Avatar Universe Language Theory
Something that has often been ignored or not discussed much is language within the Avatar Universe. Today, @xaibaugrove and I would like to discuss this in depth and share our theories and opinions on the matter.
There’s a construct of universal language within television and movie media, this means that all of the characters understand one another through a specific language, English in this case. This obviously is the case due to Avatar being an American animated series. But if we truly broke this down, English would not be the canonical universal language in the Avatar Universe. So what would be?
To tackle this question, we need to first figure out what languages would be spoken in specific nations and areas. So let’s do that.
There are some easy assumptions, such as Japanese for the Fire Nation and Tibetan for the Air Nomads. For the Southern Water Tribe, they would both be speaking a form of Inuktitut. Within each of these nations, there would be dialects and unique subsets of languages depending on the area they’re from.
The area that would have the most diverse language differences within their own nation would be the Earth Kingdom. Due to its size and diverse subsets of people, we believe there would be a large variety of dialects/languages within, but all would be forms of Chinese. In Ba Sing Se the predominant language would be Mandarin. For the large majority of the other areas, the language would be Cantonese. But then we have to break down that other areas such as the Si Wong Desert and Foggy Swamp would also have their own language/dialect. Something that is interesting and present in real world China is that there are over 200 different dialects/languages and it’s not just Chinese and/or Mandarin/Cantonese as many would assume. So we can easily apply this same idea and concept to the Earth Kingdom.
So this brings us back to our original question, what would the Universal Language in the Avatar Universe be? We believe that it would be a form of Chinese, mainly leaning towards spoken Mandarin due to the superiority and monarchy of Ba Sing Se. The next most predominant language would be Japanese due to the colonization during the Hundred Year War. People may ask, then why isn’t Japanese the most predominant? And the answer is this, the war was only 100 years. It would have taken much longer to spread their language to the extent that Chinese has already been spread due to the size of the Earth Kingdom. On top of this, Chinese is the language that is most seen canonically in writing. But we also have to break down that even within the series we see the Fire Nation making posters with Chinese, but again, this show is an American animated series, so it was easiest to have all of the writing done in Chinese.
The thing that supports different languages the most within the Avatar Universe is naming. We can look at the names of each character and where they are from and from this we can see patterns related to language. Names stem from specific languages, thus being more supporting evidence for the specific languages for each nation.
So technically every character within Republic City (from TLOK) and throughout the majority of the Earth Kingdom would be speaking Mandarin Chinese. But on top of this, many characters would be bilingual. Korra’s native language would be Inuktitut. Asami’s native language would be Japanese. Tenzin’s native language would be Tibetan. And an interesting case would be Mako and Bolin only knowing one language, Mandarin Chinese and not Japanese due to their parents being killed at an early age.
Due to the array of languages, the Avatar, master of all four elements, would also need to be a master of languages. This means that as the Avatar their training would include language classes. This also means that Aang actually would have struggled to communicate with Sokka and Katara, honestly everyone that he met due to having a short period of formal language training. This could even be seen when Aang would use certain terms such as “Flameo Hotman” and Sokka/Fire Nation People being confused by this outdated term.
In the case of Korra, she would be able to speak fluently in at least Inuktitut and Mandarin. Korra could also have a cute accent when speaking Mandarin. But we also assume that she would know the basics of multiple other languages. It’s fun to imagine that Korra would go back to her roots when highly agitated or when extremely happy due to not being able to express herself properly in a second language. This is even more interesting when you break down the issues of communication between her and Mako. Mako would have been monolingual and not completely understand the nuances of being multilingual, which could then lead to even more misunderstanding and frustration. In the case of Asami, the idea of going in and out of two or more languages would be more easily understandable.
From a viewer standpoint, the idea of multiple languages tied to each nation adds depth to the Avatar Universe. It also brings together the overall influence and inspiration of the surroundings/environment that the creators had put together. It adds nuance to character relationships and the society that they live in. Finally, it’s a different perspective that widens the lens of viewers that Chinese would be the universal language along with their native languages and it’s just been translated to English so that WE can understand what is occurring.
