29.1422, A History of Pop Culture ConLangs Part III: Dothraki, Valyrian, and How a Language Becomes its World (and People)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-29-1422. Mon Apr 02 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.1422, A History of Pop Culture ConLangs Part III: Dothraki, Valyrian, and How a Language Becomes its World (and People)

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Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2018 14:41:19
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: A History of Pop Culture ConLangs Part III: Dothraki, Valyrian, and How a Language Becomes its World (and People)

 
Part III: Dothraki, Valyrian, and… Indo-European? How Language Becomes Its
World (And People)

Welcome to part III of our series on fictional constructed languages, which is
part of this year’s Fund Drive theme, linguistics and pop culture.
ConLangs—and we do mean languages constructed for creative fiction, not
languages like Esperanto designed for the real world—have contributed to
popular culture in rich and varied and sometimes really weird ways. We started
with Part I, which briefly covered J.R.R. Tolkien’s Quenya as one of the
world’s first prominent creatively constructed language, focusing on the
real-world linguistic influences. Part II got a little lengthier in an attempt
to examine how creative linguists use phonology to create a range of
human-like and non-human-like effects in the creation of “alien” languages for
Science Fiction. 

Now welcome to Part III, where we’ll try to cover some of the aspects of the
world’s newest wave of influential ConLangs, specifically focusing on what we
think is probably today’s most popular ConLangs, Dothraki and Valyrian and the
role of languages and multilingualism in fictional worlds. 
This blog is dark and full of spoilers!

Still with us? Okay.

Dothraki and Valyrian are the show’s most prominent ConLangs, and both of them
are used by one of the series’ main protagonists, Daenerys Targaryen, who has
a lot of titles. 
George R. R. Martin’s fantasy books do not have a usable language in them,
despite the many other ways in which the epic series takes its cues from the
works of J.R.R. Tolkien (either by means of inevitable cultural assimilation
that happens with such influential works as Lord of the Rings, or by
intentional subversion.) A few Dothraki words, like Khal and its feminine
variant Khaleesi, did, however, appear in the books and provide the base for
linguist David J. Peterson’s development of the language. Peterson not only
worked with the existing words and utterances from the books, but developed
the language to be easily pronounceable for the actors—it had to sound
convincingly foreign to a primarily English-speaking audience, but also sound
natural and fluent in the mouths of mostly L1 English speakers. The Language
Creation Society, of which Peterson is a member, now has a page devoted to
Dothraki which you can check out here:
https://www.tor.com/2010/04/22/creating-dothraki-an-interview-with-david-j-pet
erson-and-sai-emrys/ 

In terms of phonology, the most salient element of a ConLang to the audience,
we find some interesting features. Those stops, nasals, and laterals that
would be alveolar in English are instead dental—a small adjustment that for
most of the audience may invoke the sound of Spanish. Peterson did include
very un-English-like phonemes, like a uvular stop, and a velar fricative, and
there is both an alveolar stop and a trill (but no English-like rhotic!) This
phonological make-up is probably what prompted Peterson himself to describe
Dothraki as evoking both Spanish and Arabic, in an interview which you can
read here:
https://www.tor.com/2010/04/22/creating-dothraki-an-interview-with-david-j-pet
erson-and-sai-emrys/

Aspirated stops may occur but not contrastively, and there’s geminates of just
about every consonant, including geminate fricatives like /xx/ and /θθ/. That
one is really smart, in my opinion—typologically rare, (especially as a
geminate!) but still no challenge for the actors. Peterson also took
phonological rules into account, devising, for example, regular place
assimilation among vowels under the influence of neighboring consonants.
Honestly, spoken Dothraki just sounds really cool. 
It’s also an interesting point of comparison with Klingon—probably both
fictional cultures can be said to be based on some of the same literary and
pop-cultural tropes, and they manifest in some of the same ways. I’d be
willing to bet any fictional language invented by English-speakers for an
English-speaking audience intended for use by warlike cultures has velar
fricatives in it; I don’t know why and it’s only a casual observation. (Quick!
I need a sociolinguist to survey ConLangs phonology for velar fricatives.)
Perhaps that sound strikes English speakers as sufficiently foreign and
sufficiently “guttural,” (but still sufficiently pronounceable) for use in a
language intended to come off as harsh and powerful. But Dothraki is very much
a human language and it has a pleasantly even consonant space—no weird, alien
gaps like we found in Klingon. 

