David J. Peterson: Hollywood Language Creator (Game of Thrones, Dune, Thor: Dark World)

David J. Petersen is an American linguist and language creator. He has studied over 20 "Earth" languages, and created more than 40 artificial languages for TV and movies, including Dothraki and Valyrian for HBO's hit show Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.

Additionally, David has created the languages for Thor: The Dark World, Dune, The Witcher, House Of The Dragon, Syfy's Defiance, CW's Star-Crossed and The 100, Dominion, Penny Dreadful, The Shannara Chronicles, Warcraft: the Beginning, Doctor Strange, and Emerald City, to name a few.

He is the author of Living Language Dothraki and The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves to Sand Worms, the Words Behind World-Building. David’s work is featured in the documentary Conlanging: The Art of Crafting Tongues, and he is the co-founder of the Language Creation Society.

Episode Highlights

Step into the intricate world of language creation with our special guest, David Peterson, an acclaimed writer and linguist with a fascinating journey that includes the mastery of more than 20 languages. Peterson unveils the richness and complexity of his craft, painting a vivid picture of language creation as an art form. We unmask the methodical magic of shaping a language from scratch, focusing on the essentials of vocabulary development, internal consistency, and the evolution of grammar.

Peterson also shares his experiences from the heart of the film industry, shedding light on the painstaking process of crafting languages for the big screen and the pursuit of authenticity at its core. We delve into the pressures of language creation for the fast-paced world of television and film, with its tight deadlines and the necessity for compromise. From battling writer's block to discussing career advice for aspiring language creators, we cover it all. We draw the curtain with a look at the Language Creation Society's jobs board and the importance of early language education. So, join us and immerse yourself in the awe-inspiring domain of language creation, where art and linguistics collide in a symphony of words!

We cover a lot of fascinating topics in this episode including:

• JRR Tolkien's contribution to modern language creation

• The workflow of sound development between himself and Hollywood show creators

• Winning a language creation contest to land his first job with Game of Thrones

• The linguistic rules and framework for creating a "realistic" fake language, and what makes a made-up movie language sound fake

• Why language creation is living art that is never finished

• Why the languages from Star Wars were all "crappily" done

• The process of teaching an actor how to speak a new language

• The Game of Thrones character he thinks speaks the best Valyrian

Listen

Read the Complete Transcript

Shane

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the official Live2cre8 podcast, coming to you from Nashville, Tennessee. I am your host, Shane Almgren, and I am joined today from California by writer, linguist, and president of the Language Creation Society, David Peterson. David is responsible for creating the Dothraki and Valerian languages on HBO's hit show Game of Thrones, the Dark Elves language in the movie Thor: The Dark World, as well as multiple alien languages on the Syfy Channel's TV series Defiance.

Well, first off, thank you very much for coming on the show. It is an honor to have you here.

David Peterson

Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Shane

I wanted to just dive right in. How does somebody get into this in the first place?

David Peterson

Language creators come to it in a number of different ways. Before it was popularly known due to Game of Thrones and things like Avatar, usually you came to it by one of two or three different avenues. One was reading Tolkien, for example. A lot of people came to language creation by reading Tolkien and discovering in his appendices that he had created languages, and so they wanted to do the same. Others came to it to study Esperanto, where they learned about a newly created language that everybody was speaking and then thought, “Well, maybe I can do a little bit better job than Esperanto.” Others just came to it through language study, or even just as kids.

A number just started creating languages on their own as a kid, just for fun, and then they kept up with it for the next 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, or 60 years, depending on how long they kept up with it. In my case, it was kind of a combination of studying Esperanto and also studying linguistics in other languages, where I figured that Esperanto was fine for a language created for international communication, but I thought wouldn't it be fun to create a language that was just for my personal use, not for anybody else to use? I just hit upon that idea my second year of college, and as soon as the idea came to me, I started creating a language immediately, and I haven't let up since. It's been about 16 years now, I guess.

Shane

Is there an official or technical term for someone who creates languages or for the languages that they come up with?

David Peterson

Well, in the OED, the term we have is conlanger. So conlang is a language. I'm sorry, is a word that means—it's a shortening of constructed language. It was originally fashioned to come up with a name for the listserv where conlangers hang out. It just needed something short and snappy—that would be conlang@blank.com or whatever. And so they came up with that, and then people started using the term, and so now it's kind of a productive term. So, a conlang is a constructed language that you create. Conlanging is the activity, and somebody who does it is a conlanger.

Shane

And when you started coming up with these languages by yourself—you know, the purpose of language is for us to communicate with other people. Did you have to convince somebody else to learn this so you guys could speak in it, or was it just enough for you to know that you had created this foreign tongue?

David Peterson

Yeah, initially, I think my idea was that I could get my girlfriend to speak it and that we would speak it together, but that was foolish. [Laughs]. First of all, learning a language is a difficult endeavor enough. It's an entirely different can of worms to learn an entirely new language where you don't even have any cognates to go off of. So that wasn't going to happen. But really, though, I look at language creation—and have for quite some time—simply as an art form. So it's not really the point to speak the language. It's the point to have created it and then for others to kind of examine it, to see the choices that were made when we created the language. Why we did one thing over another, and to kind of gain a certain sense of appreciation, the same way one does when listening to a song or watching a movie, where at the end of it you just think, “Wow, that was different; it was new in some ways, familiar in other ways. It was kind of cool. It made my life a little better.”

Shane

So, you're looking at the communication aspect of it as sort of secondary, and the beauty is in the artistic creation of the language itself, even if nobody ever uses it.

David Peterson

Yeah, it's not—I don't know. This isn't the same for all language creators, but for me, it's not really important to me if anybody uses a language or not, or any of the languages I've created. If they do, that's great, but if not, it's fine. It doesn't really matter to me. I don't use it myself very much, aside from translating stuff for shows. Certainly, I'm not trying to learn them. It would be far too difficult an enterprise.

