How to Create a Language

My name is David Peterson

and I'm the language creator from HBO's Game of Thrones.

This is my process for creating a language.

[tense music]

The very first thing that you need to do

is figure out why you're doing it.

Who's gonna be using the language?

Is it gonna be human beings?

Because if it's not gonna be human beings,

then you have to talk about different vocal apparatuses.

In other words, is this gonna be a language that's spoken

or is it gonna be a language that's signed?

You go and say, oh actually, by the way,

the people that are gonna be using this language,

they're these aliens and they have one big eyeball,

they don't have a mouth, they don't have any ears,

and they have a bunch of tentacles.

That's an entirely different process.

It's like, what can they do?

Well, they can see

so it's probably gonna be a visual language.

What can they use?

They've got their tentacles.

So they can use their tentacles to make a sign language.

That's kind of like the process you need to go through

at the very, very beginning.

After figuring out whether your language

is going to be only spoken, or spoken and written,

then you can move on to sounds.

The sounds that exist

in the various languages that we speak are ordered.

Consonants are separated into their manner,

that is, how they're produced,

and then the place in the mouth where they are produced.

So you can create, like, a little table.

Let's do Dothraki right now, that's easy.

Stops, fricatives, nasals, and approximants

which is a catch-all term for basically everything else.

And then what comes next is the place of articulation,

where you pronounce this stuff in your mouth.

So there's labial sounds,

coronal, that's when your tongue tip

touches either your teeth or the bump behind your teeth.

There's velar, uvular, glottal,

and you can fill out the rest of the sounds.

So starting with the lips, Dothraki doesn't have any stops.

It does have f and v.

Nasals, m, what that means

is that you're doing something in here

but the air is actually passing through your nose.

[speaks in Dothraki]

For approximates, it almost makes contact but doesn't quite,

so it's not, you know, but, it's wah.

[speaks in Dothraki]

Wah.

T and d, s and z

In Dothraki you also have this sound fth.

And then for approximants we kinda got these guys.

And this one that looks like a regular r,

that's a nice trill. Rrrr.

I have no tricks for helping you pronounce that.

You just gotta practice it.

[speaking in Dotharki]

I feel bad about that one.

The idea is that you fill out this chart

and what you notice is that things

are occurring in groups.

The idea is that you don't want to have too many sounds,

but you have enough so that words can sound

different enough without having to get too long.

I would then do a different map for vowels,

but it kinda works the same.

They're either front, or central, or back.

And that's where your entire tongue body is.

Front vowels are things like ee, ay.

The back vowels are things like uh, oh.

And the central vowels sound really weird like i, eh.

When you're making your syllables shape,

this is part of how you give your language a character.

Deciding exactly how the syllables are going to shape up.

What consonant clusters your going to allow or not allow.

In Dothraki there are plenty of consonants,

including the consonants w and q.

'Gawi', I think it actually means bile. [chuckle]

When you turn this into the object of a sentence,

the usual thing that you do is you drop this vowel.

But you cannot in Dothraki end a word

with these two consonants.

It's simply impossible.

So you insert a dummy e vowel

just so that's it's pronounceable.

And that's part of what shapes the character of Dothraki.

You know that you're never ever ever going to see

a word that ends in either of these sounds.

It just can never happen.

Syllables are so important because you're trying

to give a language a sound.

If it could be that any word could fit

into the language, then what does it sound like?

It sounds like anything.

If you're creating a language for a show,

that's what you want them to get the sense of.

That, they can actually hear a word and say

no, that doesn't sound like a Dothraki word

[speaking in Dothraki]

That one sounds weird.

You want them to be able to say that.

Even if they don't know why or how.

When it comes to stress and intonation and also tone,

you have to decide is this language going to be

a stress language or is it going to be a tone language.

English is a stress language,

we have stresses placed in various places.

[hello]

Other languages like Hausa or Mandarin are tone languages.

That is, the actual pitch that you speak

the vowel at is important.

[ni hao]

I've done both, I do syllable mostly

because I'm not convinced that actors will

pull off a tone language correctly.

When you're designing a stress language

there are rules to where certain things are stressed.

So for something like Dothraki

it subverts the expectations, I guess,

of English speakers.

This word. Obviously English speakers are going to

look at that and say whoa, Dothraki, yeah. Simple enough.

In Dóthraki that syllable is stressed,

so it's Dóthraki, Dóthraki.

To be honest, the stress rules are pretty easy

once you get used to them,

so I just memorize them.

Next is grammar. And grammar is something

that we refer to as morphology.

That's how words relate to one another

and set themselves into paradigms.

Every single language on the planet that we know of

makes a distinction between nouns and verbs.

Basically, having nouns versus verbs

as far as we know, is the most

important distinction in language.

When you're creating nouns the thing that you have to decide

is what is going to happen with these nouns.

Do I want to have singular and plural?

Do I want to have a dual or a trial number,

exactly 2 or 3 or something?

Do I want to have nothing?

Do I want to have case?

And if so, which cases? How many?

The last thing is gender.

The gender just refers to what type the noun is.

That can be masculine and feminine,

but it could also be big versus large,

living versus non-living,

natural versus non-natural,

tool versus plant.

That's all something you can decide

as you're building the language.

In High Valyrian, nouns have 4 numbers, 8 cases

and 4 genders.