Dothraki’s syntax is equally rich and interesting. It’s a highly inflectional
language with five cases, including nominative, accusative, genitive,
allative, and ablative, as well as three tenses and two different imperatives.
(The Dothraki and a very imperative people.) 

And there’s an archaic participle. There’s actually a lot of thought put into
the diachrony of Dothraki, including archaic spellings that reflect older
pronunciations—Dothraki has no bilabial stops (they’ve lenited to labiodental
fricatives) but some words, particularly names, are still spelled with
Romanize p and b or bh. The regular irregularities produced by diachrony are
one of the most persuasive and inventive aspects of fictional languages to me,
because it means the creator imagined a history for his language. Like the
world it exists in, there’s more to Dothraki than a snapshot of its synchrony.
It creates the impression that this world and its languages have existed for a
long time before now, not just as stories. 

But this has already gotten long! Let’s talk about Valyrian so we can talk
about Daenerys so we can talk about the rest!

High Valyrian was also developed by David J. Peterson, and the first thing I
learned about it when reading for this blog post was that it has derivative
variants. Peterson is no slouch. (Also the variants are mentioned in the
books.) Valyrian has plenty of phonological overlap with Dothraki as one would
expect, and also, joyously, contact phenomena—Dothraki loanwords have resulted
in the introduction of those fantastic Dothraki fricatives /x/ and /θ/
mentioned earlier. The phonological inventory of Valyrian is larger in general
than that of Dothraki, with a full series of labials (except /f/, basically),
including nasals, a full series of alveolars including contrastive voiced and
voiceless trills (cool), all the way back to uvulars and glottals. The vowel
system involves six major vowels /i, e, o, a, u, y/ (Dothraki had four, /i, e,
o, a,/ not including the allophonic alternations), and contrastive vowel
length. Like Dothraki, Valyrian has a well-thought-out diachrony, and the
front rounded series /y/ and /y:/ in High Valyrian are no longer pronounced as
such in its descendant variants. Like Latin, High Valyrian no longer has
native speakers in Essos and Westeros, although Daenerys does call it her
“mother tongue,” before ordering her dragons to roast a guy. In Astapori
Valyrian (one of the variants), the length contrast in vowels in gone. 

Valyrian has four grammatical numbers—singular, plural, paucal, and
collective—eight noun classes, and four grammatical genders. According to
Peterson, who talks about Valyrian grammar in this exceedingly interesting
discussion on Dothraki.com
(http://www.dothraki.com/2013/04/perzo-vujita/#comment-1391), the genders are
called vēzenkor qogror “solar class”, hūrenkor qogror “lunar class” tegōñor
qogror “terrestrial class” embōñor qogror “aquatic class,” and most animate
nouns wind up in the solar or lunar genders while others wind up in the
aquatic and terrestrial genders—the names of the genders are prototypical
members of each. He described gender as phonologically predictable generally,
but also being influenced by the derivational properties of the Bantu
languages. 
There is an enormous amount more that can be said about the very complex and
fascinating structure of Valyrian, and it’s one of the most developed
fictional ConLangs we have ever seen. But I really want to get to how these
languages interact with the worlds and the people they are used by because
that is, after all, what makes language come alive. 

Like J.R.R. Tolkien, Peterson designed his languages with a view to the people
who would be speaking them, their world, their history, their philosophy. The
depth of their complexity and the sense of history and development and change
over time is what makes them feel like lived-in languages for real people.
Daenerys Targaryen, one of the main protagonists, ends up using both of them,
as well as the Westeros common language (English, functionally.) As a member
of the ruling class (well, sort of, her family has been ousted at the
beginning of the series), Daenerys is educated in Valyrian, but for her, it’s
more than that—she’s descended from the rulers of Old Valyria and regards
Valyrian as her mother tongue (in season 3, episode 4, an Astapori Valyrian
speaking slaver insults her in Valyrian while conducting a deal with her, only
to have her declare herself and her lineage, and, as previously mentioned,
command her dragons to barbecue him. He deserved it.) She also teaches her
dragons to respond to commands like “dracarys!” which means “dragonfire.” (Or,
more pragmatically, “barbecue him.”) 