Shane

Do you speak any other—let's call them earth languages—besides English?

David Peterson

I grew up with English and Spanish in my home, and then I started studying languages seriously when I was a senior in high school. I studied over 20 of them. At the moment, I'm trying to learn Finnish—not necessarily to fluency, but at least to conversational fluency.

Shane

How does Finnish compare difficulty-wise with English?

David Peterson

It's not too bad, honestly. There's one trick that you have to get over, which is learning about how cases work, because Finnish has a ton of cases and you need to learn them in different ways using a language. But if you've already gotten over that hump, having studied something like Latin or Russian or something, it's really not too bad. Actually, the verbs are quite a bit easier, like comparing an English speaker learning Spanish. I think an English speaker will have an easier time with the verbs of Finnish than Spanish, simply because there's a lot less going on there. There's a lot less junk, I guess, morphological junk you have to memorize. A little bit easier, I think.

Shane

When you come up with a new language, do you just come up with the words as they're spoken, or do you also come up with the written alphabets and symbols?

David Peterson

It depends. So, for something like Dothraki on Game of Thrones, they are canonically not supposed to have a written form with their language, so doing so wouldn't be appropriate at all. But then, you know, sometimes it is, and I don't get to, like I haven’t been able to convince HBO to let me create the writing system for High Valyrian yet, even though we know that there is supposed to be one in the books. And then sometimes I do get to, like on Defiance, I created four languages and four writing systems. It's just tremendous. I created a writing system for the language I created for Star-Crossed and two new writing systems for two new languages I'm working on for a movie that is not yet in production.

Shane

This is a two-part question. One is: How do you determine—when you're creating a new language, how do you determine what it sounds like? And then, how does the sound, or is it the sound that affects the actual written word and what it looks like? What considerations are you thinking about there?

David Peterson

Answer to the second question first. First, there's no connection between the sound and the written form for any language, really. But for how it sounds, it depends whether I'm doing it for myself or whether I'm doing it for a television show or a movie. For the latter, it's kind of a negotiation process, because how the language sounds just impressionistically is something that's going to be very important to whoever hires me—definitely much more important than what the grammar is like. They will probably never even take a look at that.

So, I usually ask them a bunch of questions with kind of what they were expecting, what they were thinking of, and how they would like the language to sound. They usually respond in very impressionistic ways, not in very technical ways, and I take that. I translate it into a sound sample, just a fake sentence with fake words that are going to more or less have the kind of sound that I'm imagining, and then I record that. I send it back to them, and I see if we need to do any tweaking—if it sounds just right to them or if they're imagining something a little different. Sometimes it's right on. Sometimes it needs to go through three or four iterations till we get something that they're happy with, and then, once I do get something that they're happy with, I use that as a model and then build out the phonology from there.

Shane

How does one—I mean, I don't think that language creation is something that one does a lot of personal marketing for. So how do you get your foot in the door in Hollywood for this? Are there casting calls, or did someone just reach out to you? How did that happen?

David Peterson

For Game of Thrones, which was my first show, there was—the producers reached out ultimately to the Language Creation Society, who then hosted a contest that they announced to all of the language creation communities online, so anybody who saw the announcement could apply if they wanted to. There were about 40 or so that expressed interest and ultimately 30 or so that turned in applications for the first round, and then that first round was whittled down to five finalists, and then of the five finalists, the producers chose my proposal. So that was how I got the job on Game of Thrones, and ever since then, it's always just been, “Well, you're the guy from Game of Thrones, please create the language for us,” which is nice, but it's not ideal, and it's also not—I mean, it's not a model. It's not like you say, “Well, you can break into Hollywood by already having created a language for a world-famous television show.” That's not a path to success. So right now, it's still a question mark, and it's something that I really wonder about and kind of struggle with.

I think that the success of Game of Thrones has been both a tremendous boon to language creators everywhere in just elevating both the status of the art and also the level of awareness that the public has that this is a thing, but I think it also has led to, essentially, productions wanting to reach out to one of a very small number of people. I think, after Game of Thrones is gone in a few years—maybe five, six, seven years from now—people will just think back on Game of Thrones fondly. Maybe there will be another way for new people to break in so that, you know, maybe there will be a way that we can actually get some new talent in, where more producers will be interested in projects and then won’t necessarily have one person that they have to go to in mind. So that's something that I think, as a community, we need to work on so that it's not just the case that one person is doing every job until there are no more jobs, and then there are none.

Shane

Do you do any mentoring, or is there any sort of mentorship program where the people who are very successful can sort of coach up the people that have an interest in this that might not yet be on that level?

David Peterson

I mean, to an extent it was already in place, really, because I was a part of the language creation community and a very active part of it, and I still am, and the only difference is that before Game of Thrones, there was nobody really in that community who was a professional, but even so, within that community, there were those who were better than others, those who had been working longer than others. I mean, that was how I got good at it, because I was like most people—you know, when you try something out for the very first time, I was terrible when I started, but I just learned how to do it better by following the examples of others—those who had been at it for much, much longer than I had and who weren't just better at it, and also who had a better understanding of linguistics than I did at the time. So that community is still in place, and I think that people—our language creators—are learning to get better.

Unfortunately, that's not the solution necessarily, because we have a lot of language creators who are continuing to get better. We have a lot of language creators who, in my estimation, are elite, who are at my level or better, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to get jobs because they're unheard of. And not only that, if people aren't coming to me for a new movie project or a new television show, they're not going to the language creation community. They're not saying, “Okay, well, who else is just as good as him?” They're saying, “Well, who else is available and near at hand, who maybe has heard something about language?” Because they don't really have an appreciation for a very well-created language and just gobbledygook. So that's another piece that's missing. We need to be able to demonstrate that what we're doing—that what a very good language creator can do—is just head and shoulders better than just whatever random gibberish somebody near at hand can put together.

