David J. Peterson on creating the Dothraki language

For as long as sci-fi has been on film and television, there has been a need for linguists to create the languages of the various alien races invented by the writers and producers. There’s even a word for the people who do this: conlanger, someone who creates constructed languages.

David J. Peterson is currently the “it” guy for made-up languages on television, having created them for two SyFy shows (Defiance and Dominion) as well as for the CW’s The 100. He’s also responsible for crafting the Dothraki and Valyrian languages on Game of Thrones, and in this op-ed piece at the Los Angeles Times, he walks readers through his process, at least so far as Dothraki is concerned.

Peterson had a leg up on the Dothraki compared to other fictional languages—George R.R. Martin had already created a few Dothraki words and phrases in the course of writing the books. Of course, Martin isn’t a linguist like J.R.R. Tolkien was, so the potential for error was greater. But as Peterson notes, George was at least consistent in his usage: “khal” is always “king”, for example, and his efforts at creating new words always followed syllabic patterns. This allowed Peterson to extrapolate more rules covering all the necessary grammatical and syntactical needs of a language.

If it sounds complicated, don’t worry. Peterson writes clearly and concisely for people who don’t have degrees in linguistics (in other words, his explanations are not at all like the linguistics courses I took in college) so the article reads kind of like that one cool professor you had who was easy-going even in front of 150-ish students. It ends on a pretty cool note, too: “The highest compliment I receive is when fans of the literary series tell me they can’t tell the difference between the words I created and the ones Martin did.”

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