TV's Fake Language Master

How one linguist creates obsessively detailed and fully functional languages for Game of Thrones and other shows. 

- Denise Martin

ONE WEDNESDAY EVENING in January, David J. Peterson stood backstage at The Daily Show’s set in Manhattan, teaching Trevor Noah, the show’s host, how to speak Kinuk’aaz. No teacher could have been better suited to the lesson: Peterson invents languages for a living, and Kinuk’aaz, an alien language spoken on the Syfy channel show Defiance, is one of his creations. Others— there are about 40 in all— include High Valyrian, the mellifluous tongue of power players on Game of Thrones; Trigedasleng, a dialect descended from English and spoken by humans in a post-apocalyptic future on the CW drama The 100; and Noalath, a language used by druids on MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles.

In the softly lit greenroom, Noah and Peterson drilled a dialogue they planned to perform during Peterson’s interview, including a Kinuk’aaz greeting: Guderet k’agetirim (“Welcome to the show”). Noah slowly sounded out the phrase.“Goo-dee-ret kag-eh-tee-rum. Like that?” he asked. Peterson, whose long brown hair was parted neatly down the middle, repeated the second word back to Noah in a guttural tone. “K’agetirim,” he said. “Say it with a German r.” Noah speaks eight languages (among them German, Zulu, and Xhosa); he voiced the r deeper in his throat this time, perfectly mimicking Peterson’s pronunciation. A producer signaled that it was time to go, and as Noah left the room, he practiced the harsh, explosive syllables under his breath: “Guderet k’agetirim! Guderet k’agetirim!” He paused in the doorway and shook his head. “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to speak Kinuk’aaz,” he said. “I’m more … High Valyrian.”