Are the “Narval” people real? No. But they could be.
The “Narval” people (and their unique culture and biology) grew out of the filmmakers’ thought experiment inspired by real-world anthropology and genetics.
The "Narval" Origin Story
By Carylanna Taylor, PhD
Anthropologist & ANYA co-creator
Anthropologists are trained to deconstruct and understand other cultures. ANYA provided me the unique opportunity construct a culture with the help of ANYA co-creator, Jacob Okada, geneticists Dr. Ting Wu and Dr. Ruth McCole, and multi-lingual anthropologist Dr. Jose Moreno-Cortés as well as actors, non actor extras, and Jackson Heights, Queens location owners, including the Libreria Barco de Papel.
While ANYA only gives viewers a taste of the Narval’s culture, language, and biology, about as much as the non-Narval characters would be able to learn in the short time span covered by the film, their backstory stretches back millennia long before the Spanish colonized the Americas and gives the characters a mystery to explore.
ANYA began as a thought experiment between ANYA co-creators Jacob Okada and Dr. Carylanna Taylor. Their weeks-long conversation led to the creation of the “Narval” people (or “Narwhal” people to outsider). It went something like this:
JO: Could multiple species of humans exist on the planet today?
CT: We know that multiple species of the genus Homo co-existed in the past.
JO: But what about today?
CT: It’s possible that a geographically or culturally isolated group survived long enough in genetic isolation to develop and pass on a genetic variant that prohibited reproduction with other Homo sapiens sapiens. But it’s unlikely because of gene flow and migration. Anatomically modern humans move around a lot and they have a lot of sex along the way. Developing a separate species is unlikely.
JO: Improbable, but not impossible.
CT: Right.
JO: Ok, let's say a group survived, how would we find them now?
CT: It’d be like a biological needle in a haystack.
JO: I read that a lot of infertility is unexplained.
CT: Right. And genetic testing becoming more common, infertility stats and studies might start showing interesting patterns.
JO: You said geographically isolated?
CT: Yeah, like an isolated island or deep in a rainforest. Papua New Guinea’s extremely diverse.
JO: It’d be easier to film in the Caribbean.
(That’s when we had a script that took us to Narval Island… something now saved for “part 2.”)
CT: So maybe a group of indigenous people from mainland South America followed fish or birds to an island in the Caribbean. Maybe a small island off the coast of Colombia?
(At the time, I was doing freelance research with yucca farmers on Colombia’s Atlantic coast.)
JO: That works. How many people?
CT: Good question. We’d have to check with a population geneticist to see about timing and population size.
(We checked with a population geneticist, Daniel Balick, PhD, and settled on 5,000-10,000 as being a minimum for a sustainable population and at least a few thousand years for the genetic variant to become wide spread and allow it to be non-deleterious enough at first to be passed on and eventually deleterious enough to inhibit fertility with those who didn’t share the genetic variant.)
CT: And there’s a sizable population of Colombian immigrants in Queens.
(I had visited Jackson Heights, Queens when I was doing my dissertation research with Honduran immigrant in New York.)
JO: Budget wise we could only afford to tweak a few store fronts.
CT: If they really can’t have kids with outsiders, they’d keep to themselves. We could create an enclave community within the larger Latinx population.
(In practice, our actors and non actor extras were predominantly white Latinx and immigrants from several different countries. To account for this phenotype (a result of centuries of Spanish and Native American mixing, we added a completely fictitious but slightly possible Viking ship crash to the Narval’s back story. You can see a touch of that heritage in Marco’s robe.)
JO: Like the Hasidic Jewish community or the Amish.
CT: Exactly. Even on their home island they would have kept to themselves once the Spanish started arriving. They would have found ways to outwardly assimilate, but keep to themselves as much as possible. You’d see it in their language. And in their marital customs.
JO: They find way to keep people close to home.
CT: Or close to the community in the case of the immigrants.
JO: To protect themselves from persecution.
CT: That and heartbreak. If you had kids who’d be doomed to infertility with outsiders, wouldn’t you find ways to make them stay close to home? To protect them? Like religion?
JO: A curse?
CT: Sure. And marital customs.
JO: Like getting married as kids.
CT: That’s creepy. What about betrothed young?
JO: Save the wedding for young adulthood.
CT: Good idea.
The “Narval” people, their language, and their backstory developed from there: a group of people that lived in geographic isolation (an island of Columbia), developed a genetic variant that made it impossible to have children (provided by Dr. Ting Wu’s and Dr. Ruth McCole’s research with ultra-conserved elements of DNA), and an isolated (fictional) culture transplanted through immigration to contemporary Queens, New York.
To better hide in plain sight, the “Narval” people speak a language that sounds a lot like Spanish, but isn’t.
Before production began, we asked multilingual Puerto Rican anthropologist, Jose Enrique Moreno-Cortés, JD, PhD, to help us create ANYA’s “Narval” language. Here’s how he did it.
