'Game of Thrones’ fans need to enroll in this college course right now
The newest season of Game of Thrones isn't the only reason to get excited about summertime.
UC Berkeley is offering a summer session all about one of the HBO hit's fully functional but totally made-up languages. The language of the Dothraki people will be taught by none other than the language creator himself, David J. Peterson, for four days a week through the linguistics department.
The six-week course, "The Linguistics of Game of Thrones and the Art of Language Invention," is open to 40 students who are fans of language creation and not just the ripped nomadic warriors -- like warlord Khal Drogo -- known for introducing us in the first season to the Dothraki language that Peterson describes as an Arabic-Spanish mixture.
Peterson told UC Berkeley that his course will be hardcore.
"Students are going to be learning how to create a naturalistic language. These are languages that attempt as nearly as possible to replicate the quirks and idiosyncrasies of natural languages," he told the university in an interview about the course. "It’s not going to focus on the creation of alien languages, or auxiliary languages, or parody languages."
Peterson is also responsible for creating another Game of Thrones language, High Valyrian, which is spoken by religious elites and is mostly a dead language. It's something like Latin outside the fictional world of Westeros.
The class starts May 22. How do you say "Sign me up" in Dothraki?
Topics Game Of Thrones
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