So you have to know a lot of stuff

to be able to use a noun in High Valyrian.

But, you don't have to use a whole bunch of extra words

like little prepositions and stuff.

It means you have to use fewer words

and your sentences can be shorter.

That's how it works.

Verbs are the most important part of any language

and it's also the part I hate creating the most.

The verb is the engine of the entire grammar.

The can have tense, they can change depending on

who the subject is, or who the object is,

or who the indirect object is.

There are also other parts of speech that

some languages will have.

There are adjectives.

Adverbs can come in 3 different types,

there's manner adverbs, time adverbs, place adverbs.

There's also prepositions.

Plenty of languages have litlle bits that come after words

that are just like prepositions

and they're called postpositions.

Japanese has postpositions and so does High Valyrian.

Determiners are little words that give you

more specificity about the noun.

Demonstratives give you a little bit more

local information.

In Dothraki there's actually 3 different ones.

There's this close to you,

there's that close to the person you're talking to,

and then there's that, way over there

that's close to nobody.

Nouns, verbs and all of those extra parts,

all of that together is what comprises the grammar.

When it comes to sentence structure,

the first thing that you have to do is

figure out what the order of the major elements

in your sentence is going to be.

For example the sentence the man sees the woman.

It's the subject first, then the verb, sees,

then the object is the woman.

So, the man sees the woman.

In High Valyrian, it's a little different.

You start with the subject again, Vala, that's the man.

And then you put the object, ábre, and that's the woman.

And then finally the verb, urnes, sees.

It's subject, object, verb.

After you decide on your basic word order

for basic sentences, then you have to move on

to other types of sentences.

For example, questions.

So vala ábre urnes is the man sees the woman.

But if you wanted to turn that into a question,

vala ábre urnes?, Does the man see the woman?

You don't actually change the word order,

you don't add another word in High Valyrian,

you just change the intonation.

When you're creating a language,

this is your way to demonstrate

exactly how your language works differently from English.

It's really cool to come up with a really cool

and fun and interesting and quirky grammar,

but if every single thing is just word for word

exactly as English is, right in a row,

then you haven't really done anything very interesting.

The next step would be derivation.

We have for example the verb teach

and we have teacher.

One obviously came after the other.

That is what's known as derivation.

And you can do that with your language as well

and it's probably a good idea.

To give you an example, in High Valyrian

there's a word jelmio.

Jelmio is a word for wind, but then when it came time

to come up with a word for storm,

I could've made a brand new word.

You can obviously see that they're not related in English,

there's wind and storm.

But I thought, well, it'd be fun to actually

make this word a derivation of another word.

So I started with jelmio which is the word for wind.

And so from jelmio, we get jelmāzma.

Jelmāzma is like a big wind, or a great wind.

And that is the word that's used for storm.

And then this is how I actually made

Daenerys's last name.Jelmāzmo.

Jelmāzmo is kind of like of the storm.

And that's how you get the idea of Daenerys Stormborn.

Up next are miscellaneous categories.

One of the things that you'll, of course

have to eventually run into

when it comes to creating a language

is the number system.

First, is the number system going to be base 10 or not.

In English, there's a big stop kind of like a 10,

then at 20, then 30, then 40 and 50 and so on.

Not all languages are like that.

For example, if you have a base 8 number system,

what is written 1 2 is not actually twelve,

in fact it is ten.

When you're creating a writing system,

a unique writing system for your language

you get to decide is this thing going to be

an alphabet, an abjad, a syllabery,

like an abugida, or is it going to be

something that's more glyph based like a logography.

In an alphabet you have unique characters

for vowels and consonants.

In an abjad you only have unique characters

for consonants and that's it.

In something like an abugida you have

a main glyph for a consonant and then

some sort of little addition for a vowel.

And then in a logography you'll have

glyphs that stand for entire words

or parts of words or maybe more than one word

depending on exactly how it works.

The last step to creating a new language

is the lexicon.

The lexicon is all of the words of a language.

Bear in mind that a language like

English or French or German,

languages like these have thousands upon thousands of words.

My largest language, Dothraki has 4000 words.

And I put a lot of work into it.

It takes a long long time to create

thousands upon thousands of words.

So, basically when it comes to the lexicon,

when you're to that point, your going to be

working on a language for the rest of your life.

But, you know, it's a lot of fun.

You can really start wherever you want.

Think about, say for example, a scenario.

Riding a horse, starting a fire.

And think about what goes into that scenario.

What's happening. And what will the speakers

of this language have words for

with respect to that scenario.

There are so many possibilities in front of you

you can just spend days doing this.

Everything that I create goes into a full

reference grammar and dictionary document.

Everything is written down so that

if somebody else needed to figure this out,

they could figure it out.

If you want to make your own language,

and you want to get really good at it,

certainly you can study linguistics.

You could also study many other languages.

But when you study languages, don't study related languages.

So, it's cool to study French and Italian and Spanish.

It's better for you as a language creator to study

French and Japanese and Turkish.

Languages that are totally unrelated.

This is going to help give you a much better idea

of exactly how languages can be different.

I don't have a favorite word in anything. In anything!

In any and all languages I've created

or any and all languages I've studied.

If you want to know an interesting word though,

and it doesn't matter what the language is,

look up the word for butterfly.

They always have really really weird and

bizarre etymologies. It never fails.