Shane

And I've got a bunch of questions about the actual process of the methodology of that. I know when someone's doing a rapid language immersion, there's like 101 or so words that are essential to every language. You've got some prepositions like “here” and “there” and “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” “we,” pronouns and conjunctions “if,” “ands,” “or,” “but,” and verbs like “to be” and “to have.” So, if you can memorize those hundred or so words right off the bat, then you gradually start picking up vocabulary, and conjugation, and tenses as you go. Do you start something like that as a sort of framework or a common denominator when you're crafting a new language, or what is—what do you start with on the ground floor?

David Peterson

Well, you start with the grammar. The lexicon is something separate. That happens later, but I mean, it's a different endeavor from learning the language. I’ll say that because the method you describe is a good way to learn a language. You learn some very key vocabulary that all languages are going to have and that you use a lot, and then you can use that to branch out. But all of that stuff, I mean, are just tokens ultimately. If you think about—I mean, not all languages are going to have a verb for “to have,” but if you think about a language that does have a verb for “to have” and you learn that, that is great. But it's not like you say, “All right, now I'm going to sit down and create my word for ‘house.’” That doesn't mean anything. What will you have created when you create that term? Is the root there? Is it also going to serve as an infinitive on its own, or is it going to undergo some sort of a modification for being an infinitive? And then how is that infinitive used? And then, when the verb itself is used, is the tense element of the sentence—how is it going to conjugate? Is it going to conjugate? And if it conjugates, is it going to conjugate for the number and person of the subject? The object? What number of tenses are there going to be? Are there going to be different conjugations for different tenses, for different aspects, or for both? And if so, how many? And then how exactly are those going to be used?

So, it doesn't help to start with the words. Rather, you just come up with some basic nouns or verbs, hopefully something that's not too specialized—that isn't going to have too specialized a use. So, for example, usually you won't start with a verb that has a chance to be highly irregular, like “to be” or “to have,” or something that gets used a lot. Rather, you start with something that's really kind of concrete and simple, like—depending on the language—something like “to pick up,” you know. For some languages, that'll be highly used and irregular, but for some, it'll be kind of regular. So, you start with that, and then you start extrapolating.

Okay, what tenses do I want, and how are they going to be reified? You create the system of conjugation, just as with a noun, you create the system of pluralization—if there's going to be one—of case marking, and so forth. And once the system is in place, you can move on to create more words, and you can also figure out if there are going to be irregular words. How are they going to be irregular? Does it make sense to have irregular plurals in this language, or does that not make sense? Does it make sense to have an irregular past tense in this language, or does that not make sense? Will it make more sense to have an irregular future tense, for example? So, you have to start with a system, and then you can move on to the specifics.

Shane

I would guess that this is sort of a rookie mistake. It's what I would do if I was going to start doing a language —is just coming up with a new sound to mirror every English word, and then I would probably just be following the rules of English. But you're not just coming up with new words or translations; you're also coming up with new rules for that particular language.

David Peterson

Yeah, if you do what you described, you're not actually creating a language; you're creating a code for English, just a very peculiar and uncooperative way of speaking English, so it'd be like taking Pig Latin and just jumping it up a notch, I guess. But no, when you're creating a new language, you have to start from the ground up so that every single thing follows from every single other thing, and it has an internal consistency. And I think it is the most important part. Maybe there's going to be something in your language, a structure, that is going to be very similar to English, or very similar to Japanese, or very similar to Turkish, or whatever, but it won't be similar because you copied it from those languages. It'll be similar because it just happened to work out that way, following the internal consistency that you set up for your own language.

And then, most importantly—and this is where you'll actually be able to tell that it's different is some structures are going to be—if you tease them out and look at all their myriad examples, like, say, every place where we use the simple past tense in English, so just the ED form and no other auxiliary. If you look at every single place that's used in English, every single one, you'll find that it matches no other language in the entire world. There's going to be some little corner, some little irregularity, where it's just like, wow, you just have to learn that and know that you do that in English, but it's not going to be the same in any other language on the planet, and that should be true of a language that you create as well. There should be nothing that matches up with 100%.

Shane

How many words do you need to create for a language to be fully functional?

David Peterson

Well, not many. I guess it depends on how you define functionality. If the grammar is in place and the grammar is such that if there were words, you could translate pretty much any sentence, then I would call that language fully functional. It just needs vocabulary. In other words, if you could sit down and translate an entire book and just drop variables in for the words that you don't have, like the nouns and verbs that you don't have, then that language is fully functional.

But at the same time, if you're talking about using the language for everyday use, those words have to be there, and so to that end, I mean, depending if you wanted to use it in a modern-world context, like if you're talking about Dothraki, I don't think it'll ever be fully finished, or at least canonically finished, because there's going to be a bunch of vocabulary that we would need to use in our world that will never be appropriate for that language's fictional context. So, there could only be a finished version of, say, out-of-world, non-canonical Dothraki, where there are Dothraki equivalents for things like television and cell phone, because we talk about those things all the time, if that makes sense.

So, when it comes to just the number of words, you need between like—even if you're somebody who speaks a second language very well but is not fluent, you need at least like 8 to 12,000 words. That's, like, you're operating vocabulary. If you're at a very high level of fluency but non-native and native speakers have a vocabulary that's much larger than that, you know—25 to 50,000 words, depending on the language. Now, to give you kind of a comparison, my largest language by vocabulary size is Dothraki, and it's got 4,000 words. It takes a long time, a long time, to create that vocabulary and to create it authentically so that it's not just that you're just grabbing a random word in the dictionary and rolling the dice with your phonology. You're actually coming up with a realistic etymology for this word. I mean, my goal is to, you know, by the time I'm dead, have 10,000 words for all of my main languages, and to be honest with you, I doubt it's going to happen. It just takes a long time.

