David J. Peterson


David Joshua Peterson is an American language creator, writer, and artist, who has constructed languages for television and movies such as and Doctor Strange and the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for the television series Game of Thrones.

Life

Studying at University of California, Berkeley, Peterson received BA degrees in English and in linguistics. He received an MA in linguistics from University of California, San Diego. According to an interview given to the publication Conlangs Monthly, he had his first contact with constructed languages while still at Berkeley, after attending an Esperanto class in 2000. In 2007, he co-founded the Language Creation Society with nine other language creators and served as its president.
In 2009, the television network HBO needed a fictional language for the Game of Thrones television series and turned to the Language Creation Society for help. This resulted in a contest, which Peterson won.
Peterson has created the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for the HBO series Game of Thrones and the Castithan, Irathient, Indogene and Omec languages for the Syfy show Defiance; he has been creating languages since 2000. He also created the language used by the Dark Elves in the movie '. Peterson's recent projects include the creation of the Inha and Munja'kin languages for the NBC series Emerald City.
Peterson has worked to popularize the activity of language creation, or "conlanging". He produced a number of videos on YouTube, in a series called The Art of Language Invention, and published a book of the same title in 2015. Peterson also worked as an executive producer on the 2017 documentary film, '.

Filmography

Television

Films

Video games

Operas

YearTitleLanguage
2019Lampedusa Vōv, a language spoken on Ariel's island. It has serial verb constructions and reduplication.