Slashdot Mirror
The Man Who Invents Languages For a Living
An anonymous reader writes: David J. Peterson is fluent in eight languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Esperanto, Arabic and American Sign Language, but it is the languages he's created that gives him notoriety. He created Dothraki, Giant, and High Valyrian for Game of Thrones, Shiväisith for Thor: The Dark World, and four different languages for the TV show Defiance. Peterson recently sat down with NPR to talk about inventing languages for a living, and offers some advice on how to make your own.
Watching Vikings I was surprised when I heard old English (sounds a lot like German) and old French. I don't know enough about Scandinavian languages to know if they're speaking an old Scandinavian dialectic. Now when I watch GoT and they start up in one of their made-up languages I just cringe. It sounds fake and is usually delivered stiffly. Vikings has made GoT painful to watch for me.
Chosing a language always sets a context, and if you want to control the context, you can't chose languages at will.
But this already happens anyway. Ever notice how the imperials in Star Wars tend to speak British English? Dialects are used to indicate social differences in English Language SF/Fantasy movies and shows all the time. Its done with the apparent race of actors as well. Even if all your actors for all the races in your shows are the same (usually white), that's a statement with some implied context. If the races of the actors are mixed seemingly randomly with the "races" in the source work, that's a statement with some implied context too. You simply cannot get away from it.
I see no problem with extending this to entire human languages, as long as the languages are properly used (the words actually say what they purport to say, or something sensible for the context if subtitles aren't used).
don't know enough about Scandinavian languages to know if they're speaking an old Scandinavian dialectic.
I haven't seen the show, but the most historically sensible thing for Vikings to be speaking would be Old Norse. According to some folks on Reddit, that is in fact what they are speaking.
Its not very closely related to English, outside of the fact that they are both Germanic, and their common ancestor language was only 700 years or so in the past at that point.