David Peterson: What You Need to Know Before You Dive In
The guy most people actually mean when they talk about constructed languages for film and TV is David J. Peterson. He built Dothraki and High Valyrian for Game of Thrones, Kryptonian for Man of Steel and Superman, Galachoric for The 100, and a bunch of other stuff you might recognize if you watch a lot of genre television. He founded the Language Creation Society, wrote the textbook Construction of Artificial Languages, and basically turned conlanging from a footnote in hobbyist circles into something that Hollywood actually pays for. If you're looking at him as a reference point for building your own languages or just understanding how professional conlanging works, here's how to approach his methods without getting lost in the weeds.
Learning From David Peterson's Approach
His process isn't magic. It starts with a brief from the producers or directors that tells you what the language needs to do. Dothraki had to sound harsh and nomadic, so he built it around syllable structures that favored consonant clusters and short vowels. Valyrian needed to feel ancient and aristocratic, which is why it has a more complex phonology and a richer verb conjugation system. He reads linguistics papers, borrows real-world language patterns, and then twists them until they feel foreign but internally consistent. The book I keep coming back to is Construction of Artificial Languages. It's not flashy. It's basically a practical manual that covers phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon building in a straight talk way. I bought the first edition back when it came out and the second edition added more on tone systems and documentation standards. If you're serious about this, read it cover to cover before you try to design anything substantial. It'll save you months of going down dead ends. Here's something most beginners miss: Peterson doesn't build a language until it has a grammar that can generate sentences. A vocabulary list alone is useless. I spent weeks building a lexicon for a project and then realized I couldn't actually construct a single complete sentence because I'd never defined how nouns agreed with verbs or whether the language even had cases. Once I went back and laid out the morphosyntactic framework first, the vocabulary stopped being a random collection of words and started making structural sense. That shift from words to system is the whole thing.
Another thing that trips people up is the documentation habit. Peterson keeps detailed notes on every decision, and he records example sentences constantly. When I was working on a conlang for a short film, I hit a wall where I couldn't remember whether I'd made a particular noun class animate or inanimate two months earlier. I had to rebuild half the paradigm from scratch because my notes were scattered across five different documents. I started using a single living document with version control after that. Every grammar rule, every lexical entry, every example sentence goes in one place. It's tedious, but it prevents the kind of consistency collapse that makes a language fall apart under scrutiny.
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Where His Methods Break Down
This isn't a perfect system. Peterson's approach works great when you're building a language for visual media where the dialogue is relatively sparse and the audience needs to grasp the feel of the language quickly. It falls apart if you're trying to create something you actually plan to speak fluently or use for extended literary composition. His languages are designed to be learnable enough for actors to memorize lines, not to be full standing languages with the depth you'd get from something like Toki Pona or Ithkuil. Dothraki in particular has some well-known grammatical shortcuts. It was built for TV, so certain constructions were simplified to help actors pronounce them under heavy makeup and prosthetics. If you treat Dothraki as a serious linguistic model, you'll run into problems. It lacks certain features that natural languages have, and some of its rules are more aesthetic choices than structural necessities. If you want a language that's more rigorous and philosophically grounded, look at Ithkuil or Lojban. If you want something simpler and more minimalist, Toki Pona or Esperanto are better references. Peterson's work is brilliant for what it is, which is a professional service language for fiction, but it shouldn't be the only reference you consult if your goals go beyond writing dialogue for a screen.
You can find his published grammar guides, the textbook, and various lecture recordings online through the Language Creation Society website and his personal site. The PDFs of his grammar guides for Dothraki and Valyrian are free and widely available. They're the closest thing to primary source material you'll get on how he structures a language from a creative brief to a working grammar document.
David Peterson's Impact on the Conlang Community
Before Peterson, constructed languages were mostly a niche hobby with very little crossover into mainstream culture. The Lord of the Rings languages were treated as academic curiosities. Peterson changed that by proving that a constructed language could be a commercial product with real creative and financial value. The Game of Thrones effect opened the door for networks and studios to hire language creators as part of pre-production. It also pushed the broader conlang community to take linguistic rigor more seriously, because now there was an expectation that these languages would be held up to scrutiny by audiences who actually knew something about linguistics. The Language Creation Society, which he founded, publishes the journal Conlang and hosts an annual conference. It's become the organizing body for the field in a way that didn't really exist before. If you're engaged with this stuff at all, the LCS resources are worth following regardless of whether you agree with everything Peterson does. His work is accessible, his methods are documented, and the textbooks are affordable. The barrier to entry is lower now than it's ever been. The real question is whether you have the patience to do the structural work before you start making words sound cool. That's the part nobody warns you about.
