 Middle-earth, called it his “secret vice.”
This sentiment may explain the distinction between those who write languages for love and those who do it for, you know, practical reasons. Marc Okrand, creator of “Star Trek”’s hugely popular Klingon, said he doesn’t exactly consider himself a conlanger: “I got into it because I was asked to do it for a movie, not because I had a passion initially for making up languages....But now I’m a conlanger because I’ve made up languages.” Paul Frommer, creator of the Na’vi language from “Avatar,” told me, “I was not a conlanger prior to ‘Avatar.’”
Peterson, meanwhile, talks about conlanging as a defining obsession, “a hobby I couldn’t kick.” He began inventing languages when he was an undergrad at Berkeley before going on to a master’s in linguistics at UC San Diego. In 2007, he helped form the Language Creation Society, a conlangers group. When the producers of “Game of Thrones” needed someone to write a language for the warlike, horse-loving Dothraki tribe in season one, Arika Okrent, a linguist and author of the book “In the Land of Invented Languages,” suggested they ask the LCS. Peterson rose to the occasion, and his Dothraki, with Russian, Turkish, Estonian, and other influences and a lot of words about horses, was the result. “It’s a native conlang conlang,” Okrent said.
Peterson argues that there are crucial differences in having a conlanger write your language, as opposed to an academic linguist. Conlangers are more aware of the history of other created languages, he says, a study that improves their artistry and tends to create languages that are less evocative of natural languages: “If you’re hiring a conlanger specifically as opposed to a linguist, what you’ll see is sources that can’t be as easily defined.”
Frommer, a linguistics PhD who was a business communications professor at USC before retiring, demurred on this point: “I really don’t know if we approached things that differently,” he told me. Frommer didn’t study other conlangs, not wanting to be influenced in his work. But both Frommer and Peterson followed Tolkien’s approach of starting with a proto-language and aging it based on principles of historic linguistic shift, thus creating a flexible, more authentic-sounding language. Both infused their invented languages with cultural specificity: Dothraki, for example, has no word for “please.” Na’vi, due to the importance of ceremony on Pandora, has a ceremonial register with different versions of pronouns.
The real differences may be less linguistic than cultural—and professional. Peterson’s prominence in the conlanging community gave Dothraki an immediate stamp of nerd authenticity, a boon in an age when fan attention to details like period slang and dress has reached obsessive heights. Whereas Klingon and Na’vi fans had to seek out Okrand and Frommer, Peterson was present in online forums from the very beginning, as obsessive as anyone else. And, unlike Okrand and Frommer, who never sought to become full-time conlangers, he’s parlayed the gig into an ongoing career: As far as he knows, Peterson is the only person in the world who earns a living by making up languages. He’s since written conlangs for “Thor: Dark World” and the SyFy show “Defiance.” The upcoming season of “Game of Thrones” features a new Valyrian dialect he wrote, Meereenese, which involves “a lot of shushing” noises, he said. Tolkien’s “secret vice” has, today, become a respectable profession.
Whether Peterson’s “Game of Thrones” languages will endure longer than the run of the show is still in question. And one unexpected threat to Dothraki might be that it does its job too well. Richard Littauer, a Web developer in Brooklyn, helped write the first Na’vi dictionary and also helped found the original Dothraki Web forum. He says he found Dothraki more “fleshed out” and “a little more realistic” than Na’vi. But he couldn’t enjoy the language without thinking of the ferocious Dothraki themselves.
“I’m not a bloodthirsty Mongol warrior,” he explained, with a hint of regret.Britt Peterson is a writer in 