CJ Jones Creates Na’vi Sign Language For Avatar 2!
James Cameron hired a CJ Jones, a Deaf person, to come on board and create the ‘Na’vi Sign Language’ NSL for Avatar.
You all must know about the movie Avatar. It was released in 2009 and was directed by James Cameron. The movie has blue creatures and has amazing 3D effects. James Cameron created a new planet named Pandora and also created a new language called Na’vi! Cameron is such a perfectionist that in order to create the Na’vi language he hired a professor named Paul Frommer. Frommer has a doctorate in linguistics and was commissioned specifically for this purpose. Initially, the language only had a vocabulary of roughly a thousand words, but in the years since the film’s release, that number has increased to almost triple that amount. It is a proper language with grammar and everything! Now after 13 years he is releasing Avatar Part 2! For all these years he worked very hard to make the movie perfect. The 3D graphics, the editing, have all been perfected by Cameron and his team. Now let us tell you something interesting about this movie. The movie has many underwater scenes. In these scenes the blue people are living underwater. Now the blue people have to communicate with each other. And how will they communicate through gestures right? James Cameron wanted the blue people to communicate properly. So what did he do? He decided to create a different language for the underwater blue people. Cameron hired CJ Jones, a Deaf person, to come on board and create the ‘Na’vi Sign Language’ NSL! CJ Jones is an experienced ASL teacher and an actor as well! Jones met Cameron and after listening to Jones' vision, he hired him in 20 mins!
The director realised that in order to create an underwater language with gestures; it is important to bring a Deaf person on board as they are the best people to understand visual language. They worked for two years to create the signs. There is a clip of Jones talking about how he came up with the signs' language.
‘When I decided to create NSL, I didn’t want it to match the other Sign Languages on earth. I had to come up with signs which are unique and have no similarities. That was tough. I had to use gestures and body language. I thought about how Na’vi people would communicate underwater. So I decided to use my creativity. Think about how they would feel and get into their soul. So that’s how I invented the signs. This is how I invented NSL.’ He even demonstrated the NSL sign for thankyou. He has created 350 signs for Avatar 2&3. James Cameron has dedicated himself to making four sequels.
