A fun fact about one of the most popular shows on TV:
More than 5m people now hear a few words in Dothraki or Valyrian, the fabricated languages spoken in the television series “Game of Thrones”, each week—more than the number who hear Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic combined.
How fictional languages mimic real one:
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, were influenced by Finnish and Welsh, two languages that Tolkien loved. Navi includes popping-like sounds found in Georgian and Amharic, but few English ones, to enhance its foreignness. Estonian’s negative verb system inspired Dothraki’s. Inventors also insert systematic irregularities into the language by imagining how it might have evolved over hundreds of years. They decide which words should exist and which should not: Dothraki has no word for toilet, for example, but (being the language of horse-riding warriors) more than 20 for horse.
For those really interested, Denise Martin is sorry to report that everyone is mispronouncing “Khaleesi”:
But don’t feel bad. On the HBO show, her smitten man-servant Jorah has been saying it incorrectly as well; the more accurate pronunciation should be “KHAH-lay-see,” not “ka-LEE-see.” That’s according to David J. Peterson, the language creator responsible for all of the Dothraki and Valyrian dialogue spoken on the show, and he’s driven mad every time he hears it. “Ugh. God. That’s not how it’s supposed to sound,” said Peterson. “The vowel change bugs me.” As the architect of the language’s grammar and pronunciation rules, he’s the only one who can correct it with authority, but he lost the battle to correct the pronunciation on the show early on. “The producers decided they liked the other way better. They probably thought most people were pronouncing it that way anyway, which is true.”
The Dish 