David Peterson, inventor of Dothraki and Valyrian, may be the first professional ‘conlanger’

SUNDAY NIGHT, the HBO series “Game of Thrones” begins its fourth season of realpolitik-with-dragons. And perhaps no one has longed for a return to the corpse-strewn land of Westeros so much as connoisseurs of the show’s invented languages, Dothraki and Valyrian.

Over the past 30 years, Hollywood has become far more interested in getting languages right onscreen—even ones that are completely made up. An actor who once would’ve barked some gibberish is now given lines drawn from an entire alien language, with a complex grammar and vocabulary.

In the past, the people writing these languages have been mostly academic linguists. But David Peterson, the inventor of Dothraki and Valyrian, is something of a new breed. The creator of 12 languages before he wrote Dothraki in 2010, Peterson is not just the first major language creator in Hollywood to identify primarily as a “conlanger,” or maker of constructed languages. He’s also probably the only professional language creator ever. It’s an odd career path, but with Hollywood heavily investing in geeky authenticity, it may well be one that’s here to stay. More.

See: The Boston Globe

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