
To see the entire conversation between Frommer and myself, click on the video below. I’ll close this essay with the conclusion of that segment, when Frommer tried to explain linguistic relativism by noting that the English language doesn’t have a word for schadenfreude, a German word for enjoying someone else’s misfortune. I added that we also don’t have a word for genugtuung, which specifically refers to enjoying misfortune when it befalls a morally deserving party.
“If a random schmuck slips on a banana peel and lands on his butt, that’s schadenfreude,” I explained. “But if a January 6ther slips on a banana peel and lands on his butt, that’s genugtuung.”
Pushing genungtuung into the popular lexicon counts as my attempt to offer, if not a comfort, at least an emotionally healthy form of release in these trying times. I made that January 6th crack because I know the politics of Cameron, who in addition to “Avatar” directed and co-wrote two brilliant and equally progressive science fiction films, “The Terminator” in 1984 and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” in 1991. Like the “Avatar” movies, those films are implicitly political. Cameron himself, by contrast, is explicitly political.
“I think it’s horrific, I think it’s horrifying … I see it as a turn away from everything decent,” Cameron told the New Zealand publication Stuff earlier this year. “America doesn’t stand for anything if it doesn’t stand for what it has historically stood for. It becomes a hollow idea, and I think they’re hollowing it out as fast as they can for their own benefit.”
The “Terminator” and “Avatar” helmer, who recently moved to New Zealand, added that “I don’t know if I feel any safer here, but I certainly feel like I don’t have to read about it on the front page every single day. And it’s just sickening. There’s something nice about the New Zealand outlets – at least they’ll put it on page three … I just don’t want to see that guy’s face any more, on the front page of the paper. It’s inescapable there, it’s like watching a car crash over and over and over.”
In capitalist societies like that in the United States, one would hope that this means all of “Avatar”’s deeper messages — specifically of distrusting the self-serving manipulations of fascistic institutions, linguistic and otherwise — would also become influential.
So far, that hasn’t happened. Maybe “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” which will be released in December 2025, can play a small part in thusly altering our zeitgeist, much as I hope to do by interviewing Frommer. The visionaries behind both the “Avatar” franchise as a whole and its specific conlang are best poised to help us explain why “Avatar”’s commentary on our Orwellian era is so important.
“We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. …
The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power. …
It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.”
Michel Foucault
Back Seat Socialism Podcast Episode 4
Website: matthewrozsa.com
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Back Seat Socialism
Back Seat Socialism is a column by Matthew Rozsa, who has been a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently, he is writing a book for Beacon Press, “Neurosocialism,” which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.