The Valyrian languages are a fictional language family in the A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, and in their television adaptation Game of Thrones.
In the novels, High Valyrian and its descendant languages are often mentioned, but not developed beyond a few words. For the TV series, linguist David J. Peterson created the High Valyrian language, as well as the derivative languages Astapori and Meereenese Valyrian, based on the fragments given in the novels. Valyrian, alongside Dothraki, has been described as "the most convincing fictional tongues since Elvish".
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High Valyrian
In the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, High Valyrian occupies a cultural niche similar to that of Latin in medieval Europe. The novels describe it as no longer being used as a language of everyday communication, but rather as a language of learning and education among the nobility of Essos and Westeros, with much literature and song composed in Valyrian.
Creation
To create the Dothraki and Valyrian languages to be spoken in Game of Thrones, HBO selected the linguist David J. Peterson through a competition among conlangers. The producers gave Peterson a largely free hand in developing the languages, as, according to Peterson, George R. R. Martin himself was not very interested in the linguistic aspect of his works. The already published novels include only a few words of High Valyrian, including valar morghulis ("all men must die"), valar dohaeris ("all men must serve") and dracarys ("dragonfire"). For the forthcoming novel The Winds of Winter, Peterson has supplied Martin with additional Valyrian translations.
Peterson commented that he considered Martin's choice of dracarys unfortunate because of its (presumably intended) similarity to the Latin word for dragon, draco. Because the Latin language does not exist in the fictional world of A Song of Ice and Fire, Peterson chose to treat the similarity as coincidental and made dracarys an independent lexeme; his High Valyrian term for dragon is zaldr?zes. The phrases valar morghulis and valar dohaeris, on the other hand, became the basis of the language's conjugation system. Another word, tr?sy, meaning "son", was coined in honour of Peterson's 3000th Twitter follower.
Peterson did not create a High Valyrian writing system at the time, but he commented that he "was thinking something more like Egyptian's system of hieroglyphs--not in style, necessarily, but in their functionality. Egyptian had an alphabet, of sorts, a couple of phonetically-based systems, and a logography all layered on top of one another." In the third season's episode "The Bear and the Maiden Fair", Talisa is seen writing a Valyrian letter in the Latin alphabet, because according to Peterson, "it didn't seem worthwhile to create an entire writing system for what ultimately is kind of a throwaway shot".
At the start of June 2013, there were 667 High Valyrian words.
Phonology
Vowels with a macron over them (?, ?, ?, ?, ? and ?) are long, held for twice as long as short vowels. Some words are distinguished simply by their vowel length in High Valyrian. The rounded vowels ??? and ?y? may not be pronounced in modern High Valyrian, as a non-native or prestige language and did not survive into the descendant languages. As a result, while Daenerys Targaryen's first name may generally be pronounced [d?.'n?:.??s] by characters in Game of Thrones, in High Valyrian it would have been closer to ['dae.ne.?ys], with a diphthong in the first syllable and a rounded vowel in the last. The long vowels have also been lost in some derived languages; in season 3 of Game of Thrones, we hear Astapori Valyrian, from which all long vowels have been lost.
Syllable stress is penultimate unless the penultimate syllable is light and the antepenultimate syllable is heavy, in which case stress is on the antepenultimate. As a highly inflected language, word order is flexible (a feature lost in derived languages), but sentences with relative clauses are head-final.
Grammar
Nouns
There are four grammatical numbers in High Valyrian -- singular, plural, paucal and collective. For example, vala "man" (nom. sing.); vali "men" (nom. pl.); valun "some men" (nom. pau.); valar "all men" (nom. coll.). The collective can itself be modified by number as a new noun declension, for example azantys "knight, soldier" (nom. sing.) -> azantyr "army" (nom. coll.); azantyr "army" (nom. sing.) -> azantyri "armies" (nom. pl.).
Nouns have eight cases -- nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, instrumental, comitative and vocative, though the instrumental and comitative are not distinguished in all declensions, nor are the genitive, dative and locative always distinguished in the plural.
There are four grammatical genders, which do not align with biological sex. The Valyrian names for the genders are:
Animate and individuatable nouns are generally in the lunar or solar classes, while other nouns are generally classified as terrestrial or aquatic. The names of the classes derive from the nouns themselves, which are prototypical members of each gender. Peterson describes Valyrian gender as being inherent but more predictable from phonology than gender in French, with some of the derivational properties of the noun classes of Bantu languages. As a result of the phonological predictability, many words for humans (which tend to end -a or -ys) are lunar or solar; many foods and plants (often ending -on) are terrestrial.
According to Peterson, "what defines declension classes in High Valyrian" can be divined by paying "close attention to the singular and plural numbers" and noting "where cases are conflated and where they aren't". In the following tables, adjacent case conflations are merged into the same table cell; other cases that share a form with another are underlined.
