10. The Dothraki Language Is Much Bigger Than You Might Expect
There's a lot of different languages spoken across the Narrow Sea which all depart from your regular English for geeky, article-based purposes, let's call it Westerosi and none is more popular than Dothraki. Nothing gets across the idea of fish-out-of-water and foreign exoticism faster than a new language, so when it came time to script Dany's escapades, it was clear that the horsemen's language would have to be realised in its full form. To that end, Benioff and Weiss set up a contest among linguists and saw David J. Peterson co-founder of the Language Creation Society crowned the winner. This means that Peterson's job, among others, was to give these quasi-Mongols their own mother tongue. And what a job he did he's on 3000 words as it stands (and still no word for thank you), and has managed to stuff references to his wife and cat into the lexicon. Confused? Peterson's wife is called Erin, and the verb 'to be good' in Dothraki is Erinat. Erinak also means kind lady, and his cat, Okeo is immortalised in the language as the Dothraki word for friend. There's also cultural idioms (the way to ask how somebody is in Dothraki is to ask whether they ride well, and telling them to hunt well constitutes a goodbye. On top of this, he also has to work around all the actors occasionally getting it wrong (something Iain Glen apparently did) and create new grammar rules to account for them, meaning that by the end of filming series one he was ready to stove Jason Momoa's head in. Well, he could try the man's built like a truck. A
shirtless truck. He also created Valyrian, in both High Valyrian and it's Astapori dialect. While it's not as extensive as Dothraki they've used the latter far more than the former thus far there's still 667 High Valyrian words and counting, and double the pronounciations and grammar changes once you take the dialects into account.