How do you create a real fake language? | Little White Lies

Hard Craft

How do you cre­ate a real fake language?

28 Mar 2023

Three individuals wearing medieval-style clothing in a black and white image.
Three individuals wearing medieval-style clothing in a black and white image.
David J. Peter­son, who has worked on Game of Thrones and Dune, reveals the secrets behind cre­at­ing the lan­guages which bring fan­ta­sy worlds to life.

The prac­tice of con­struct­ing lan­guages harks back to the 12th cen­tu­ry, but thanks to J.R.R. Tolkien’s fic­tion­al lan­guages in the world of Mid­dle-earth, many peo­ple took up the pas­time in the 20th cen­tu­ry. The release of The Lord of the Rings and the appen­dix that includ­ed Tolkien’s cre­at­ed lan­guage notes brought greater vis­i­bil­i­ty to con­lang­ing (the cre­ation of con­struct­ed lan­guages). David J. Peter­son, the man who famous­ly cre­at­ed the fic­tion­al lan­guages Dothra­ki and Valyr­i­an for Game of Thrones, spoke to LWLies about the art of lan­guage cre­ation for film and television.

LWLies: Did you always see con­lang­ing as a viable career path? 

Peter­son: It’s not some­thing you could have decid­ed to do pro­fes­sion­al­ly in the past because the job didn’t exist. Before 2009, there had been a few instances where peo­ple had been paid to cre­ate a lan­guage, but that was it.

I’d been cre­at­ing lan­guages on my own for ten years before get­ting into it pro­fes­sion­al­ly. When I spoke to oth­er con­langers, it seemed unlike­ly that any­one would ever be paid to cre­ate lan­guages because nobody had ever been hired to cre­ate a lan­guage because they were good at it. The only peo­ple who were hired to cre­ate lan­guages at that point were ran­dom­ly on set at the time, peo­ple with lin­guis­tics degrees, or in one case, a grad­u­ate stu­dent whose web­site fea­tured a sen­tence in Klin­gon (a con­struct­ed lan­guage spo­ken by the Klin­gons in Star Trek).

You’ve cre­at­ed over 60 lan­guages at this point. When you’re devel­op­ing fic­tion­al lan­guages, do you ever get con­cerned that they are going to sound similar? 

I don’t wor­ry about it too much. We have all these dif­fer­ent sounds in the lan­guages we speak on Earth and many, many more. No lan­guage on Earth uses all of them — or even a quar­ter of them. But they’re so dif­fer­ent right?

The prob­lem is that when you’re cre­at­ing lan­guages for TV and film, the pro­duc­ers often say they want the lan­guage to sound unique, but it also needs to be easy for the actors to pro­nounce because they’re often mono­lin­gual Eng­lish speakers.

This means you’re stuck with sounds from Eng­lish or West­ern Euro­pean lan­guages that they’d be famil­iar with, which is a small sub­set of the sounds. But you can make things sound quite dif­fer­ent by chang­ing the phono­tac­tics, or in oth­er words, the rules of how the sounds of a lan­guage are put togeth­er, includ­ing the into­na­tion and stress patterns.

What does the process of cre­at­ing a spo­ken lan­guage involve? 

After fig­ur­ing out what the lan­guage is going to be used for, I start with the sound sys­tem. Then, I move on to the gram­mar of the nouns, verbs and oth­er parts of speech. I usu­al­ly start with nouns because they are more sta­ble. Verbs tend to be more dif­fi­cult. As you move on to each dif­fer­ent stage, it some­times trig­gers the revi­sion of a pre­vi­ous stage.

Once I have the parts of speech, I can move on to phrase struc­ture and sen­tence struc­ture, which involves dif­fer­ent sen­tence types, like ques­tions or sen­tences with rel­a­tive claus­es or sub­or­di­nate claus­es. Then you go to the dic­tio­nary and start cre­at­ing words. The most impor­tant part is the gram­mar, but the longest part is cre­at­ing words so that they look like they belong. Imag­ine trans­lat­ing into anoth­er lan­guage, know­ing that the words you need to trans­late don’t exist in that language.

Do you tend to base your con­struct­ed lan­guages on exist­ing languages? 

We have two dif­fer­ent types of cre­at­ed lan­guages that we dis­tin­guish between — a pri­ori and a pos­te­ri­ori. With a pri­ori lan­guages, the gram­mar and lex­i­con are entire­ly nov­el. A pos­te­ri­ori lan­guages are based on some­thing exist­ing. For exam­ple, when I was cre­at­ing a lan­guage for The 100, an Amer­i­can sci-fi TV dra­ma series about Earth after a mas­sive nuclear cat­a­stro­phe, I had to cre­ate a lan­guage for fic­tion­al peo­ple in the real world. For that rea­son, they spoke a descen­dant of a real-world lan­guage. It’s the Amer­i­can Eng­lish of the future. Every word of the lan­guage and every part of the gram­mar came from mod­ern English.