Verbs
While nouns have four grammatical numbers, verb conjugations have only been described in the singular and the plural; paucals trigger plural agreement and collectives trigger singular agreement. There are two paradigms of verbs, those with a stem ending with a consonant and those with a stem ending with a vowel; the tables below show examples of three tenses in the active voice. It is possible to tell which paradigm is in use from the first person plural indicative -- consonant stems will always end in -i, whereas vowels stems will end in -?. Verbs with stems ending in a vowel follow a pattern where that stem-terminal vowel might change -- -a and -i do not change, -e becomes -i, but -o and -u both become -v. Verb stems may never end in a long vowel or a diphthong.
Adjectives
Adjectives have three declension classes. Like verbs, adjectives only have two number forms -- a singular, which is also used for the collective, and a plural, also used for paucal numbers. Adjectives may be both prepositive (e.g. "the white shoe") or post-positive (e.g. "the body politic"); when prepositive some further rules apply.
Several forms of elision and consonant assimilation occur with prepositive adjectives:
- With inflections of two syllables (such as kastoti in several class I plurals), the second syllable is often lost to elision; word-final -t is also lost before consonants -- compare aderot ?brot ("to the quick woman") with adero Dovaog?dot ("to the quick Unsullied").
- When such elision causes a word-final -z (such as with the class I kasta becoming kastyzy (nom.) and kastyzys (voc.) in the lunar plurals, below), the final -z is devoiced to -s when it precedes a voiceless consonant -- compare kastys hobresse ("blue goats") with kastyz d?ryssy ("blue kings"), both forms from kastyzy, the lunar nominative plural.
- If the syllable in question is vowel-consonant-vowel, then only the final vowel is elided -- compare ?nogro ?l?ro ("of the first blood") to ?l?r ?nogro ("of the first blood").
- Whereas instrumental forms are generally listed as containing -s- or -ss- and comitative forms generally contain -m- or -mm-, some nouns use only the s-forms in both cases and some nouns use the m-forms for both. When this occurs, the consonant in question experiences consonant harmony, causing the use of what might otherwise be a comitative form for an instrumental and vice versa, such as with the examples given of class III vowel mutations below, where the forms appear to be instrumental ("by means of the ... men", "by means of the ... rains"), despite being comitative ("accompanying the ... man", "accompanying the ... rains").
- Finally, word-final -m is decreasingly common in High Valyrian. Contracted inflections that end in -m will often assimilate to -n unless the next word begins with a vowel or a labial consonant.
Class I adjectives
Class I adjectives decline differently for each of the four noun classes. The exemplar is kasta, meaning "blue and green". As before, in the following tables, adjacent case conflations are merged into the same table cell; other cases that share a form with another are underlined.
Class II and III adjectives
Adjective classes II and III both conflate rather more forms, failing to distinguish between solar and lunar nouns and failing to distinguish between terrestrial and aquatic nouns. Class II also has some subclasses, that have not yet been detailed. The exemplars used here are the class II adjective adere ("sleek, smooth, slippery, fast, quick") and the class III adjective ?lie ("first").
Class III adjectives also experience vowel changes when subject to the elision described above. When a lunar or solar form is elided to a syllable containing -?- (such forms are highlighted in the table below), this -?- mutates to -io-; this does not occur with terrestrial or aquatic forms. Compare:
Duolingo course
Since October 31, 2016 a course in High Valyrian for English speakers has been in the works at the Duolingo Language Incubator. David J. Peterson is one of the contributors to the course. The beta version was released on July 12, 2017.
Learn To Speak High Valyrian Video
Derivative languages
In the world of the novel and TV series, the Nine Free Cities of Essos speak variants of High Valyrian, described by the character Tyrion in A Dance with Dragons as "not so much a dialect as nine dialects on the way to becoming separate tongues". The cities of Slaver's Bay speak related languages, descended from High Valyrian with the substrate of the local Ghiscari languages. Peterson noted that with regard to the vocabulary of the derived languages, "If it's got a j in an odd place, it's probably Ghiscari in origin."
Peterson described the relationship between High Valyrian and the Free Cities languages as being similar to that between classical Latin and the Romance languages, or more accurately between Classical Arabic and the modern varieties of Arabic, in that High Valyrian is intelligible, with some difficulty, to a speaker of a local Essoan language.
Astapori Valyrian
The first derivative Valyrian language to be featured in the series was Astapori Valyrian, a variety from the city of Astapor in Slaver's Bay. It appeared in the third-season premiere episode "Valar Dohaeris". Peterson created the Astapori dialogue by first writing the text in High Valyrian, then applying a series of regular grammar and sound changes to simulate the changes in natural languages over a long period of time.
For example, Astapori Valyrian has lost all long vowels (designated with a macron) and most diphthongs, such that an "Unsullied" is rendered as Dovaog?dy [do.vao.'?e:.dy] in High Valyrian, but as Dovoghedhy [do.vo.'?e.ði] in Astapori. Similarly, Astapori Valyrian has lost the case system of High Valyrian, so the word order is more reliably subject-verb-object (SVO) and the four genders of High Valyrian have been reduced to two, with two definite articles: ji and vi. Word stress is less predictable than in High Valyrian, but commands are stressed word-finally (for example: ivetrá).
Meereenese Valyrian
Meereenese Valyrian appeared in Season 4 of Game of Thrones. Like Astapori Valyrian, it lacked long vowels as well as the sound /y/.
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