thank you to... literally everyone for requesting this episode.
welcome to Conlang Critic, the show that gets facts wrong about YOUR favorite conlang! I’m
jan Misali, and in this episode, we’ll be looking at the language of we who ride, Dothraki.
as you saw before, this is by far the most requested language for me to review. Dothraki
is one of those rare mainstream-adjacent conlangs that you can expect an average nerd to know
about. I mean, not every conlang has been joked about on The Office, you know? there
really isn’t any other language I could’ve begun Conlang Critic Season Three with.
Dothraki is a fictional language created for the book series A Song of Ice and Fire and
its adaptation Game of Thrones. even though series writer George R. R. Martin created
the initial seed that eventually grew into the Dothraki language, most of the important
work of creating it was done by David J. Peterson, who was hired for the HBO series. David Peterson
was able to take the fragments of text in the original books and flesh them out into
a fully functional language.
he also has a pretty significant online presence, so there’s a nonzero chance that he’s
actually you, the viewer, in which case, hey Dave! big fan. The Art of Language Invention
taught me a lot of what I currently know about conlanging, and the Smiley Awards were part
of what inspired me to make a series of conlang reviews back in 2016.
oh, and if you’re not David Peterson, that’s absolutely not an invitation to go flood his
twitter mentions with links to this video. he’s a busy guy.
anyway, I’ve never read A Song of Ice and Fire or watched Game of Thrones, so I can’t
actually speak for how the Dothraki language is portrayed in universe outside of what I
know from reading about the language itself. going in, I knew that the Dothraki people
are supposed to be violent and that they ride horses and that’s about it. I considered
watching Game of Thrones for the purposes of this review and then I immediately decided
that that was a bad idea.
I was originally planning on only relying on free resources for this, which is what
I usually do, but the wiki on dothraki.org leaves much to be desired. fortunately, I
was instead able to get a lot of the missing information I needed from DJP’s blog and
the book Living Language Dothraki, which I picked up basically as a last minute decision
while writing this episode.
and I gotta say, this book sure is an official piece of Game of Thrones brand merchandise!
it’s really funny to me how the cover designers Ryan Sacks and Lauren Houston put the official
Game of Thrones logo real big in the bottom, nice and readable from a distance, while the
name of the author is right there in the fine print, taking up about as much space as the
words “a conversational”.
anyway,
Dothraki’s consonants are:
since Game of Thrones is pretty popular, a lot of people have made a lot of claims about
what the Dothraki language reminds them of. as it turns out, it sounds a whole lot like
Arabic and Russian among people who don’t know what Arabic or Russian sound like.
anyway, the phonology was one aspect of Dothraki where David was somewhat creatively restricted.
it needed to be compatible with the original corpus, and it needed to be reasonably pronounceable
by English-speaking actors on a TV budget. that second restriction is why, for example,
the voiceless stops are allowed to be aspirated, since it’s kinda hard to get English speakers
not to aspirate voiceless stops.
one thing that stands out right away about this consonant inventory is the lack of labial
stops. David ended up deciding on that after realizing that in the source material they
don’t appear in any Dothraki words other than names. it’s explained through a sound
shift that turned them into labiodental fricatives, which also works as an explanation for why
/v/ is the only voiced fricative that isn’t a sibilant.
also notable here are some rarer sounds. the uvular stop and velar fricative both function
as the token “consonants that sound harsh to typical English speakers”. in the context
of the whole inventory, they don’t seem out of place, and help give Dothraki a distinct
aesthetic.
the other rare sound here is that dental fricative. it’s a sound that’s paradoxically both
strange and familiar. again, I don’t think it’s really out of place here, and given
the spelling of the word “Dothraki”, I don’t think David really had much of a choice
regarding its presence. if the th in there represented anything else, the word “Dothraki”
would have no sensible in-universe reason to be pronounced the way it is by English
speakers.