Shane

What do you find more fulfilling: to create a new language or to expand on one that's already existing?

David Peterson

Oh, that's actually—that's a really good question that I don't think I've ever been asked before. Shoot, I don't even know if I can compare them. They're both very fulfilling, very satisfying. But I think if I had to choose one, it would actually be the first. It's really—I don't know. I get kind of a greater sense of accomplishment when I take a language that I've already got, and I push it a little bit further. So, it's, like, suddenly it is this much more complete. It's like this area of vocabulary is now described, or it's like I have—I now have a textual example of a very rare type of grammatical construction that I can always go back to and say, “You know, how would you do this?” It’s like, “Well, here's an example.”

I actually find that more satisfying than creating a new language, because when you're creating a new language, I mean, you're generating a lot of stuff—a lot of new stuff—but you're also generating a lot of holes, you know. You look everywhere, and you think about, you know, comparing your older projects that are quite complete, and you're thinking, like, “Oh, god. I don't have this vocabulary and this vocabulary and this vocabulary.” It's like, “Oh, I don't know how to do fractions in this language. That's going to be something I do one day.” And it's just like—so you look at this fledgling thing and see all the imperfections, and it can be just frustrating.

Shane

Well, I think, just as an artistic medium, that's something that's really cool that’s not in other mediums, right? You know, if you paint or if you're a sculptor or you're a musician, at some point, there comes a point where your project is finished, and you go sell it, you hang it on the wall, whatever, but you're not constantly adding to it. This is more, sort of, a living art project in that it's constantly evolving if you choose to work on it.

David Peterson

Yeah, absolutely. Basically, the day that a language is done is the day that a language creator dies. But even then, that just leaves a bunch of material for somebody else who may decide, “Well, I'm going to pick this up and see if I can expand it or maybe change it a little bit,” and then it becomes their project. You know, it has a history, of course, so it's something old and something new, but something that can just keep growing and expanding. But yeah, it's like a language is never done. It's just like the languages we speak on Earth. They're never done. It's like, at what point in time do you say, “Okay, English is done. We don't need more words”? Never. They just keep going forever, and that's cool.

Shane

So, when a director or producer approaches you and they pitch their idea and say we need this language or we need a couple languages—three, four, however many—how long is the actual process from when you're given the assignment to where they have something that they can give to the actors?

David Peterson

Well, it's really—the two endpoints are, you know, my start point and when I'm able to successfully translate the dialogue in a script that I'm given, and ideally, I should get at least three months there. Often, I have less time than that, which is frustrating because then I'll end up with a situation where I've translated stuff and decide later on that I wish I would have done something differently. But unlike the old days, working before—when I was just working for myself—you can't change anything once it's in its canon. That's kind of a bummer, but that's about how long it takes me.

I really think that the process can be improved, and, you know, language creators are going to hate to do this. We're very much like writers. We like to keep control over everything that we do. But I think that the process could be improved by having lots of language creators working on the same project. First of all, I think everything could happen quicker, just as long as you had a project manager who could say for certain what the direction of the language is going to be. Second, it'd just be easier to generate vocabulary, so that could happen quicker, and you could get to the translation process quicker. And third, there comes a certain point where it doesn't matter, like, how much money somebody could offer me. There's a certain point where it's just too much work. Where, you know, they'll say, “Okay.”

Like, say they wanted to do one of these Star Wars movies and do them well, as opposed to do them crappily, which is the way they've always done them with respect to language, you know, and they say, “All right, we're going to see between 15 and 17 different alien species, and we want languages for each of them. Not only that, we want different dialects for alien species A, which is going to show up on this planet here, and alien species B, which is—or alien species A, is going to show up in another scene, but they're from a different part of their world. They should be speaking, you know, a different dialect or maybe a different language from their planet.” That's just something that one person can't do. It would take years to be able to do that. But if you had a team of language creators —

Shane

— That's what I was just going to ask. Go ahead and run with that thought. That's what I was just going to ask you about. Go ahead.

David Peterson

Right. Yeah, that's something that you could do, like if you had a studio. I always thought if we could do things like, you know, the Jim Henson Creature Shop, where you could actually produce, like, you know, five to ten fully fleshed-out languages, and you could do it in a short amount of time, and I think the payoff for this is going to be for the fans because, I mean, ultimately, what the director of a movie cares about—they care that it sounds good on screen, and then when it's done, it's done. But if you move beyond that and look at the franchise, I mean, there's so many people that were excited about the gibberish that's in Star Wars that they put up, you know, their sketches online and tried to make the garbage and the language.

I mean, what if they were actually fully-fleshed out languages? Like, the new Star Wars movie comes out, and there are ten new languages, and each one of them starts out with, like, 3,000 words of vocabulary. I mean, the fans would go nuts for that, and, you know, you could market it straight off the bat too. You could sell guides for it the day the movie comes out. I think that would be an ideal situation. I just don't know if there is enough demand to be able to support that, to be able to support all of the people who would have to be working, you know, in that studio, who would have to call that their full-time job. I'm just not sure that there's enough money there.

Shane

If you sat down and you were watching a movie that had a created language and you didn't know going into it how that had been developed, just listening to it, are there any nuances or anything that would give it away to you whether that had been created, that it was just gibberish that a screenwriter had done, or if an actual linguist had worked on it?

David Peterson

Yeah, I mean, there are a number of things. First of all, it depends on the amount of material. If there is one line, then there's no way. You can't tell if it's gibberish, if it's an authentically created language but it's a badly created language, or if it's actually just some language you don't know on the planet. I mean, with one short line, there's nothing that can be determined. So, if that’s all you need for a movie, then no, you don't hire a language creator; just have the actor make up something that sounds good. As the number of tokens increases, the likelihood—or the ease—with which a viewer can spot a fake rises exponentially, and, of course, even more exponentially if somebody knows what they're looking for. But it's like if you have the amount of dialogue that you had in the movie Avatar and they were just making up gibberish the whole time, I mean, people would walk out. It would just sound so bad at a certain point. We would just say, “Just speak English. This is terrible.” I mean, with that amount of dialogue, even the average viewer is going to be able to spot a fake.