In the case of high Valyr­i­an in Game of Thrones, this is a total­ly fan­ta­sy world that has no con­nec­tion to our world. So why would any of it be based on any lan­guage that exists in our world when none of those lan­guages are sup­posed to exist there?

A smiling person wearing glasses and a blue shirt in an outdoor setting.

How do you focus on devel­op­ing the right parts of the lan­guage for the pro­duc­tion you are work­ing on? 

If the gram­mar is pret­ty much set­tled, but you haven’t got the scripts yet, then you need to antic­i­pate the kind of vocab­u­lary you’ll need. In some cas­es, like Game of Thrones, I most­ly knew what scenes were com­ing because I was able to refer to George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, which Game of Thrones is based upon.

For exam­ple, I knew the gen­er­al direc­tion of the sto­ry of Daen­erys, one of the pro­tag­o­nists in the series, because of the things she does in the books. So, I could imag­ine what types of things the Dothra­ki might say and cre­ate the vocab­u­lary I thought I’d need ahead of time.

What sorts of lan­guage cre­ation briefs do you tend to receive before you start work­ing on a production? 

Game of Thrones was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent because the pro­duc­ers con­tact­ed the Lan­guage Cre­ation Soci­ety and there was a com­pe­ti­tion. Most of the time, though, there’s a short con­ver­sa­tion with pro­duc­tion to make sure we’re on the same page. It’s usu­al­ly about sound because they don’t care about gram­mar. They lis­ten to a sam­ple of the lan­guage and tell us what they think. Some­times, there’s some back and forth, but then it’s just on me — or me and my partner/​fellow con­langer, Jessie Sams.

Do you do lan­guage class­es with the actors or do they just get the script? 

It has worked both of those ways, depend­ing on the pro­duc­tion. For Game of Thrones, I nev­er worked with the actors, but the best per­for­mance I have ever seen by some­body work­ing with a cre­at­ed lan­guage was on Game of Thrones. That per­for­mance was by Jacob Ander­son, who played Grey Worm. What he had to do in episode 305 was very dif­fi­cult because he had quite a long speech, and those were the first spo­ken lines that his char­ac­ter had at all. It was real­ly reward­ing to watch.

What’s the wack­i­est request you have received when cre­at­ing a lan­guage for a production? 

Dan Weiss, one of the co-cre­ators of Game of Thrones, asked me to trans­late the French Taunter” dia­logue from Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail for Sea­son 4. They were like, Daen­erys is going to be hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with her peo­ple and on the oth­er side, there’ll be this guy shout­ing at her.” Weiss want­ed to have him say­ing this, with no subtitles.

And how did you go about cre­at­ing the dif­fer­ent vari­ants of Valyr­i­an in Game of Thrones, such as Astapori Valyrian? 

Astapori Valyr­i­an is an a pos­te­ri­ori lan­guage; it is an evolved form of High Valyr­i­an that has a lot of influ­ence from the for­mer Ghis­cari lan­guage, which was spo­ken in the Ghis­cari Empire that exist­ed before the Valyr­i­an Empire destroyed it in Game of Thrones.

Basi­cal­ly, when you’re cre­at­ing a lan­guage like this, you start by cre­at­ing a daugh­ter lan­guage. For exam­ple, if you look at the tran­si­tion from Latin to Span­ish, over time, the sounds, the mean­ings of words and the gram­mar changed.

I start­ed with High Valyr­i­an, with the knowl­edge that these ele­ments were going to change. The extra con­sid­er­a­tion was that the High Valyr­i­an lan­guage dis­placed an old­er fic­tion­al lan­guage — Ghis­cari. The sound sys­tem in Ghis­cari helped to influ­ence what sort of sound changes were applied to High Valyr­i­an to pro­duce Astapori Valyr­i­an. I made a pro­file for the Ghis­cari lan­guage, based on the Ghis­cari names in the books.≈

Did you expect Valyr­i­an and Dothra­ki to get the recep­tion they have got from audiences? 

Valyr­i­an has had a pret­ty big recep­tion. The return of the dra­ma series House of the Drag­on real­ly helped with that. I was able to cre­ate a Valyr­i­an course for Duolin­go, too. For Dothra­ki, it’s been a much slow­er build. At its height, I had about six peo­ple inter­est­ed in learn­ing Dothraki.

What are you work­ing on at the moment? 

Jessie Sams and I recent­ly went to the pre­mière of sea­son two of Shad­ow and Bone, which we worked on togeth­er. We’re also work­ing on sea­son two of Halo, sea­son two of House of the Drag­on, the sequel to Dune, the next sea­son of The Witch­er and a brand-new film that I can­not tell you about yet, so you’ll have to wait until June to find out about that one!

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