Dothraki’s vowels are:
now that’s what I call a four vowel system! it’s just the standard five vowel system
but without /u/. however, that’s just if you look at it on a phonemic level. there’s
a lot more going on when you take allophony into account. after a uvular stop, everything
moves around like this:
uvular sounds have a tendency to move vowels around, so it makes sense that that happens
in Dothraki too. on top of that, /o/ becomes unrounded after dental sounds.
this doubles the total number of vowel phones up to eight. and THAT’S before you even
bring up the diphthongs!
there aren’t any diphthongs. it’s just four vowels, eight vowel phones.
now, although there aren’t diphthongs, Dothraki is completely fine with having two vowels
in a row within a word, even if it’s the same vowel twice. it’s sorta like how consecutive
vowels work in Japanese. so this
is a four syllable word pronounced like /ˈxa.le.e.si/.
in universe, Dothraki isn’t a written language, so the romanization system here is pretty
straightforward. everything’s basically spelled how you’d expect in a typical fantasy
language, which makes sense because this romanization actually came before the phonology. there’s
not much to say here, just a barebones fully phonemic romanization, exactly what it should
be in this context.
there’s one thing that’s different between the romanization of DJP’s Dothraki and Dothraki
as it appeared in the books, and that’s the spelling of the voiced postalveolar sibilant
fricative, /ʒ/. in the books, this was the digraph , which has mercifully been changed
to the far more sensible digraph .
Dothraki is a highly inflectional language, relying on a variety of different affixes
for most grammatical things. a pretty basic example of this is the way nouns are declined
for case and number.
the five cases in Dothraki each have their own set of suffixes for different contexts.
most of these have different forms depending on if the noun in question ends with a consonant
or a vowel, and most also have a completely separate plural form used exclusively for
animate nouns, with inanimate nouns not being marked for number at all.
an extra animacy distinction is made on top of that for the two most common cases, nominative
and accusative. for animate nouns (in the singular), the nominative case is unmarked
and the accusative case has a suffix, but for inanimate nouns it’s more irregular.
the table here is the analysis of Dothraki nouns used by the Dothraki wiki, saying that
inanimate nouns can take many different nominative suffixes and can either be marked or unmarked
in the accusative, but in reality it’s more regular than that.
for an inanimate noun that ends with a vowel, the accusative is marked by removing the vowel.
so the word jano, meaning “dog”, becomes just jan.
it’s then this form of the word that takes the suffixes for the other cases. for an inanimate
noun that ends with a consonant, like arakh, meaning “sword”, the nominative and accusative
are usually the same thing.
the -e suffix for inanimate nouns in the accusative is mainly used for words that would otherwise
end with consonants or consonant clusters that aren’t allowed word finally, but it’s
sometimes unpredictable. here’s the different cases of the word sondra, obsidian.
the cases themselves are pretty solid. the allative and ablative cases in particular
are nice to see here. they form a nice pair with each other, basically corresponding to
the English prepositions “to” and “from”. having these as the only two locative cases
was a good call.
the default word order is subject-verb-object, which is kinda boring, but it’s one of the
things that was already there in the books. also evident from the books is a complete
lack of a copula. these features probably didn’t have any actual thought put into
them, but it is cool that David was able to incorporate them into his full version of
the language.
adjectives follow and usually agree with nouns.
the way adjectives agree with nouns is a little bit strange, but in a believable way. for
adjectives that end with vowels, there’s a suffix applied marking the plural even when
the noun itself wouldn’t normally be marked for number. and then uh, there’s a suffix
for when it... isn’t nominative? which is only applied in the singular. I guess this
makes sense, as like a single suffix that covers four different cases, but given how
other things in Dothraki work it’s strange not having a separate adjective suffix for
the non-nominative plural.
since Dothraki doesn’t have a copula, adjectives in general can be turned into stative verbs
by simply applying the appropriate verb suffixes. so since dik means “fast”, the word for
“to be fast” is dikat.