Daenerys identifies with the language of her heritage, which is also the
language of her name, and that’s interesting to me. Language plays a part, not
only in the plot (as mentioned above) but in the characterization of the
people who carry out the plot, and none more than Daenerys. She goes through a
lot during the course of her story, not least of which is being married off to
the Dothraki Khal Drogo as part of a political move. As her character
develops, she learns to cope with the extreme distress and trauma of her life,
becomes more and more empowered, and begins acquiring the Dothraki language.
While still regarding Valyrian as her language. Her process of acculturation
within the Dothraki is a major part of her arc, and is portrayed in the books
and TV show alongside her becoming more and more fluent in Dothraki. By the
current point in both the show and the books, she’s one of the most powerful
political players, most realized and human characters, and fluently
multilingual. She’s a perfect example of the way that language can add depth
to a fictional character as much as it adds depth to a fictional world. 

Today, ConLanging, casual and professional, is more popular than ever. If you
follow Steve the Vagabond and Silly Linguist on social media (and you should,
for a good laugh) you will have seen snippets of Atlaans, a Germanic-based
ConLang invented as the mother-tongue for an alternate linguistic history of
the world (check it out here: http://sillylinguistics.com/atlaans/) There’s
plenty of alternate-history ConLangs, but I have already promised that
ConLangs intended for the real world are not my subject here… except if you
create an alternate history language that is also part of a work of fiction.

Having already talked at length about books, movies, and TV shows, I think
it’s time to bring up the latest world-building venture that involves
ConLanging: video games. Far Cry Primal, by Ubisoft, released in 2016 and
involves a ConLang called “Wenja,” developed by University of Kentucky
assistant professors Andrew and Brenna Byrd, which is spoken by the
inhabitants of a prehistoric world from thousands of years ago.
Indo-Europeanist Andrew Byrd described Wenja as like Proto-PIE, (link here:
https://linguistics.as.uky.edu/uk-professors-go-primal-far-cry) something that
might  have been used thousands of years before PIE is hypothesized to have
been spoken. Not much is said in the interview about the mechanics of Wenja,
except that it had to have been pretty much imagined, and they developed a
very robust vocabulary that could easily suffice for a real-world
language-user. But the language, according to its creators, didn’t feel alive
until Brenna Byrd began teaching it to the actors. Who began using it and
practicing it among themselves, and inventing cries and greetings to fit in
the game. Andrew and Brenna Byrd managed to find the meeting place between a
totally fictional language for a totally fictional world and a hypothetical
language that could have existed in the real world, which is amazing on its
own. But it wasn’t until it was deployed among real speakers that it was
electrified to life.

What I think is important about ConLangs, specifically fictional ones, and the
reason I am so interested in them, is what they represent. ConLangs created to
fill the lives and form the expressions of fictional people who live in
imagined worlds, are in a way representative of how we imagine our
relationship with language in the real world. That gets reflected in the way
that fictional languages can become integral both to their worlds and to their
speakers’ identities. They come to life in the hands of real speakers, and
carry with them a sense of the history that has led the world and its people,
even up to individuals like the initially-unassuming Daenerys.
As everyone knows, there’s a lot of trouble in the world. But it’s not all
trouble out there, and it’s worth thinking about that today more than ever,
creators are invested in talking about what it means to communicate with each
other. What it means for peoples and cultures and individuals to cross and
recross language boundaries. They are invested in creating rich and diverse
worlds full of people who have their own individual and cultural relationships
with the very concept of human communication. And that’s pretty neat. 

Well, this has been way longer than we ever intended it to be. There’s too
much interesting stuff to talk about with language, and it turned out there
were a lot more fictional languages than I ever could have covered! 

If you enjoyed this series, please support us here at the LINGUIST List by
donating here: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/ 

This series was written as part of our Fund Drive’s focus on language and
linguistics in media and pop culture. We work hard to help provide a space for
linguistic resources. Thanks so much for being with us all these years! 
--The LL team







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