In The Na'Vi

I was just reading the Kentish Express today. In the What's On section there was a little column of entertainment snippets. In it I read the alarming news that a team of amateur linguists had written an English - Na'vi dictionary. What is Na'vi? Well, I was hoping you would ask. I'm sure the nerds among you probably already know.
Na'vi is the fictional language devised by director James Cameron and linguist Paul Frommer for the movie Avatar.  That's right, the language spoken by the tall humanoid flying Smurfs on the planet Pandora. Turns out it wasn't just gibberish, it was an actual language with its own grammar, sentence structure and everything. If you don't believe me, check out the Wikipedia page for Na'vi and the website that teaches you how to speak Na'vi.
If that is in itself not alarming enough, it turns out that since there are now over 400 fluent speakers of this language (again, another worrying fact), a group of Na'vi nerds is now campaigning to have Na'vi recognized as an official language. Apparently there are some languages, real ones, that have less fluent speakers and so they feel it stands to reason that it should be thus recognized.


I knew it was April 1st, so I checked the rest of the paper to see if this was in fact some sort of jolly jape. Evidently not. I even glanced over my shoulder to see if some twat with a mic and a camera crew was there to record my gobsmacked reaction, but no. This is a fact.


All I can say to the Na'vi campaigners is, if you want to learn a language, why not learn an actual one instead of some gobbledegook that was made up for a movie? Oh, and while you're at it, quit watching movies and playing Final Fantasy X or World Of Warcraft and go ask that hot checkout girl in the supermarket for a date. Get a life. A real one, not a fictional one.