Meet Dothraki

Dothraki is the language of the horse-riding people of the grass sea in Game of Thrones. You met it briefly in Constructed Languages 5 as an example of a language made for a screen. In this course you learn how it works: its sounds, its nouns and cases, its verbs and finally whole sentences. This first chapter explains where Dothraki came from, how much of it is official and how this course writes and marks its examples.

Where Dothraki Comes From

When HBO began making Game of Thrones, its producers needed a real spoken language for the Dothraki. They turned to the Language Creation Society, and the job went to David J. Peterson. Martin's novels give very little to work with: one account counts just 56 Dothraki words, 24 of them names, and Peterson himself has spoken of about fifty words and phrases. What the books do contain is a description of how the language sounds and the names, and Peterson has said these strongly shaped the sound system he built.

The language also had to be usable by actors. Peterson aimed to keep it pronounceable and learnable, because performers needed to say it convincingly on screen. His inspirations, according to published accounts, included Russian, Turkish, Estonian, Inuktitut and Swahili; Peterson has also said that to him Dothraki sounds like a mixture of Arabic and Spanish. That last remark is his impression of the sound, not a claim that Dothraki was built on those languages.

How Big Is It?

The size of the vocabulary depends on when you ask, because it has grown over time. The numbers below are dated reports, not one authoritative count.

What Counts as Official

Because Dothraki grew in stages, a form can have different standing. This course tells you which kind you are looking at wherever it can:

• From the novels: words and names that Martin wrote, such as khal and khalasar (the words, as Martin spelled them).
• Heard on the show: lines Peterson wrote for the scripts, including the phrases below.
• In the published book or Peterson's own posts: forms and words that he gave in print or online.
• Community-built: words invented by learners to fill the gaps (the vocabulary was designed for the show's world, so there is little for modern everyday life).

Your First Phrases

Here are phrases to recognise by sight now. You do not need to analyse them yet; the parts are explained in later chapters. The English meanings are the glosses Peterson gave.

You will also see khal and khalasar. In the show a khal is a Dothraki leader and a khalasar is his people, a group of Dothraki riders. These meanings come from how the words are used in the show; this course will check them against the dictionary when it reaches nouns in Chapter 3.

Writing Dothraki

Dothraki is written here in the Latin alphabet, the form used in the novels and in learner materials. In the story, the Dothraki do not write. Chapter 2 explains the sounds and the spelling in detail.

The word-for-word glosses on the right are a first guess at how the parts fit together; Chapters 4 and 5 will show the real structure.

How This Course Is Organised

The ten chapters move from the bottom up: sounds and spelling (Chapter 2), nouns and gender (3), cases (4), pronouns and possessives (5), verbs (6 and 7), adjectives and numbers (8), sentences and phrases (9), and reading real passages (10). Every example is given with a gloss. At the end of each chapter the forms used are listed, so you can check them in the dictionary and Peterson's own notes.

Hands-On Exercises