Part of the production-prep for this weekend’s blockbuster release of Avatar was the commissioned creation of a full-fledged language for the film’s aliens. And indeed, with the movie now out in theaters, the analytical dissection of Na’vi has heated up.

As with the similar fascination in developing science-fictional tongues like Klingon, I really shake my head at these linguistic exercises. Fill these massive code-sets with all the vocabulary you want, and get as many geeks as you can to speak/write it — that doesn’t change the fundamental fact that they remain fake languages. They don’t exist in any meaningful context, other than a few hours and/or pages of escapist fantasy. It amounts to a lot of intellectual energy expended upon very little.

In fact, in the case of Avatar, which is just getting off the ground as a sci-fi franchise (assuming it will take off as such), this early promotion of the in-film language comes off to me as little more than an overdeveloped marketing stunt. Hardly an inspiring foundation for building a mode of interpersonal communication.