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A reference for Neytiri’s dialogue and close POV: a hunter, teacher, daughter, mate, mother, and warrior whose intensity includes playfulness, curiosity, tenderness, grief, and morally difficult anger. Her voice is rooted, but not frozen.
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This guide centres on Avatar and The Way of Water; Fire and Ash is not covered in detail. Distinguish three things: what canon shows, what a performance suggests, and what a particular fic chooses.
Do not write every spoken line in “broken English.” In the first film, some scenes involve Neytiri speaking actual second-language English. Elsewhere she speaks Na’vi; The Way of Water also renders much Na’vi dialogue as English for the audience. Audience language is not automatically in-world language.
Her native-language thought and speech are fluent. Reduced English in a specific scene is not reduced intelligence, emotional sophistication, or capacity to explain.
Neytiri begins from a lived relationship to her people, forest, family, and Eywa. She need not explain those foundations to herself. But belonging does not mean she is always certain, always correct, or incapable of changing.
Useful frame: she speaks from a world she knows intimately—and reacts fiercely when that world is misunderstood, damaged, or taken away.
Keep the practical hunter beside the spiritual daughter. Keep the woman who laughs beside the woman who grieves.
There is no requirement that all speech be fragments while all thought becomes near-liturgical prose. Sometimes a plain thought and a full spoken explanation are exactly right.