But with less dialogue for stuff, I’d say only an expert can detect it. Here are the things I'm looking for. First of all, languages have—whatever the language is, they all have very predictable intonational patterns that are different from one another, and those intonational patterns need to match basically throughout. I mean, of course there's going to be different intonational patterns for questions and for statements and for exclamations and for lists, but with enough dialogue, you should be able to hear, “All right, here's”—just by listening, it's like, “All right, well, this is just a regular sentence,” and if the intonation is varying wildly, that's going to strike one as really odd.

Second, there are just repeated phonological elements. So, there's lots of different words of English, sure, but if you take any section of English dialogue or just a chunk of text, you're going to see lots of stuff gets repeated, such as “the,” “a,” “and,” “is,” a “zz” suffix, like in kids or runs, an “s” suffix like in caps or bats, you know, the “ing,” the “ed,” things like that. They're just going to keep popping up in, like, every single sentence, and so that's the type of thing that you're listening for. Are there any of these repeated elements, whether they're affixes or whether they're function words? If you don't hear a lot of repetition like that, it's going to sound weird. It's going to sound like you're just making something up every single time.

And then, finally, there's also a general match between the amount of phonological material that's being produced by the actor, the amount that you hear, and what the translation is. Now, of course, there is always going to be a case where it's like, “Oh, you can say this in, like, two words in Swahili, and you need 12 words in English.” That'll happen, of course, in any language. But, I mean, as the number of sentences increases, there should be a reliably consistent metric, like, okay, this is about what you should be getting.

And so, like with the new Star Wars—first of all, I had somebody just kind of bake up gibberish, but then they didn't even use all of it, and you can tell where it's like you see this guy—first of all, he says, like, you know, a sentence that's, you know, reasonably long, and the translation is reasonably long. Next sentence—reasonably long, translation reasonably long. And then the next sentence—about the same length. It sounds about the same length, and it's translated as, like, three words. And it's like, “Oh,” and it's like—just as somebody who's worked on television and film, I knew what happened. What happened was the person provided this translation, and then they decided to change it, and they didn't bother to ask for a change in the dialogue. They just changed the subtitle, and that stuff happens. Yeah, that stuff will happen, but it's just like, you know, you can tell.

Shane

Now, I do recall that happening because my family lived in China when I was younger, and I do remember sitting there while, you know, one of my parents were speaking in English, and then a translator would interpret something, and you'd have some matches time-wise, and then my parents would either say something really long or really short, and the translation came back the opposite way. I thought that was unusual. I was like, “What are they adding? What are they making up, or what are they leaving out there?”

David Peterson

Oh, yeah. Oh, no, and kids who grew up with two different languages in the home, where maybe they're not as fluent, you know, they know that kind of thing all the time, where it's like, you know, some family member comes over, and they say, “[gibberish sounds],” and they look to the parent and ask, “What did they say?” Like, she said, “Hello.” It's like, “Nuh-huh. No, sir. There was something else going on there, and you're not telling me.”

Shane

What is the actual process for the actors? Are they given a script with your language written out phonetically, and are you on set to dialect coach them? How does that work?

David Peterson

It depends on the project. So, there are some projects where I have coached the actors and worked with them on their lines, and there are some times where I've been on set when it was filming and there when that happens. The most consistent thing that happens is that I get the script and the writer's tag what needs to be translated, and then I translate the lines. The document I produce is—it has—the line is written in English. It has a title, an MP3 title that has the character name and the project or episode number, and then a unique number that goes throughout that episode or movie so that they can find it. So there’s an English line, and then a translated line, and then below that is what I'm calling a phonetic line, but it's not really a phonetic line. I started off in Game of Thrones sending full IPA transcriptions for every single line. I did, but then I discovered that none of the actors know IPA even a little bit, so it was just pointless.

So, what I do is I break it down syllable by syllable, so I keep the word separated, and then I hyphenate each word by syllable, and I put in all caps the syllable that's supposed to get high intonation, and that doesn't necessarily correlate with stress. Sometimes if the whole word is in focus, then the whole word gets put in all caps, and basically, with that line and then with my recording, they can kind of figure out exactly how the intonation is supposed to work. And then, below that, I do a word-for-word literal translation so that the actors can see which word means which word, if they want. So, I send all that material along with a recording where I record it normal speed, slow speed, and then do the English. I send all that off to a script coordinator, who distributes the material to the actors. Then the actors themselves will use different combinations of that material. So, I know a number of actors who find it very useful that I put the word-for-word translations below so they can figure that out, and others that never look at that line at all. Some don't even—some actually get my stuff and then write down their own phonetic transcription for themselves on some pieces of paper and work with that. Some never look at it and only use the MP3. It just depends on how they like to work.

Shane

I'm in Nashville, and I work in the music business, and, you know, songwriters are everywhere, and songwriters are great at coming up with lyrics. Sometimes you'll hear them perform their own song in a writer's round or something like that, but usually they're giving it to signed recording artists, who are known for their vocals. I'm wondering: When you come up with a language, are you happy and are satisfied with the way that you speak it? Are there certain actors who really nail better than others exactly the way you hear it in your head?

David Peterson

Yes, so it varies, again, wildly. There are some performances that are just outstanding and some that are frankly terrible. I feel pretty good about how I pronounce most of the languages. In one case, like—and this is Jacob Anderson, who plays Grey Worm on Game of Thrones. I thought his performance was so stellar that it actually fundamentally altered the way that I pronounce the language. I thought he did a better job. I thought he did better than I ever could, and I still think so, and it just delights me that his character has, you know, continued on and gotten a lot of lines along the way. I love hearing him pronounce his Valyrian lines. They're just gorgeous. He's the best that I've ever seen in any of the shows that I've worked on. And then, you know, sometimes they're just there—actors or actresses who really should never have gotten the line in the first place, but you know.

