Na'vi phonology and orthography

Naʼvi lacks voiced plosives like , but has the ejective consonants   , which are spelled px, tx, kx. It also has the syllabic consonants ll and rr. There are seven vowels, a ä e i ì o u. Although all the sounds were designed to be pronounceable by the human actors of the film, there are unusual consonant clusters, as in fngap "metal".

Naʼvi syllables may be as simple as a single vowel, or as complex as skxawng "moron" or fngap above (both CCVC).

The fictional language Naʼvi of Pandora is unwritten. However, the actual (studio) language is written in the Latin script for the actors of Avatar. Some words include: zìsìt "year", fpeio "ceremonial challenge", ’awve "first" (’aw "one"), muiä "fair", tireaioang "spirit animal", tskxe "rock", kllpxìltu "territory", uniltìrantokx "avatar" (dream-walk-body).

Vowels
There are seven monophthong vowels: There are additionally four diphthongs: aw [aw], ew [εw], ay [aj], ey [εj], and two syllabic consonants: ll [l̩] and rr [r̩], which mostly behave as vowels.

Note that the e is open-mid while the o is close-mid, and that there is no *oy. The rr is strongly trilled, and the ll is "light", never a "dark" (velarized).

These vowels may occur in sequences, as in the Polynesian languages, Swahili, and Japanese. Each vowel counts as a syllable, so that tsaleioae has six syllables,, and meoauniaea has eight,.

Naʼvi does not have vowel length or tone, but it does have contrastive stress: túte "person", tuté "female person". Although stress may move with derivation, as here, it is not affected by inflection (case on nouns, tense on verbs, etc.). So, for example, the verb lu "to be" has stress on its only vowel, the u, and no matter what else happens to it, the stress stays on that vowel: lolú "was" (l$\langleol\rangle$u), lolängú "was (ugh!)" (l$\langleol\rangle$$\langleäng\rangle$u), etc.

Consonants
There are twenty consonants. There are two Latin transcriptions: one that more closely approaches the ideal of one letter per phoneme, with the c and g for and  (the values they have in much of Eastern Europe and Polynesia, respectively), and a modified transcription used for the actors, with the digraphs ts and ng used for those sounds. In both transcriptions, the ejective consonants are written with digraphs in x, a convention that appears to have no external inspiration.

The fricatives and the affricate, f v ts s z h, are restricted to the onset of a syllable; the others may occur at the beginning or at the end (though w y in final position are considered parts of diphthongs, as they only occur as ay ey aw ew and may be followed by another final consonant, as in skxawng "moron"). However, in addition to appearing before vowels, f ts s may form consonant clusters with any of the unrestricted consonants (the plosives and liquids/glides) apart from ’, making for 39 clusters. Other sequences occur across syllable boundaries, such as Naʼvi and ikran  "banshee".

The plosives p t k are tenuis, as in Spanish or French. In final position, they have no audible release, as in Indonesian and other languages of Southeast Asia. The r is flapped, as in Spanish and Indonesian; it sounds a bit like the tt or dd in the American pronunciation of the words latter / ladder.

Sound change
The plosives undergo lenition after certain prefixes and prepositions. The ejective consonants px tx kx become the corresponding plosives p t k; the plosives and affricate p t ts k become the corresponding fricatives f s h; and the glottal stop ’ disappears entirely. For example, the plural form of po "s/he" is ayfo "they", with the p weakening into an f after the prefix ay-.

Lenition has its own significance when the plural prefix can optionally be omitted. In the above example, ayfo can be shortened to fo. Similarly, the plural of tsmukan "brother" can be smukan (from aysmukan).