the earliest recorded invented language was by medieval nun Hildegard von Bingen

One of the challenges we have is it takes people a long time to learn a language. I was interested to know what endangered-language communities could learn from these created-language fan communities, to learn languages faster

When I surveyed Na’vi speakers, many said they joined because they were fans of the film and they stayed for the community.

But also, one of the things I saw in the Na’vi case was that individuals joined the fan community because “Avatar” was very tied to environmental rights and indigenous rights. These ideals of environmentalism are part of the language, and they picked up on that. That is part of the reason that some of them were learning the language.

One very simple invented language is Toki Pona. It has 123 words. The idea is that you can just learn this set of words and anything you want to say can be said by combinations of those 123 words. Then we have very complex languages like Ithkuil that were invented to avoid the ambiguity in most real languages.

What were they doing? How were they learning the languages? They would often have members of the community make online dictionaries, and post lessons, and do other things that are innovative to help people learn. I looked at that to see how endangered-language communities might be able to model the learning processes of these fandoms.

One of the things I learned from the Na’vi community is the importance of having audio files and imagery, a place for people to talk to each other, linking it to social media.