Shane

You care to comment? We won't make you name the actor—any characters that you care to mention?

David Peterson

[Laughs]. None, none specifically at this time, but as a general rule, though, the main cast tends to be better than somebody that's brought on for, like, one episode, though there was one, Hannah Cheesman, who was on Defiance for maybe two episodes, who just came in—and I watched the dailies—just unbelievable, nailed her lines every single time, did them phenomenally. Like, who is this person, and can this person please become a regular? Just amazing.

Shane

How many different languages have you personally created?

David Peterson

Over 40 at this point.

Shane

Wow! If I gave you a phrase, you could translate it into any of those languages off the top of your head, or do you have to reference notebooks to see what the rules were that you came up with?

David Peterson

Maybe I could do it in Dothraki, but probably nothing else, and that's just Dothraki, just because I've worked with it so much. But, no, like anything else, no, maybe if I had the vocabulary for it, maybe Trigedasleng from The 100 since it actually is English. It's just an evolved form of English, but the rest—no, no, no, not even close—definitely need to pull up the dictionaries.

Shane

I, personally, love the sound of Spanish. It's on my bucket list to learn it. I think when it's spoken, it's just the most beautiful-sounding language. I'm sure that you have different languages that you've created that you're more proud of for the complexity of the rules or whatever, but is there a particular one that you like hearing the best?

David Peterson

Oh, definitely Irathient. I love speaking it, and I love hearing it when it's pronounced correctly. That was one of the languages I created for Defiance. I did a bunch of stuff with that language where I was just—it was, like, my favorite thing to do with a language, but in particular, the pronunciation of it and the way the intonation worked, I think, was just awesome, and I loved it. It's funny—on the show, they always did kind of a more understated version than I did and that I would have wanted them to do. But, you know, it's still really cool to hear it. That was a good one.

Shane

So, I know this is a very tiny niche community that doesn't have a lot of recognition or celebrities—for lack of a better term—that your average person has heard of. Who are the standard bearers in the field? I know you mentioned Tolkien. Is he the main guy, or is there anyone else?

David Peterson

Well, it depends. That are somewhat well known, or that are good?

Shane

I would say good. Coming from a professional, elite person, who would you say is the standard bearer?

David Peterson

Probably the best language creators I know are—if I had to pull some out—Matt Pearson, who’s a professor over at Reed with Linguistics. Dirk Elzinga, who’s a professor of linguistics at BYU. My good friend Doug Ball, who’s a linguistics professor at Truman. Sylvia Sotomayor, who's just amazing, and then I’d probably have to go with somebody like Jan Strasser over in Germany or even Carsten Becker, also in Germany. Those are some of the best language creators I know. Alex Sink [sp], too; I’ll throw him in there. I don't know if I could pick a top one among them, but it would probably be Sylvia. Sylvia is just the best, and she keeps getting better—disgustingly better. She is so good.

Shane

Stephen King famously advocated that writers aspire to write 2,500 words a day, minimum. Do you have a daily standard when you're creating? Is it a length of time or a certain number of words? Just anything that you hold yourself to?

David Peterson

You know, I am so busy at this point that I don't even need it. [Laughs]. I can't tell you when I'm not working on shows anymore, but it's like—there's not been a day since 2009 that I haven't worked on at least one of my languages, I mean, unless I was on vacation or something. But even then—like, it happens all the time. I tell them ahead of time, “All right, I'm going to be gone for this period of time.” They’re like, “Okay, cool, have fun.” And then some requests come in while I'm gone, and then I have to work on it. But it's just like—but also the stuff is so varied too—the kind of things I'm doing.

For example, today I was working on a font for a writing system. That was the bulk of my day today, getting that up to speed. And then, when I go back to work, I'm going to be working on evolving a language forward so that I can use it to translate some song lyrics. And then, you know, in different days, it'll be translating a script, and in different days, it'll just be working on expanding the language, adding vocabulary. The types of things you do are so different, I don't know if there could be a metric.

And this is not even working on shows or anything. It's like some days you sit down, and it's like, “All right, you know, today feels like a vocabulary day. I'm going to sit down and, you know, really generate some vocabulary. A different day is working on, you know, some sort of translation project that you have. We're working on an art project that involves your language that you just feel like doing at that time. That's one of the things that's so cool about a language is that there's so much stuff you can do with it that it's never just one thing all the time.

Shane

Are you more creative during the day or at night?

David Peterson

Night. I went to sleep at 5:00 a.m. yesterday, or this morning, rather.

Shane

When you did attain a certain status in your profession that, you know, the regular person would deem successful, was there anything that threatened to derail it? Like, did success interfere at all with your creativity, or how did you navigate success when you finally achieved it?

David Peterson

I know that there have been a lot of—there's a lot of people that say, you know, the only way to kill your love for your hobby is to make it your job. That hasn't happened with me, but there are consternating factors when it comes to doing something you love and then working, you know, in television or film. Part of that has to do with the deadlines, which is that—as a language creator just on your own—the only deadlines you have are those you impose. And even if you're doing something fun in the community, like, you know, doing a relay or something, and, you know, that imposes a kind of deadline for how finished your language needs to be by the time you participate. You can still change it later because, you know, why not? It's yours; you can do with it what you please, but you can't do that in television and film if you want to remain consistent. So, there are absolute hard deadlines. And then there are also, you know, absolute deadlines when it's, like, okay, we have to have this material translated by now, or it's not going to happen. And so, that makes things a little bit more difficult for a project that is inherently deadline-less when you're just working on your own. So that was a tough adjustment.

