A talented teenager has invented a brand new language with 1,500 unique words and a completely original script - at the age of 18. Multi-lingual Melissa May already speaks fluent German, French and Spanish and reads Portuguese, Norwegian, Italian, Swedish and Danish. She has dabbled in Latin and Old Norse, is learning Chinese and Dutch and has applied to study Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University. But not content with that the brainy student decided to invent her own language with its own words and script, written 'backwards' like Arabic. Melissa has spent the past three years creating Skénavánns, which has a distinctive grammatical structure and a vocabulary of 1,500 original words. She has already built up a 50-page dictionary which she is constantly adding to, detailing the definitions, related terms and roots of each word she invents. Skénavánns, which literally means 'our speaking of the language', sounds a little like a Nordic language but isn't based on any other dialect.