The “Narval” Language
by Jose Enrique Moreno-Cortés, PhD
Anthropologist & “Narval” Language Consultant
“What?!” That was my first reaction when Carylanna Taylor and Jacob Okada, the creators of ANYA, asked me to help them develop the Narval language. They proposed we create a language that uses the complete lexicon and structure of the Spanish language. In other words, this language will sound like Spanish, but it won’t be Spanish!
As a Spanish speaker, I was baffled by the request. How can you create a new language using a language spoken by 470 million of people? How can we fool the public creating a language that will sound like a Spanish?
When I asked the writers/producers these questions, Carylanna answered “that’s the idea: the language must sound like a Spanish, but it won’t be Spanish. It will be a secret dialect within an openly spoken language.” She explained that the language spoken by the Narval, the population on which the movie plot revolves, is a language developed by using the Spanish vocabulary of different cultural/cognitive domains and applying them to different or opposite cultural/cognitive domains in the Narval language.
I was intrigued. The idea was bizarre, but completely possible under the characteristics of language, as studied by linguistics and linguistic anthropologists. First, language is symbolic, it is a system of arbitrary symbols humans use to communicate. It is that arbitrariness of language that support the idea of creating the Narval language. There is no necessary link between the symbols that create words and sounds and their meaning. Each society through their culture assigns meaning to its language. So, I thought, if Sequoya, a Cherokee Native American, used the English alphabetic symbols as the basis to develop the Cherokee language syllabic writing system, why can’t the Narval people use a whole language to develop their own? Besides, in fiction, languages like Klingon and Dothraki have been created before for use in films and series. So, I was sold on the idea and agreed to help.
“Narval” might sound a lot like “narwhal” (the whale) but it really means “sea water.” The “Narval” people named themselves and their language after something important to their Caribbean island heritage and incorporate into their culture, such as this ritual of squirting sea water to welcome a new visitor into a Narval home.
History of the “Narval” Language
The first task to develop the language was to discover a little more about the origins of the Narval people. According to the lore invented by the writers/producers, the Narval are descendants of a lost Viking ship that arrived on an island near the Colombian coast. There, the Vikings mixed with the Amerindian population of the area, probably combining the Old Norse language spoken by the Vikings with the local language. The local language could have been one from the family of the Arawak languages spoken in the area at that time. This interaction would have occurred a long time before the arrival of the Spaniards to the Americas.
Doing a bit of hypothetical linguistic archeology, I thought about how this language might have come to be. Based on how the language developed and the survival of the Narval population, it seems that the Spaniards never get to visit the island. However, inhabitants of the island were aware of the Spaniards and the fate of the Native American population from the Mainland. Wary of the Spaniards, and taking advantage of their visible European traits, they learned Spanish language in their visits to the Mainland. Scared of a potential Spanish invasion to the island, the leaders decided to “camouflage” their culture under the guise of just another Spanish colonial enclave.*
During centuries of Spanish domination and fear of settlers moving to the island, the leaders of the Narval community designed a code language based on Spanish to use in particular situations, especially when doing trade with the mainland. Once settlers from the Mainland began moving into the island, the Narval started to speak the Spanish-based code language in an everyday basis, using them even in private. The Wars of Independence led by Bolivar in the mainland gave this code language the final thrust in becoming the lingua franca of the native population. The language and their culture became a symbol of their identity against the changes in the continent. Through the years, the language became the native language of the population, only speaking Spanish when dealing with foreign residents. This kind of linguistic development parallels the formation of creole languages on other Caribbean islands such as Haitian creole, that emerged from contact between French settlers and West African slaves.
“Narval” Language Rules
I mostly dealt with the Narval lines spoken on screen. However, in case we needed to create more lines during filming, I created some basic rules for the structure and vocabulary of the Narval language.
For the language to sound like Spanish to the casual Spanish-speaking listener, the Narval used the very most common words and parts of speech as in Spanish. This includes:
• Articles, conjunctions, prepositions.
• Key verbs like To be and To have.
• Days of the week, names of moths, etc.
They changed other parts of speech more radically. A bit like a child might play with pig latin.
Adjectives and adverbs are switched with their opposite word when available.
Verbs are switched with their opposite word. Verbs that don’t have a specific opposite word are expressed in the negative to form their opposite action.
Nouns are derived through the original mother tongue (a mix of Norse and Arawak), by swapping one cultural domain for another, or borrowed through interaction with other cultures.
The cultural domain swaps I came up with include:
Body parts—>fruits
(For example, the Narval use “guayaba” for butt.)
Family—>Domesticated animals
Professions—>Wild animals
Public buildings—>House furniture
Food—>Words related to construction
Grains—>Basic tools
Meats—>Construction materials
Plants & flowers —>Minerals
For the Narvals’ numbering system, I used Papiamento, a Spanish/Dutch/Portuguese creole. I reasoned that the Narval would do as much trade as possible with the Dutch colonies to reduce their chances of being discovered by the Spanish.