The other tough adjustment is that working on a television show is it's a compromise. In every aspect, it's like you're not going to be able to achieve your perfect, exact vision for your small area of the television show. It has to be filtered through everybody else that's working on it, and as a language creator, that involves many—there are many different aspects to it. Like, I mean, of the dozen or so projects I've worked on, there are maybe three languages that sound exactly the way I wanted them to. For the rest, I had to make sacrifices based on what the directors or the producers wanted.

Often, they would say, “It needs to be easy to pronounce for the actors.” It’s like, “Ugh, brother.” Or it's like, “Oh, we don't like that sound. That sounds—you know, it sounds too harsh. Change it.” I'm like, “No, it doesn't.” But you know, all right, you're the one signing the paycheck, so there's that. And then there's the fact that, you know, you're working with a lot of different writers, and there are times where I look at a scene, and I say, “I really think that this entire scene—based on who these characters are—this entire scene should be translated into my languages,” but they're like, “No, the audience isn't going to tolerate that.” I'm like, “Yes, they will,” but you know. So that type of compromise. And so it doesn't make language creation less fun, because I still love it. I mean, if I lost all my shows today, I would continue to work on my languages forever. But it does change the way that you have to operate as a language creator. Where, previously, the only person you were answering to was yourself.

Shane

Do you ever get writer's block, or is there an equivalent in language creation, or is it—like you said before, there's so many different facets—there's translation, there's vocabulary, there's a lot of different things you could be working on? Do you deal with writer's block at all? Does that come up, or do you just—how do you get past it?

David Peterson

Oh, god, yeah. That's really tough. I remember I was dealing with a big case of writer's block for one language in particular on Defiance, and what happened to knock me out of it was I got another project for a totally different show, The Shannara Chronicles, and I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with that language. I decided to try it out, and I thought to myself—well, there was one particular thing I was doing, which was initial consonant mutation, and I had two ideas for how to create a system like that, and I can only do one for the language on The Shannara Chronicles. And so, I thought, well, this would be perfect for this other language that I had no idea for. I'm going to do the other one because I want to do both of them, and that kind of kicked me out of my funk. Other times, it's just—that actually helps a lot, by the way, having two separate projects.

So, it's like I'm at a dead end with this one. I'm going to go jump to this other one and work on it for a little bit and then just leave the other one to sit, and then maybe—and then, you know, something usually comes to me, or just studying languages, which is something that I'm going to do for the rest of my life and will never get tired of. You know, just pull up the language that you've never heard of or pull out one of the linguistic survey books and see what it's got. And that's usually where something will jump out at me—something I never thought of before, something that I wanted to try—and then that kind of gets me back on track.

Shane

As far as languages go and what you want to do, are there any things that are definitively on your bucket list professionally? Shows that you want to work on or accomplishments that you —

David Peterson

— Well, I mean, I guess outside of Hollywood, I want to see—I would love to have guides for as many of my languages as possible, like I did with Dothraki. There's a book out on Dothraki called Living Language Dothraki. I would love to see—especially the languages I love. I mean, it's just never going to happen with Defiance languages now because the property is all but dead. But those languages are so good, they deserved it. I really love them so much, and not only that, I really do feel like if there are more of these, so it's not just Living Language Dothraki, and A Gateway to Sindarin, and The Klingon Dictionary, but if there are a bunch of these, I feel like that's a potential avenue for other language creators. I mean, my dream world would be where a language creator could publish a book on their language—and not just self-publish—but actually publish a book on their language just because it's good. I mean, I would buy them. I buy natural language grammars all the time just to read them—just because I enjoy them, not because I want to learn the languages. I would do the same with created languages if those materials were available, and I think that the more books that are out there, the more people will be used to the idea, and the more people will think it's interesting. So that's kind of my goal.

As for projects, though, there's always projects I see that I want to work on. It's usually ones that have already come out, that like, “Oh, god, why didn't you call me?” Like the new Voltron on Netflix. So help me, god, why am I not working on that, you punks? My dream project would have been Avatar: The Last Airbender, but that came out well before it was a known thing that it just never would have occurred to them, but that would have been—if done right, that could have been, I think, the greatest project ever for a language creator.

Shane

Is there any opportunity—I know James Cameron's got three sequels cooking. Or is the Na’vi language—is that established from the first movie?

David Peterson

Oh, yeah, it's established. It was created by Paul Frommer. It's got quite a wide community surrounding it. So, I mean, unless there are new languages, I imagine it'll be—the Na’vi will be in there throughout, and if there are new languages, I imagine that they would also go to Paul, since they have worked with him before on those films. I mean, the only way somebody else is working on those is if there is just so many languages required that he can't keep up, but I doubt that'll happen. I honestly, though, could see them moving away from the languages in the sequels, which I hope they don't, because that was my favorite part of the movie.

Shane

David, what advice would you give to someone who wanted to do what you're doing if they were just starting out?

David Peterson

That is the absolutely toughest question to answer because, if you just want to create languages for the love of it, I've got plenty of advice for you and plenty of things to tell you. If you want to create languages for television shows, I have nothing to tell you, and I feel awful about that. You know, like I touched on before, I think it's going to have to be my responsibility to try to see if we can create a pathway for future language creators to get projects like this.

I will give you one resource. The LCS has a jobs board where new jobs are posted. It's jobs.conlang.org, and the jobs range anywhere from a new language needed for a web series to I am an author—an unpublished author—working on my very first fantasy book, and I want to work with somebody to create a language. They're all over the map, but they'll be paying jobs, and they're very infrequent, but it's something to look out for. But those jobs are hotly contested, so you have to be very good to get one, and everybody in the community knows about it, including the people that have been working for years and years.