adverbs in Dothraki are a part of speech separate from adjectives. so the adverb check, meaning
“well”, is completely unrelated to the word for “good”. they are placed sentence
finally, but can also be placed sentence initially for emphasis.
like most suffixes in Dothraki, verb suffixes work differently depending on if the root
ends with a vowel or a consonant.
here’s what this table looks like for the verb dothralat, “to ride”.
yes, this is the verb that the name of the language is derived from. now here’s a conjugation
table for the verb ifat, “to walk”.
this system makes Dothraki verbs look more complicated than they actually are, in a way
that mostly feels natural.
now something that’s exactly as complicated as it looks is how Dothraki does negation.
so first of all there’s a basic prefix that’s used for negating adjectives.
however, that prefix isn’t used for negating the superlative forms of adjectives, to do
that there’s a separate sublative suffix that replaces the usual superlative suffix,
which means that adjective suffix table was actually incomplete.
that’s all pretty normal, nothing too complicated yet. the complicated part is negating verbs.
so basically there’s the negation particle vos
which goes before whatever verb needs to be negated, and then since this is Dothraki it
becomes vo if the verb in question starts with a consonant.
then on top of that, the verb itself is given a specific negative suffix. it’s sorta like
how Finnish does negation, but a bit more complicated since it’s different depending
on what affix the verb would’ve had to begin with.
this level of complexity, where it’s regular but in a somewhat unpredictable way, really
helps Dothraki feel natural in a way that I haven’t seen a lot of other fictional
languages pull off. the attention to detail here is far more than what you usually get
out of a language created for a TV series.
like any good fictional language, the vocabulary in Dothraki is representative of the culture
that speaks it. it’s full of these little gold nuggets of worldbuilding that really
paint a good picture of what the Dothraki are like. and it’s handled a lot more cleverly
than what par for the course would be from a language spoken by a quote unquote “nomadic
war-mongering race”. while granted there are certainly at least three distinct words
for “to kill” listed,
there’s also things like how the word for “fake” primarily means “wooden”, which
makes sense for a group of people that makes things out of wood.
the way to say “earthquake” literally translates to “horseless stampede” which
is absolutely fantastic.
the best sense of culture I got from reading about Dothraki was from the various idioms
used for things. a lot of these involve riding, like asking someone “Hash yer dothrae chek?”
as a basic way of saying “how are you?”. it literally means “do you ride well?”
I also like the phrase “Hazi vo mra zhor”, which is translated as “I don’t care”
but literally means “that’s not in my heart”.
the Dothraki language implies its speakers to have a complex, rich culture, who certainly
care a lot about riding horseback into battle and all that, but aren’t solely defined
by that. again, I have absolutely no experience with or interest in the actual source material,
so I don’t actually know how the Dothraki are portrayed in the story they’re from.
despite that, the fact that I was able to get any sense at all about what they’re
like just from reading about their language is a huge testament to how well DJP was able
to con this lang.
outside of things that specifically have to do with Dothraki culture, what made me really
happy was seeing words that were made in honor of specific people in David’s life. like,
the word for “good” or “kind” is erin, which adorably comes from his wife’s name.
also named for DJP’s wife Erin is the word alegra, meaning “duck”, which is from
her middle name.
I absolutely love that sort of thing.
now, I mentioned Dothraki’s animacy distinction earlier, and it works in a way that’s pretty
interesting. see, usually animacy is just a way of distinguishing living things from
nonliving things, and in more extreme cases distinguishing between people and things.
in Dothraki, it’s actually more like a grammatical gender distinction, but without the whole
agreement system part. heck, not even pronouns need to agree with animacy in Dothraki! so
it’s not like, REALLY a grammatical gender thing, just a run of the mill noun class thing.
which of the two classes any given noun falls into isn’t really about if it’s alive
or not. a river is animate, but a horse is inanimate.
anyway, here’s all the pronouns in Dothraki.
