KQED first spoke with Peterson in the summer of 2017 when he was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, teaching students how to speak and write like characters in Game of Thrones.

He assigned each of his students one language to build from the Game of Thrones universe. John Clements created one for the people of Sarnor.

Clements, who was majoring in computer science at the University of Arkansas, said creating languages has been a hobby of his since he was a kid.

"It’s always something I’ve been interested in," said Clements. "I remember in middle school I would sit at lunch and make up alphabets."

Fellow student Dash Stevens fleshed out the language of the people of Jogos Nhai. Stevens studied linguistics at the University of Hawaii, and has been inventing new tongues for years.

"It’s got a base consonant and then from there it has markings for vowels," said Stevens of his linguistic project. "The closest kind of writing system in existence would be devanagari for Hindi."

The class was a crash-course in linguistics through a Game of Thrones lens, said Peterson.

"In learning how to do this stuff you’re basically learning everything that there is to know about language," Peterson said.

As for how that course went in 2017, Peterson said he was pleased with his students’ progress.

"There have been lots of theft-worthy ideas that I’ve seen," said Peterson.

Peterson said one of the most essential things the students learn is to make languages that people actually want to use on a daily basis. "That is what all languages are going to have in common," said Peterson. "They evolve structures that are going to be useful in some way."

For example, a word in English that would not be useful — if it existed — is "cattif." Peterson made up the word and said it means "17 cats."

Peterson said most people would have very little use for a word that means 17 cats, so it would just fall out of use. "That's because of the way the human brain works, the way that we live our lives and our experience with cats."

For the students, that meant making several changes to their languages to make them truly practical. Stevens said he went through seven versions of his written system.

"If you want something to be even remotely realistic, you have to have that kind of depth to it," Stevens said.

So could one of these students be the next hot new language inventor in Hollywood?

The entertainment industry is just starting to develop serious careers for language creators, said Peterson. So the good news for his students: jobs are on the way.

Although Peterson calls Orange County home, he watched the Season 8 premiere back on the Berkeley campus with some students Sunday night. And like all fans, he's bracing himself because he knows a lot is about to go down in whatever language the character speaks.

This post includes reporting from KCRW's Jenny Hamel and KQED's David Marks. A version of this story was originally published on July 14, 2017.