To the untrained eye, hash yer ray tih zhavors chiorisi anni? may seem like gibberish, but it’s far from it. Fans of the fantasy drama Game of Thrones may recognize the phrase as Dothraki, a language created by linguist David J. Peterson specifically for the series. In English, the phrase translates to “have you seen my lady’s dragon?”

In the search for authenticity, studios often turn to linguistic experts to construct languages for film and TV characters. Notable examples include Klingon by Mark Okrand for the Star Trek franchise, and Na’ vi by Paul Frommer for Avatar. What these languages have in common is their functionality, which is achieved by applying linguistic knowledge to develop a proper sound system (phonetics and phonology), grammatical structure (morphology and syntax), lexicon (vocabulary) and writing conventions (orthography). In the case of Dothraki, its structure is inspired by key features of Russian, Mongolian, Turkish, Estonian and Swahili.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language to understand how it is structured, acquired and used in everyday life. Beyond creating interesting languages for entertainment purposes, linguistic skills are essential for English teachers because it converts intuition into a scientific foundation so they can identify and address learning challenges among students, such as finding the right tongue placement to produce a sound that doesn’t exist in their native language, but that is needed to speak English.

Through the study of linguistics in the Pedagogy of National and Foreign Languages program at UDA, students work on building this knowledge to enhance their teaching skills, quench the curiosity of their future students with real science, and perhaps one day even create a new alien dialect!