Languages

Throughout A Song of Ice and Fire, numerous cultural and regional dialects are discussed. These dialects form the known world's spoken tongue, and help define its people.

Languages of Westeros

The Old Tongue was the language of the First Men, who dominated Westeros for thousands of years. Today, the Old Tongue is still remembered by giants and some free folk who live beyond the Wall, but most people within the Seven Kingdoms know no other language than the Common Tongue. Although the Common Tongue has minor variations and regional accents, Dornishmen can communicate with northmen without difficulty. Foreign tongues are taught in the Citadel and by maesters, or are brought from other lands by immigrants, merchants, sellswords, and the like.

Languages of Essos

Many languages exist in Essos, the continent across the narrow sea.

• High Valyrian, the language of the old Valyrian Freehold, is learned by well-educated men across many of its former territories and beyond. In the four centuries since Valyria's destruction, everyday use led the language spoken in different former provinces to grow into a dozen bastardized dialects from the Free Cities to Slaver's Bay, known as "Low Valyrian". Each Free City's dialect is on its way to be a separate language, but someone who is fluent in High Valyrian can communicate well enough.
• The Dothraki language is the tongue of the Dothraki, the indigenous inhabitants of the Dothraki sea.
• Lhazareen is described as singsong.
• Old Ghiscari is a largely extinct tongue. It was spoken five thousand years ago by the Ghiscari people of the Old Empire of Ghis, which was destroyed by the Valyrian Freehold. A mongrel tongue blending High Valyrian and Old Ghiscari is now the predominant language of Slaver's Bay. though Old Ghiscari is still spoken by some, and engraved Ghiscari glyphs can be found on various old objects.
• The Summer Tongue is used in the Summer Isles.
• The Ibbenese language is a "guttural, grunting tongue" spoken by the Ibbenese in Ibben and northern Essos.
• The speech of Asshai can be used in spells.
• The trade talk is a coarse argot that has developed across most of the world's major ports, using words from a dozen languages (many of them insults) and hand gestures.
• The Rhoynish language was spoken by the Rhoynar. The Red Princes of Dorne attempted to outlaw its use after their migration to Westeros, but it is said that the orphans of the Greenblood continue to speak it in private.

Non-Human Communication

• The children of the forest speak and sing in the True Tongue, and have taught it to some ravens.
• The Others' language is described as sounding like cracking of ice on a winter lake. In Game of Thrones it is named Skroth.

Portrayal

Unlike J. R. R. Tolkien, who created entire languages with grammar, syntax, and tenses, George R. R. Martin has created only a few words from each language in his world, and his languages are not conveyed in any great detail. Instead, the tongue in which they are speaking is noted but rendered in English, with added characteristics and flavor portrayed through out the text. As Martin explained,

Tolkien was a philologist, and an Oxford don, and could spend decades laboriously inventing Elvish in all its detail. I, alas, am only a hardworking SF and fantasy novel, and I don't have his gift for languages. That is to say, I have not actually created a Valyrian language. The best I could do was try to sketch in each of the chief tongues of my imaginary world in broad strokes, and give them each their characteristic sounds and spellings.

David J. Peterson developed spoken Dothraki and High Valyrian for HBO's television adaptation, Game of Thrones. The languages expand greatly from Martin's few created words. A website, dothraki.org, helps teach and spread the constructed tongues. The popularity of the Dothraki language has led it to be called "the new Klingon".

Peterson was given considerably leeway, as he was not strictly hired as linguist for just TV adaptations but also for place name adaptations used in The Lands of Ice and Fire map book. He worked on these projects in consultation with Martin, thus several worldbuilding points about how languages are related to each other might be regarded as semi-canon.

Peterson inferred that the Dothraki and Lhazareen share common ancestry, given that the Lhazareen are said to closely resemble the Dothraki but are generally shorter. Thus he developed an outline for an ancestral "Proto-Plains" language which their current languages branched off from. Peterson likened the relationship between Dothraki and Lhazareen to the difference between English and Swedish.

Similarly, Peterson developed an outline for how the different Low Valyrian dialects that diverged from High Valyrian are related to each other, much like how the real-life Romance languages diverged from classical Latin. There are three broad groupings or branches:

• Ghiscari Low Valyrian (or Eastern Low Valyrian) - spoken in Slaver's Bay, and thus the only branch Peterson was able to develop for Game of Thrones itself. This group was heavily influenced by the extinct Old Ghiscari language.
• Southern Low Valyrian - spoken in the southern Free Cities, from Volantis to Myr. These dialects are the least divergent from High Valyrian, and fairly similar to each other.
• Northern Low Valyrian - spoken in the northern Free Cities, which due to their geographic isolation at the distant frontier of the Valyrian Freehold and disparate origins are quite divergent from High Valyrian as well as from each other. Norvos, Qohor, and Lorath were founded by religious dissidents from Valyria who struck out on their own, Pentos had strong influence from local Andals; most of all, Braavos was founded by a hodge-podge of escaped slaves taken to Valyria from across the world and thus had many disparate influences (thus while Volantene is closest to High Valyrian, Braavosi is the most divergent).

Peterson also made a brief outline for Old Tongue, a thin gloss for a simplified version spoken by the Giants called "Mag Nuk". Peterson actually developed a fairly detailed version of the language used by the Children of the Forest, originally meant to be used in Game of Thrones Season 6 but which ultimately never appeared on-screen.

Peterson continued to expand on High Valyrian for House of the Dragon - and starting in its first season also developed a complex glyph writing system that appears on-screen.

External links

• Language Invention Wiki - devoted to the conlangs developed by David J. Peterson