Two crucial 'Game of Thrones' languages designed by Cal grad



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Every time you witness a conversation in high Valyrian or Dothraki on this season's "Game of Thrones," you can thank David J. Peterson and the Linguistics department at Cal.

The UC Berkeley grad, who helped design the hugely important tongues for the recently returned HBO fantasy epic, spent hours developing not just vocabulary terms, but also pronunciations, rules, and grammatical structures for the languages.

In a recent interview with CBS, Peterson explains that both Dothraki and high Valyrian are functional — a crucial quality to the authenticity of the show's dialogue.

"It really has to feel real in order to get to drive that impact home to the audience," he told CBS. "And the languages that I create are a part of that."

Peterson, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 2003, co-founded an organization called the Language Creators Society in 2007 with a handful of other Cal grads. Less than three years later, "Game of Thrones" creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff contacted the Society to build out two languages vital to the plot of the show, using just the starter phrases coined by author George R. R. Martin: "Valar Morghulis" ("All men must die") and "Valar Dohaeris" ("All men must serve"). A contest ensued to select a winner for the gig, and as biarves would have it, Peterson won.

As Peterson and HBO revealed in a 2010 press release, the languages draw inspiration from Turkish, Estonian, Swahili, Russian, and Eastern Canadian Inuit language Inuktitut.

As of today, Peterson has created over 5,000 words for the show, and now, unsurprisingly, the books too. Back in 2013, Peterson revealed that he's periodically contacted by Martin for translation accuracy for the upcoming sixth book, "The Winds of Winter."

"He'll e-mail me once in a blue moon, and then I'll reply and I won't hear back," Peterson told Vulture. "He's a busy dude. I'll have to wait to see if he used anything when it's published."

Until then, fans can keep up with the the languages at Peterson's blog, which is devoted not just to his "Game of Thrones" work, but also artificial tongues he developed for shows like Showtime's "Penny Dreadful," the CW's "The 100" and movies like "Thor: The Dark World."