SERIELAND COULISSE - Dothraki, a language built from scratch for the "Game of Thrones" series, has gone beyond the boundaries of its original series.
It is also heard in the cult "The Office".
PODCAST
Dragons, an iron throne and a totally invented language ... This week, in SERIELAND, Clémence Olivier takes you behind the scenes of the "Game of Thrones" series.
Ten years ago, we discovered on our screens a series that was going to become a phenomenon. It tells the story of the power struggles between several families who seek to conquer the Iron Throne: it's Game of Thrones. Its very meticulous production, its many twists and turns, its impressive dragons and its political framework… This is what seduced tens of millions of spectators in each episode.
But the strength of the HBO series, which is inspired by the novels of George RR Martin, is also to have plunged us into a completely new universe.
We discovered new continents and peoples, such as the Valyrians or the Dothraki.
The latter are nomadic horsemen that the young Daenerys Targaryen will rally to her cause.
We recognize them by their braided black hair, their charcoal makeup, their warlike attitude and their dialect: Dothraki.
In the first season of the series, entire scenes take place in this language with subtitles.
It was created entirely for the series.
A language created for the series
The author of the novels had imagined a few sentences in his books, but it did not go further.
So the creators of the series decided to develop the language as for the High Valyrian besides, which one also hears in GOT.
To get there, they called on a linguist: David J Peterson, a little genius of languages.
He has created dozens of them for cinema and for series.
It was therefore he who imagined the dothraki, drawing inspiration in particular from Spanish and Arabic.
In total, he created over 3,000 words.
But that's not all, he also imagined a conjugation and a whole grammar.
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A trend in Hollywood
It is a titanic job. So much so that one can wonder why the creators of the series broke their brains to create a language when in any case the spectators do not understand anything. We could have let the characters gossip. Except that
Game of Thrones
is not a production like any other. It is a series with great resources and in which quality takes precedence. Creating an elaborate language for a people that we follow over several seasons is therefore one way of making the series credible. And it's also been a trend in Hollywood for several years, as
Le Courrier international
reminds us
.
It started mostly in the 1980s, especially with the creation of Klingon, for the movie
Star Trek 3: In Search of Spock.
At the beginning of 2000, we discovered the Elvish language in The Lord of the Rings or even the nav'i, the language spoken by the natives in the film Avatar by James Cameron.
It was in 2009.
A language that we hear outside of the series
Fans of science fiction and the heroic-fantasy genre are particularly fond of these invented languages because it complicates the universe of the film or the series, but above all it gives them a language to come together. In any case, that's how the American linguist A-ri-ka Okrent analyzes it in the
New York Times
.
Basically, when you speak a made-up language, you belong to a group!
And that also goes for the dothraki. The fans grabbed hold of it. Just type on google to find many blogs and pages devoted to this dialect and tutorials in spades to learn the language. But that's not all. The funny thing is that the dothraki has also been invited to other works of fiction. Omer mentions it in an episode of The Simpsons. And, in season 9 of the cult series
The Office,
which describes the lives of office workers, Dwight convinces Erin, the receptionist, to learn Dothraki, rather than French.
David J Peterson, the creator of the dothraki, loved this scene.
So much so that he decided to add the formulas invented by the writers of The Office to the grammar of his language.
Well unfortunately you will not hear it in
Game of Thrones.
Quite simply because in the last seasons we speak less Dothraki.
But it's still fun to see how much this series and its universe have marked minds and infused pop culture.
Game of Thrones
is the last series that we all watched at the same time every week.
And if I was fluent in Dothraki I would surely say that it is frankly "vezhveni", great what…
Game Of Thrones
It's a series in 8 seasons, 73 episodes
It is available on OCS