So, what you got to do is, if you want one of these things, you have to work on your skills. So that means sitting down, creating the language, seeing what you need to improve at, and getting better. In order to get better, I mean, of course, you have to do it, but also study as many languages as you can, hopefully, as many different languages. It's not as good to study French, and Italian, and Spanish so much as French, and Japanese, and Swahili. You want languages that are as different as possible—that are totally unrelated. Study languages, look at other people's created languages, and see what they have done. Learn from the best because they're out there, and they have stuff up on their website. And, yeah, just keep at it.

Shane

Good advice. And that brings us to the final section of our interview, so our final 14 questions. These are quick answers, some of them just one word. We'll fly through these. Feel free to expound if you'd like. Question number one is: If your job—if this language creation thing—only paid the bills and not a penny more, would you still do it?

David Peterson

Absolutely? It paid less than that for the first few years.

Shane

What talent or skill do you not have that you wish you did?

David Peterson

I wish I could put my fingers in my mouth and whistle really loud. You know how Phil Jackson does that. [Laughs].

Shane

Fill in the blank. I am a success if I _____.

David Peterson

If I am happy with what I've done.

Shane

And, conversely, I am a failure if I _____.

David Peterson

Am miserable.

Shane

What is the single best piece of advice that you followed to get where you are today?

David Peterson

Oh, uh, I'm not even going to be able to get it right, but I remember a guy that I worked for delivering electrical supplies. He was the one that really showed me that, sometimes, working with others is not just about doing the job well, but it's about making sure that you recognize others’ value and do things that have nothing to do with work that help build that rapport.

Shane

What is a piece of well-intentioned advice you're glad you ignored to get where you are today?

David Peterson

[Laughs]. I'll give you a specific one. I remember in the Dothraki competition there were people saying things like, “Well, these producers—they're not good with language, so the grammar needs to be simple for them and the actors.” It's ridiculous, like they would pay any attention to the grammar whatsoever, whether it was simple or complex. No. I just did the best possible job I could, and I think that's served me well.

Shane

What character trait do you like best about yourself?

David Peterson

I would say the fact that I have a second level I can go to if I really need to get something done so that I can just work on stuff casually, but if I need to kick into another gear, I can.

Shane

What character trait do you like least about yourself?

David Peterson

I am unfailingly pessimistic.

Shane

Fill in the blank here. I believe every child should have the opportunity to _____.

David Peterson

Learn as many languages as possible, as early as possible. It's ridiculous that we start learning languages in high school. What a joke.

Shane

If you could suggest one piece of self-improvement that everyone on Earth would adopt, what would it be?

David Peterson

Have somebody to bounce ideas off of. That's actually one of the things that's helped me most. My wife is—she has the exact same linguistics background that I do—a BA in linguistics and a Masters in linguistics—and she has been absolutely invaluable to me throughout the course of my work as a language creator. It's so fantastic if you can have somebody whose input you value to be able to give you feedback on your work.

Shane

If you could have any superpower, what would it be?

David Peterson

Non-somnia, so I could sleep for like 14 minutes a week and be fine.

Shane

That's a new one I've not heard before. [Laughs]. If you could have dinner with anyone, alive or dead, who would it be?

David Peterson

Oh, David Bowie.

Shane

Two more. A hospitable nearby planet has been discovered, and you've been recruited to help colonize it. You can take any three items with you that you wish. What are they?

David Peterson

3D printer, stuff that the 3D printer can use, and a power source for the 3D printer. [Laughs].

Shane

All right, that works. That's three. Final one: You’ve just won a lifetime achievement award in your field, and we want to hear your acceptance speech. That's all the people that you have to thank for getting you where you are, or if there's any particular personal cause that you'd like to champion, this is your soapbox, so let her rip.

David Peterson

I absolutely would not be where I am were it not for the language creation community—just all of the people I've known, all the people that I've learned from, all the people whose languages I've studied, all the people who I got into flame wars with over on the old internet. Without them, I absolutely would have been a terrible language creator, and I think that their work is still—when it comes to created languages—the best I've ever seen. All I could ever hope for is that their work is recognized for what it is—for the art that it truly is.

Shane

And, finally, tell us all of the pertinent websites that you are affiliated with. If people want more information on you, where can they find it?

David Peterson

First off, if people are just interested about language creation in general, go to the Language Creation Society's homepage, which is conlang.org. C-O-N-L-A-N-G.org. For me, I have a handle that I use on various social media platforms. It's pronounced “deadaless,” but it doesn't look like it. It's spelled D-E-D-A-L-V-S, as if it were spelled in the Latin way, so I'm dedalvs with the “v” over on Twitter and on Tumblr, where I'm very active on both. I have a website, artoflanguageinvention.com, that will take you to all of these various places. It's named after my book, The Art of Language Invention, from Penguin Random House, and I have a YouTube channel. It's also called The Art of Language Invention. You can find links to all of those, actually, at my main website, artoflanguageinvention.com.

Shane

Awesome. Well, David, I sure appreciate it. It was great to have you here. I appreciate all your insights and wisdom.

David Peterson

Yeah, well, thank you. This is probably one of the best ones I've done. Your questions were awesome.

Shane

Oh, thank you. Cool, cool. Well, it was a pleasure to talk to you, and I'm really thankful that you were able to make this work.

David Peterson

Yeah, yeah, and you too, and I really meant that too. Honestly, a lot of the interviews I do, it's usually a lot of the same questions, but this one was really good.

Shane

I appreciate it. I've worked hard at that craft.

David Peterson

Well, right on, man. I'll look forward to checking out some of your other ones. This is really cool.

Shane

Well, David, it was great talking to you. Best of luck to you.

David Peterson

All right, thanks. You too.

Shane

All right, take care.

David Peterson

Bye.

Shane

Once again, that was language creator David Peterson. I'd like to thank everyone for joining me today. You are listening to the Live2cre8 podcast, and this is Shane Almgren reminding you to dream big, be inspired, and live creatively.