10 Awesome Movie Jobs You Had No Idea Existed

While sci-fi films featuring alien species can usually get away with having the extraterrestrials spout a whole lot of gibberish, the more committed filmmakers working in the genre tend to enlist actual linguistic experts to create new alien languages.

Take James Cameron's Avatar, where Cameron hired linguist Dr. Paul Frommer to help build a base of words for the Na'vi language years and years before shooting started.

Elsewhere for 2016's Arrival, Denis Villeneuve employed the help of linguistics professor Jessica Coon to correctly depict how linguist protagonist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) word initiate basic communication with the heptapod alien species.

But surely the most famous example of a linguistic expert being hired to flesh out a sci-fi film is Marc Okrand, who was gainfully employed to develop the Klingon language for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and also help teach the cast to speak its complex vocalisations correctly.

Okrand arduously went back to the brief slivers of nonsense Klingon spoken in the original film and effectively reverse-engineered an entire language out of those fragments, leading to it eventually becoming the most widely-spoken fictional language in history.

Alien languages in films are almost always rooted in the rules of real human language, often borrowing conventions from non-English languages which would sound suitably "exotic" to most western audiences.

It's a tough job, but when it leads to the creation of an iconic language like Klingon or Na'vi, also insanely neat.