WORD, DUDE: Jack Gleeson as Joffrey Baratheon, the cruel King on the Iron Throne on the fantasy series, has to deal with Dothraki-speakers. (
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Dothraki is the new Klingon.
“Game of Thrones” fans will be pleased to know that even without Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa), the remains of his “khalasar” — that is, his clan — continue to speak the fictional language in Season 2 of the HBO fantasy epic, which premieres Sunday night.
The mastermind behind Dothraki, as it’s heard on TV, is Language Creation Society president David Peterson, who essentially won the bid to create the language for HBO by turning the smattering of phrases written by author George R.R. Martin into a fully-functional spoken language.
To do that, he “analyzed the [words] in the books” and took into account the fact that Martin is American and tried to figure out how other English-speaking Americans would think the words sounded based on their spellings.
Fan interest in Dothraki — one of several entirely new “constructed languages” that Peterson’s created over the years — has come as a bit of a shock for the former linguistics major.
All of a sudden, “there were a bunch of people who were actually interested in learning the language,” Peterson says.
Unlike earlier constructed languages fanciers, these fans “weren’t interested in the various choices I made with the grammar or that I did something to make [the words] look more authentic.
“They were more like, ‘Ugh. That’s another irregular noun, that’s so hard to learn.’ ”
(Judge for yourself during CNN’s “The Next List,” April 8, in which Peterson will be speaking Dothraki.)
Getting Dothraki from the page to the screen seems more straightforward.
During filming, “Thrones” writers sent Peterson scripts telling him which parts they wanted translated into Dothraki. He’d send back written and spoken dialogue, which the actors then used to help them memorize their lines.
On-screen, that dialogue is subtitled in English.
Why go through all this trouble? Blame “Star Wars,” says Peterson.
“You could tell that Princess Leia, in her bounty hunter costume, says the same thing twice and it means something different the second time,” he says.
Back then, there wasn’t anywhere for the handful of people who noticed it to complain about it.
“Now, with the Internet, a minority can become an instant majority,” Peterson says. “If any little detail is wrong, it’s up somewhere on the Internet.”
Dothraki currently has a 3,500 word dictionary (compared to the upwards of 250,000 English words). Peterson hopes to get Dothraki to at least 8,000 words.
“It’s a life-long project to have enough words that it’ll at least cover the basics of natural language,” he says.
In the world of sci-fi, Dothraki is still searching for its cool.
At a convention last year, Peterson recalls people dressed in “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek” costumes laughing at him and his organization’s booth.
“We were the nerds of the nerds, ” Peterson admits.