Could this kind of linguistic development happen in real life?
The short answer is yes.
Linguists who investigated the historical evolution of languages and its origin identify two types of communication that can developed in context similar to the reality of the Narval society, these are pidgin and creole languages. Pidgin languages are developed in situations when there are unequal relationships of power between populations. Pidgins originates when there is a need of communication in certain contexts like trade and work. For example, pidgins developed where European colonial powers established commerce and slave trade. The slaves, coming from different societies and with different language, talked with their masters and with each other using pidgins. A particular pidgin developed from the vocabulary of the masters and with the integration of some linguistic features from the slaves’ languages.
A pidgin is a simple dialect, with no native speakers, and used for particular contexts. If the use of a pidgin expanded into more aspects of the sociocultural life of a society and eventually acquired native speakers, people which first language is the pidgin, the language becomes a creole language. Creole languages are more complex, used in every sociocultural context, and have native speakers.
So, applying these concepts from linguistic to the Narval language, the language develops as a pidgin to be used in the context of trade with Spanish speakers from the mainland, eventually becoming a creole by the adoption of the language as a lingua franca in the island, and eventually becomes the native language of the Narval.
*A Note from Carylanna on the “Narval” language: Jose’s and my interpretations of the Narval/Spanish interaction differ slightly but are complementary. Mine has more to do with the Spanish discovering the Narval’s inability to reproduce with outsiders and treating them as outcasts—for me, the Narval people’s intentional bastardization of Spanish is a kind of “weapon of the weak.” Jose’s version is more closely based on an historical understanding of colonization. Both versions fit with how the onscreen portrayal of the Narval language; both could have happened in the course of the language’s development. Differences of opinion in the interpretation of data is common - especially in the early stages of learning about a new people or phenomenon. To know for sure how the Narval and their language came to be, SEYMOUR, LIBBY, MARCO and their friends in Little Narval and on Narval Island would need to conduct further research.
The “Narval” Biology
In order to give Dr. Seymour Livingston a concrete and realistic genetic mystery to solve, we turned to the experts for help. Our thought experiment - and knowledge of basic human evolution, including recent genetics based discoveries about other member of the Human family - got us through the first drafts of ANYA but we needed help to go deeper. We turned to an invaluable scientist-filmmaker match-making service: The National Academy of Sciences The Science & Entertainment Exchange. We hit the jackpot when they introduced us to Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Ting Wu and, by extension, Dr. Ruth McCole. To our amazement, Ting and Ruth agreed to let us use their work on “ultra-conserved elements” of DNA (UCEs) as the model for the genetic variation that makes it impossible for the “Narval” people and other humans to reproduce.
As ANYA’s Seymour explains, UCEs are tiny bits of DNA that are typically unchanged across species for millennia. By chance the original population developed a random genetic mutation in one of their UCEs that got passed on among the Narval during their millenias-long period of geographic isolation before the arrival of the Spanish. By the time the Spanish arrived, the entire Narval population had the new variant and it prevented them from having kids with outsiders… until the 21st Century when the encountered the very possibility of gene-editing.
In short: UCEs are real. The kind of mutation the Narval experienced - as well as the idea of multiple species of humans co-existing at the same time - are plausible. The specific genetic variant discussed in ANYA (i.e. variant UCEs on a FOX-P2 gene) is invented, but plausible.
For more on the “Narval” biology read:
Science Advisor Ting Wu explains why she decided to lend her research on UCEs to ANYA
Science Advisor Ruth McCole shares her experience of being a science advisor to ANYA throughout development and onset
ANYA co-creator Carylanna Taylor discusses how and why gene editing became a part of ANYA
Bringing the “Narval” to Life
Bringing the “Narval” people from script to screen on a very modest budget, created many opportunities and challenges for ANYA’s creators, cast, and crew. Perhaps the most challenging was figuring out how to create an entire new world with a production budget smaller than most TV spots.
To add authenticity and reduce costs we shot docu-style in twenty-two real locations throughout New York City and Pittsburgh with NYC and Pittsburgh based cast, crew, and extras. We also reworked our script until we had a story that could be shot in sixteen days. More importantly, we limited our time spent in “Little Narval” to one story day and one story evening the following week and only showed “Little Narval” through the eyes of two outsiders (LIBBY and SEYMOUR). This means that 1) like Libby and Seymour, the viewer only gets glimpses and clues of the Narval’s rich culture and language and 2) actors playing the Narval characters have deeper back stories on which to draw, and 3) as Seymour, Endo, and Libby learn more about the Narval it feels like there is always more for them to discover.
The experience of awe, discovery, trust-building, and culture shock is very much like how it feels to be an anthropologist experiencing a culture and community for the first time.
You want to see more, you say? So do we!
