Duolingo app can help if you need to speak with a dragon
‘Game of Thrones’ language a hot item
“Daenerys zaldrizi rijas.” Forget the Valyrian TV subtitles — there’s a new way you can learn that this sentence reads “Daenerys praises the dragon” in common English.
Whether you’re team Targaryen, Snow or somehow rooting for Cersei Lannister to sit on the Iron Throne by the end of “Game of Thrones’” highly anticipated seventh season, fans can now start the first episode with a bit of High Valyrian tongue.
On Thursday, East Libertybased language learning app Duolingo is releasing a beta version of its Valyrian web course, so viewers can pick up on the “ancient” language that Daenerys Targaryen uses to speak to her dragons. The move comes in time for Sunday’s season seven premiere — an expert marketing maneuver for both the HBO series and for the free language education app.
Duolingo — a free gamification-style language learning app company headed by Carnegie Mellon University professor Luis von Ahn, the researcher who developed bot-spotting tool reCaptcha — offers at least 90 language courses. Some are still “hatching” — lingo meaning the courses are still being developed.
Currently, the site has at least 170 million users. The company draws revenue through advertisements and in-app purchases.
High Valyrian has been a
highly requested course by users on Duolingo since last year, where the language first entered the Duolingo incubator, a space for volunteers to create future courses in a collaborative development process. Essentially, there are three phases: courses not yet released, courses in beta and those that have graduated from beta to become full-blown language lessons.
According to the incubator site, the High Valyrian course’s estimated completion date is July 16, 2017, and there are currently four collaborators working in the incubator.
Yes, it’s a fictional language, but the Valyrian course will be exceptionally accurate, considering that David J. Peterson — the linguist who invented all of the languages for Game of Thrones, including Valyrian and Dothraki — has been key in its development.
Beginning in October 2016, Mr. Peterson worked with the Duolingo team to create a language course with standards similar to dozens of other courses the app offers, like Dutch and Japanese.
“David has devoted a lot of time and effort to making it possible for millions to learn High Valyrian,” said Myra Awodey, lead community specialist at Duolingo.
Fictional languages with a cult-like following are nothing new, said Scott Kiesling, a linguistics professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
“People have been making up languages probably as long as language has existed,” he said. “In science fiction and fantasy, it’s a long tradition going back to [Lord of the Rings author J.R.R.] Tolkien.”
Consider the avid Star Trek fans who devote their time to learning Klingon, a language originally developed to add a roundness to the alien characters of the television and film franchise.
Originally, Klingons simply spoke English when they hit television screens in 1968, but with the passage of time, the alien warriors began to grunt. In 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” subtitles helped the audience to discern guttural sounds that were otherwise meaningless.
In 1982, linguist Marc Okrand — known for his professional work in Native American languages — created a more sophisticated and consistent Klingon language. It was first used in “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,” according to www.Kli.org, a website for Klingon language, lessons and history.
Although Klingon was derived to add a sense of reality to otherwise alien characters, the language has blossomed into a fully functioning means of communication with a life outside of the series where people speak the language with one another as if it were Spanish or French.
Even in the Game of Thrones world, High Valyrian is a decidedly uncommon tongue.
It is seen as an ancient language spoken by Valyrians for thousands of years, stretching from the Free Cities in the west, to Slaver’s Bay in the east, according to the Game of Thrones wiki, based on the novels by George R.R. Martin.
Mr. Kiesling suspects that High Valyrian beat out other languages in the franchise, like the more brutish Dothraki, because there is status associated with it.
“If you think about how languages work ... they often have status and go with the people. I would think Daenerys is one of the most popular characters on the show and people want to be like her and speak like her,” he said. “Plus it’s a noble language.”
Klingon is also a subsidiary language in the Star Trek world — though not associated with high status — and is certainly not used by all characters, so the precedent stands. Plus, Klingon is currently in Duolingo’s incubator with an expected completion date of Aug. 1, yet another parallel.
Duolingo users should expect the High Valyrian course to use a familiar interface, with images to introduce vocabulary words and helpful underlined terms to freshen the memory when translating a sentence.
Other staples, such as audio pronunciations and microphone capabilities to perfect spoken Valyrian, will also be in place.
Time will tell if this marketing stunt for both Game of Thrones and Duolingo could lead to a new language in the real world with a cultlike following. For now, it’s all about helping fans connect.
"Our mission at Duolingo is to make it free, fun and easy for people worldwide to learn new languages, regardless of whether the language is real or fictional,” Ms. Awodey said.
Mr. Kiesling believes learning a new language, even if it’s fictional, can prove instructional.
“The first non-native language you learn is hardest, you find the things you need to pay attention to, whether it’s word order or cases and it sort of lets your mind think about language differently, so the next one can be learned more easily,” he said.
“Often people will say, I didn’t know anything about English grammar until I learned a non-English language.”