Speaking in tongues: the man who made a career of making up languages

There are two kinds of people. There are those who watch Princess Leia speaking an alien language in Return of the Jedi and notice that she spoke the same piece of gibberish twice but with a different subtitle. And there are those who don't. David J Peterson is in the first camp. "It bothered me when I saw it," says Peterson, the Californian president of the Language Creation Society, creator of the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones , and a vocal advocate for "conlanging", the art of language creation. "But I thought I was the only one who noticed or cared."

The problem was that Star Wars creator George Lucas did not go to the trouble of creating real languages for his aliens. Other world-builders aren't as slapdash, largely because many fans do notice and care. So there's a growing group of science-fiction and fantasy languages with properly constructed grammatical rules and vocabularies. This isn't entirely new. JRR Tolkien created Elvish before he ever wrote Lord of the Rings ; Trekkies have long invested in Klingon dictionaries and endured nerd-baiting jokes on The Simpsons for their trouble.

Peterson created his first language while in his first year at college in Berkeley, where he was studying English and linguistics. He didn't have a science-fiction world to put it in. "I thought at the time the language could be used as a secret way of communicating between myself and my girlfriend," he laughs. "That was a really stupid idea. People's first languages are almost uniformly terrible. I knew about Esperanto but I wasn't aware that Tolkien had created languages. I wasn't aware that Klingon was a language, though I was a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation . It was very rare for people to discuss creating languages; up to the early 2000s it was seen as aberrant. Before the internet, language creators never met one another. It wasn't uncommon for a conlanger to believe they were the first to ever do it."

Game of centuries
In fact, people have been creating new languages for centuries. The German mystic Hildegard von Bingen created one of the first, Lingua Ignota (Latin for "unknown language"), a lexicon largely used for naming angels in the 12th century. By the 17th century, language concerns were more philosophical and scientific.

“John Wilkins and others were interested in creating languages that tried to more accurately and scientifically encode the world,” says Peterson. “[Their languages] might have a word and the first letter would tell you whether it refers to an animal, vegetable or mineral. The next might tell you its family and the next its phylum and genus and so on. The idea would be that just by looking at the word you’d know what it meant if you knew the system.”

The next wave of language creation came as an extension of the Utopian political thinking of the late 19th century. These creators sought nothing less than a new world language, which, they assumed, would usher in an era of peace. The most successful was Esperanto, published by its creator LL Zamenhof in 1887. Although it never became a world language – “Its roots are too European,” says Peterson – today it has more than a million speakers. Peterson says there were “tonnes of other languages created at that time”. He mentions two that survive – Ido (an offshoot of Esperanto) and Occidental – as well as one of the first, Volapük, the “divinely inspired” creation of the German priest Johann Martin Schleyer. The success of Esperanto, says Peterson, is largely because it was “open source. Zamenhof was happy to . . . let people develop it.”

The auxiliary-language movement quietened after the second World War but there was a new vogue for creating languages, for "the joy of it and for artistic purposes". In 1931, before Elvish ever appeared in his fiction, JRR Tolkien wrote an essay called A Secret Vice about creating "a personal system and symphony that no one else was to study or to hear".

He was ahead of his time. In the modern era, the constructed-language community largely moved from creating international auxiliary languages with which its creators hoped to change the world to creating languages designed for entirely imaginary worlds. The first language constructed for a television show was Paku, designed by the UCLA linguist Victoria Fromkin for Land of the Lost in the mid-1970s. ("It was a terrible show," sighs Peterson). But the most significant was Klingon, created in 1984 by Marc Okrand for the third Star Trek movie. It had notionally existed previously but Okrand gave it consistent grammar and vocabulary (even so, the creators of Star Trek: T he Next Generation often opted for a bastardised version).

By the 1990s there were some active online conlang communities and thousands of "conlangs". The community still features some advocates of international world languages as well as those engaged in linguistic-thought experiments. Of these, Peterson singles out John Quijada's Ithkuil "a language that packs as much meaning into as small a space as unambiguously possible. Ithkuil sounds like this crazy gobbledygook. It's so difficult it takes hours to create a sentence, but it's wonderful when it comes to explication and clarifying one's thoughts. John has a wonderful description of this abstract painting [by Marcel Duchamp] Nude Descending a Staircase . After I read his description in Ithkuil I saw the painting differently. I saw it the way he saw it."

Lingo, made to order
Peterson himself is operating in the made-to-order fantasy-language business – a small but growing industry. In 2010, the people adapting George RR Martin's Game of Thrones novels for television held an open competition to find people willing to build the Dothraki language. Thirty applicants went through a two-round application process, and soon Peterson was extrapolating grammatical and lexical rules from the snippets of gobbledygook Dothraki Martin had sprinkled through his books.

There were technical challenges and sometimes Peterson had to grit his teeth as actors mispronounced his creations, but he loves it. "The cast are getting better all the time," he says, and Martin has even contacted him for linguistic input into the novels. Since creating Dothraki, Peterson has also created Valyrian for the same programme and two contrasting "alien" languages, Irathient and Castithan, for the Syfy Channel drama Defiance .

“It’s all about verisimilitude,” says Peterson. “If you’re going to have a fictional people from a fictional place they can’t all be speaking English. Fans are now analysing shows and movies in a way that’s changed everything. People complained about the reality and unreality of shows and movies for decades but how loud was their voice in 1984? What could you do? Write to the newspaper? Thanks to the internet, the message has got through to television producers and writers that fans want ways to interact with the show that go far beyond sitting down and watching it when it airs for the first time. So if you’re doing a great big sci-fi or fantasy show and there’s potential there for a language, they’re looking at that and taking it seriously.”

Right now, television is providing a mass audience for constructed languages and Peterson regularly meets people who speak his inventions better than he does. “But I was never too interested in that. I’m more interested in the structure and the design and how I solved the various problems I posed to myself when it came to lexical expansion and grammatical detail. Maybe it’s because I’m an English major, but I always thought of created languages as being like a novel with the end-product being a grammar and dictionary that you could sit down and read through and admire.”

Game of Thrones is on Sky Atlantic on Mondays at 9pm. Defiance airs on the Syfy Channel on Tuesdays at 9pm

Irish proverbs translated into Dothraki
"Reki memé davrae ha maninaan, me davrae ha vadaan."
"What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Peterson changed this to "what's good for the colt is good for the filly" as the Dothraki are a horsey people.)

"Vo zihakesos shiran dorvi ma evoon davra vezhi."
"Do not mistake a goat's beard for a fine stallion's tail."

"Vo vekkhi jolini ven jolino zhorre yeri."
"There's no hearth like your own hearth."

"Gomma voji asamva riv mae k'athsavari."
"A person's mouth often broke his nose."

"Dorior dorion udrirzi mijessis."
"There's no country without a language." This one is in High Valyrian. "[It] felt more appropriate," says Peterson.
Translations by David J Peterson