I was more amused than I should have been seeing that the third person singular pronoun
is “me”. you look at enough Indo-European languages and you just sorta expect for something
like “me” to be a first person pronoun, but nope! why should it be?
numbers in Dothraki are pretty regular, there’s some basic roots for numbers one through ten,
plus a prefix for multiples of ten.
yes, boringly, this numbering system is in decimal, which was actually an active decision
and not just the result of not bothering to think about what base the numbering system
should use. quote,
“I wanted to realize the language as it might be imagined to exist in the universe
of A Song of Ice & Fire. So even though a conlanger doesn’t need an excuse to, say,
create a number system that relies on a base other than ten, I felt like I needed a pretty
good reason to do anything other than what an English-speaking audience would expect.
In the books, numbers are pretty much exclusively base-10... In addition, since the Dothraki—and
those groups that border the Dothraki Sea—all trade, I think it’s not unreasonable to
assume that by the time of the action of the books, everyone will have converted to the
same base.”
this sort of thing happened a lot while I was researching for this episode. basically
every time I saw some aspect of Dothraki where I said to myself “well that’s kinda boring”
I then looked a bit more and found somewhere where David Peterson explains that it’s
boring for completely understandable reasons. it makes me wonder what Dothraki would’ve
been like if DJP hadn’t been under the restrictions of needing to work with HBO and having everything
be fully compatible with the original books.
oh, this has nothing to do with Dothraki, but when the heck am I gonna get another excuse
to talk about this? so well over a decade ago, David Peterson made a language called
“Sathir”, and that language has a numbering system that uses base six. if you’re new
to the channel, that’s my favorite base for about forty minutes of reasons. anyway
I would just like to take this opportunity to point out that DJP got the base conversion
from decimal to seximal wrong here. one hundred is two foursy four in seximal, not four foursy
four. that’s what I’m resorting to now, insulting people I respect for seximal boners
they made before the start of the Obama presidency.
this is a new segment where I provide an example of a language in use! I’m putting it here
right at the end before the rating. in the future, this will actually tend to be me speaking
the language myself, but since Dothraki was created for a TV series, I figured a much
better way to get a sense of what the language is like is to just use audio from the show
itself. and I gotta say it was absolutely more trouble than it was worth finding this
audio. it’s unlikely that I’ll end up doing the spoken sample part this way again.
this audio is from Game of Thrones Season 1 Episode 7, “You Win or You Die”, spoken
by the character Khal Drogo, portrayed by Jason Momoa. let’s take a listen.
Jora Andahli, okki zhille hrazef fin allayafa shafka drogikhoon anni. Me shafki.
Anha asshilak jin azh shafkea haji rekoon et shafka.
Ma rizhaan anni, vezh fin asaja rhaesheseres, maan anha valloshak azh akka.
Maan anha vazhak jin ador shiqethi finaan neva ave maisi mae.
Anha vazhak maan Rhaeshis Andahli. Anha, zhey Drogo, atak jin.
oh, right, I should mention that I’m not doing rankings anymore. instead of trying
to directly compare languages with each other, I’ll just be concluding with my final thoughts
on how good I think the episode’s conlang is, saying something like,
all in all, Dothraki fully deserves to be as popular as it is. given the circumstances
of its creation, what David J. Peterson was able to accomplish really can’t be called
anything other than expertly made art. if only it were attached to a more interesting
work of fiction, you know? it’s sorta like Na’vi, where the conlang is good on its
own merits and also happens to be connected to a story I couldn’t care less about. Game
of Thrones is certainly better for having the Dothraki language in it, but Dothraki
is good despite being from Game of Thrones.
but you know what they say, the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant. and as I
said, Dothraki is good on its own merits. in a vacuum, it is a piece of worldbuilding
that feels more than real enough to be believable. it certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s about
as good as it could have been.
thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time, where I’ll be reviewing Novial.
hey, is this anything? “the lady doth raki too much methinks”. no, that’s nothing.