Over 1M Game of Thrones fans are learning Valyrian and you can easily learn too - The Sauce
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Over 1M Game of Thrones fans are learning Valyrian and you can easily learn too

It may look like gibberish, but all the lines spoken in Valyrian on‘Game of Thrones’ world are linguistically correct and 1.2 million people across the globe are learning it.

The language was written by linguist David J. Peterson, who has created over 50 fictional languages, mostly for movies and TV shows. He constructed Valyrian like a real language nearly from scratch, complete with grammar and rules. All he had to build upon was a handful of words and sentences that author George R. R. Martin included in his “A Song of Ice and Fire” books, from which the series is adapted, such as “Valar morghulis” (“All men must die”) and “Valar dohaeris” (“All men must serve”), CNN reported.

Peterson also designed another of the fictional languages heard throughout ‘Game of Thrones,’ Dothraki which is spoken by Jason Momoa’s character Khal Drogo and his tribe. The linguist developed this language first, in response to an online competition launched by the show’s producers before the series first aired.

“I applied, with many other very good language creators,” Peterson said in a phone interview. “The competition had no upper limit on the amount of material you could provide. When I learned that, I spent every single minute of every day working on my proposal up to 18 hours a day sometimes. In about a month, I created over 300 pages of material, including grammar, translations and cultural phrases.”

CNN further reported that he won the competition, and was later asked to create Valyrian too. Today, Dothraki has about 4,000 official words and Valyrian about 2,000. Popular online learning platform Duolingo has even included High Valyrian the noblest of Valyrian dialects, as spoken by Daenerys in its offerings, and to date, 1.2 million learners have started the course.  It is particularly popular in the UK, where 100,000 people have signed up to study it more than can speak traditional languages like Irish and Scottish Gaelic, according to Duolingo.

How long does it take to design a functional constructed language? According to Peterson, it takes six months to a year to get the grammar up and running, but the speed of TV and movie production means he gets far less than that.

Time is not the only factor at play, however. “The thing with a language is that it’s not actually a physical entity, so you can, in theory, create the whole thing in your head. But will you remember it? What takes time is making those decisions and then writing them down in a way that you’re going to be able to access later,” he said.

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To help “Game of Thrones” actors speak Dothraki and Valyrian correctly, Peterson records audio versions of each line, so the performers have a model to follow. Usually, the process starts with Peterson receiving the full scripts, although this hasn’t happened for the current season the eighth, and last, of the series presumably due to a heightened need for secrecy.

Constructed languages, or “conlangs,” have grown in popularity since the inception of the internet, which has given learners easy ways to find one another and platforms to expand their vocabulary. Among the best-known fictional languages, Klingon from “Star Trek” has enjoyed a cult following since the 1990s and its creator, Mark Okrand, regularly releases new words.

It, too, is available on Duolingo and is one of several conlangs for which ample online resources are available, along with Na’vi from the 2009 blockbuster “Avatar” and Elvish from J. R. Tolkien’s “saga.

While learning a fictional language may have little practical value, it offers a way for people to connect with their passions and interact with like-minded individuals.

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