For hardcore ‘Game of Thrones’ fans, one college will offer a course in Dothraki this summer
Che dothras che drivos, “Game of Thrones” fans. Now is your time to prove how intense your devotion to all things Westeros really is.
In case you’re wondering, “Che dothras che drivos” means “ride or die” in Dothraki, a made-up but also very real language created specifically for the hit TV show on HBO. And this summer at the University of California Berkeley, students can take a class on the language with the man who created it, linguist David J. Peterson.
In a press release Thursday, Berkeley announced the course, which will be worth three credits, will be called “The Linguistics of ‘Game of Thrones’ and the Art of Language Invention,” and will take place four times a week from May 22 to June 30.
When “Game of Thrones” first premiered in 2011, fans of the fantasy epic quickly fell in love with the Dothraki language, spoken by “a warrior group that ride their horses across the sands of Essos,” according to The Wrap. One of the show’s main protagonists, Daenerys Targaryen, also learned the language throughout the show’s first season.
But rather than having actors babble nonsense and then adding subtitles for the Dothraki lines, the show’s creator hired Peterson, who studied linguistics at Berkeley as an undergraduate, to create an entire language with consistent rules of syntax and grammar. According to Vulture, Peterson spent two months, working 12 to 14 hours a day, to create the language. He later ended up inventing another language, High Valyrian, for the show.
The language, as well as the show, proved to be so popular that Peterson later worked with Living Language, a self-study publisher, to produce an audio CD, a textbook and a mobile app to teach people more than 500 words in Dothraki, as well as grammatical rules, per Entertainment Weekly. And Dothraki’s influence began to enter pop culture as well, even making an appearance in the comedic TV show “The Office.”
According to Mental Floss, the “Office” writers did not consult with Peterson before they wrote their show including the language, but they actually managed to use proper Dothraki and even clarified a grammatical rule that Peterson later incorporated into the official language.
For the class this summer, Peterson said the focus will not be as much on teaching students to speak Dothraki as he will use it as an example of linguistic development, similar to courses taught by academics that use the made-up Elvish and Orkish created by author J.R.R. Tolkien for his fantasy epic, “The Lord of the Rings.”
This story was originally published April 27, 2017 at 10:39 PM with the headline "For hardcore ‘Game of Thrones’ fans, one college will offer a course in Dothraki this summer."