text: According to Entertainment Weekly, "The Navi can commune with animals on their planet by literally plugging their braid into the creatures nerve systems. To become a warrior, a Navi must tame and ride a flying creature known as Ikran." The Navi also use this neural bonding system, called "tsaheylu", to mate with a "life partner", a bond that, when made, cannot be broken in the Navis lifetime. This is akin to human marriage.
  The Navi way of life revolves around their religion, and the Home Tree. The Navi sleep in hammocks in large groups for comfort and as a warning system. 
  Conceived for the film was the Navi language, a constructed language often spoken by the actors when they played Navi characters. The Navi language was created by communications professor emeritus and linguistics consultant Paul Frommer of the University of Southern California. He designed the language so as to be speakable by human actors, combining syntactic and grammatical rules from other existing languages. Frommer created over a thousand words for the Navi language and coached the actors who narrated Navi characters. When communicating to humans in the film, Navi characters – especially Neytiri – speak in accented and broken English.
  Human visitors see the Navi as possessing a religion, whose chief and possibly sole deity is a benevolent goddess known as Eywa. The Navi are able to physically connect to Eywa when they use their braids to connect to the Tree of Souls and other similar flora which function as the global brain's interfaces. Eywa is said to have a connection to all things Pandoran.
  Political power is exceedingly diffused, with each clan being a sovereign entity under either the diarchical rule of both a temporal chieftain (known as an Oloeyktan) and a spiritual chieftain (known as a Tsahik), or the monarchical rule of a single individual who holds the two separate offices simultaneously. The numerous clans are seemingly only ever brought together as a tribe by Toruk Makto, a messianic war chief whose office is both non-permanent and apparently the only one with an authority that covers the entire race of Navi. By the time of the film, there had only been five Toruk Maktos in the history of the tribe, and the last one had ruled no fewer than four generations before the present day. This may be due to the fact that the Toruk Maktos seem to draw their power from a situation of explicitly external danger, and therefore are not really necessary for the day to day internal running of the tribal clans. Succession to the various offices is smooth, however, based more on popular recognition and customary worthiness than on anything else, and respect for hierarchical superiors appears to be high.