When a Dothraki girl first wondered about her chieftain Drogo, remarking to herself “what a handsome man the khal was” in the opening scenes of George RR Martin’s novel A Game of Thrones, the author had no idea his imagined language would stretch to a vocabulary of 4,000 words, studied by legions of ardent fans.

But today, over at the Tongues of Ice and Fire site, dedicated fans of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels are contemplating the various linguistic puzzlers thrown up by Dothraki, the fictional language spoken by a nomadic, warlike race in the bestselling fantasy series. One reflects on forms of the present participle, while another wants to know the Dothraki for “poop” – apparently it’s “graddakh”.

According to the publisher of a Dothraki language course, Living Language Dothraki, the site boasts nearly 150 Dothraki speakers, and a beginner’s course devised by Dothraki guru David J Petersen has been met with “fantastic” enthusiasm. Peterson was hired by HBO to devise some of the vocabulary used in Game of Thrones, as its TV adaptation of the novels took off: Martin himself might have been described as the American Tolkien by Time magazine, but he has happily admitted to being no JRR when it comes to invented languages.

“A few years ago, I got a very nice email from a reader who wanted to know more about the vocabulary and syntax of High Valyrian,” Martin wrote on his blog in 2010. “I blush to admit that I had to reply, ‘Uh … well … all I know about High Valyrian is the seven words I’ve made up to date. When I need an eighth, I’ll make that up too … but I don’t have a whole imaginary language in my desk here, the way Tolkien did.’”

The same was true of Dothraki, he added: “Lots of characters speak the language of the horselords in my novels, and I did pepper the text with a few Dothraki words like khal and arakh … but for the most part I was content just to say, ‘They were speaking Dothraki’, and give the sense of what was said, playing with the syntax and sentence rhythms a bit to convey a flavour.”

More was required for the television series, and Peterson won a competition to see who would create Dothraki for the show. He began, he says, by analysing all the Dothraki words in the first three books: there were just 55, he discovered, many of them names.

“I determined what the sound system must be for those words to be licit, and then analysed the grammatical structure evidenced by the few phrases and sentences in the text. With that information in hand, I began filling in the gaps,” he says. “There were quite a number of gaps to fill. My initial proposal – the one that won me the job – had about 1,700 words in it.”

Peterson’s version of Dothraki now runs to around 4,000 words. He describes the sound of the new language as “Arabic + Spanish / 2” and he plans to continue expanding it until it has at least 10,000. Out last October, his Living Language Dothraki includes a 128-page language guide, along with dialogue and exercises.

Publisher Living Language, an imprint of Random House, promises it will teach readers everything from “how to use fighting expressions and deliver searing insults” to “all the vocabulary you’ll need to talk about animals, hunting, food, weather, nature, clothes, and colours”.

“The enthusiasm for Dothraki and the text Living Language Dothraki has been overwhelming. It’s a lot of fun to watch it spread,” Peterson says. “Fans are eager to investigate every aspect of the world, and Dothraki is a part of it. In addition, I think a number of fans are captivated by Daenerys’s storyline, and remember fondly Jason Momoa’s performance as Khal Drogo. Honestly, if you had to pick one family to be a part of, who wouldn’t want to be a Targaryen?”

Peterson has worked on a number of fictional languages, mainly for television and film. He created the Castithan, Irathient and Indojisnen languages for Defiance, and the Lishepus language for Dominion (both produced for online streaming channel Syfy). The Shiväisith language in Marvel’s Thor: The Dark World is also his work.

Anyone for Shiväisith? Thor: the dark world

Even Peterson’s prolific invention arguably doesn’t match the ambition of the tongue dreamed up by Paul Kingsnorth for his Man Booker-longlisted The Wake. A story of the English resistance post-1066, it is written entirely in a language of the author’s own devising. The novel opens:

“the night was clere though i slept i seen it. though i slept i seen the calm hierde naht only the still. when i gan down to sleep all was clere in the land and my dreams was full of stillness but my dreams did not cepe me still. when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time.”

Kingsnorth, though, says he never intended to embark on such a challenging undertaking. He began writing the novel in modern English, but found that he could only tell the story in a different language.

“I realised as I was trying to get into the head of this Anglo-Saxon that I couldn’t have him expressing himself in 21st-century English – it wasn’t working. I tried working out what I could do, but a lot of what I did sounded forced. I had to be careful not to create an olde worlde idiom.”

Kingsnorth tried inserting a few Old English nouns, “but that just looked weird, so I started putting more and more in, building it up.” The concern then was that people wouldn’t understand the text. “So I started bending words a little, rewriting so the spelling would be easier, and almost by accident I found I was creating this version of Old English, the idea of which was to create the impression in the mind of the reader that they were hearing from an Anglo-Saxon man.”

He stopped using words of Latin or French origin, so that 90%, he believes, of the words in the novel originate in Old English. “I found I had a much more limited vocabulary. The words were rougher and more stark, much more Germanic,” he says. “It made me write in a different way – because I had fewer words, I had to write more simply, more carefully.”

It took him six months to craft his version of Anglo-Saxon, working from historical documents and dictionaries, and “I did find myself thinking in it in times”, he admits. “I also found it very difficult to spell in contemporary English, but it has been a fascinating thing. The way we speak provides limits to the way we think, defines the way we see the world. It was a huge amount of work, but I am a history nerd and it was great fun.” His next book, he adds, is written in modern English.

Alastair Reynolds, one of the UK’s most respected science-fiction writers and an author who includes an entire Revelation Space glossary on his website, takes a different approach. His universe might house a host of different languages – Canasian is “a language incorporating elements of Cantonese and Quebecois French” – but they are not spelled out on the page; his characters speak English.



antonese and Quebecois mix in Alastair Reynolds’ Canasian

Reynolds does, however, dream up new words for the future technologies used by his creations. His favourite, he says, is “lighthugger” (“any large space vehicle with a relativistic cruise ceiling”), but he’s also fond of “medichine” (“subcellular nanotechnology”).

“I love to do it, but I don’t force it,” he says. “I’ve a whiteboard in my office and if I come up with a coinage that sounds vaguely promising, I’ll write it there.”

Some words invented for science fiction go on to have lives of their own in the wider world, he says. “If it happens, you feel pretty good about it; it’s a tip of the hat. Ansible was something Ursula Le Guin came up with for an instant communications system. It’s a handy term … and has popped up in other works,” he says. “Some coinages we now feel are completely part of everyday terminology, at least within science, were originally SF. So terraforming goes back to Jack Williamson, and gas giant has its origins in SF [the work of James Blish].”

But it’s important not to go too far, believes Reynolds. “You can go overboard, like with that fantasy cliche of a sentence with about 20 capitals in it,” he says. “You want to hold it back a bit. You don’t want to throw 20 invented terms at the reader on the first page. It needs to be used sparingly, or it throws the reader out of the story.”



So while Martin might have called Peterson a “world class expert” – and expressed his wish for “the day when someone translates Shakespeare into Dothraki” – his characters are unlikely to start spouting paragraphs of the language on the page. It is known, khaleesi, that prose which wears such braids is simply graddakh.



Useful phrases in Dothraki

m’athchomaroon – hello

Hash yer dothrae chek? – How are you? (Literally, do you ride well?)

hajas! – cheers!

athdavrazar – excellent

Anha vazhak yeraan thirat – I will let you live

Fichas jahakes moon – Take his braid. (Used to encourage fellow fighters.)

Yer shekh ma shieraki anni – You are my loved one. (To a male.)

Yer jalan atthirari anni – You are my loved one. (To a female.)