David J. Peterson, creator of the Dothraki language for HBO’s Game of Thrones, has now indirectly revealed that he’s working on creating the Valyrian language for the production thanks to an interview with PRI’s The World. At the 2:05 mark, the interviewer in the piece reads some of the names of languages that Peterson is working on as displayed on his computer, and Valyrian is among them (another one mentioned, Skroth, is the name for the “language” that Peterson invented for the Others as briefly heard in the opening of the first episode).
Thanks to the success and popularity of Game of Thrones, as well as the Na’vi language in James Cameron’s Avatar, a number of TV and film productions are hiring language creators and linguists like Peterson to invent languages. Besides working on the Game of Thrones languages, Peterson’s also working on alien languages for Syfy’s new cross-media series, Defiance.
CORRECTION: Defiance, not Dominion, is the series Peterson is creating languages for.