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HBO
Struggling to fill the months until “Game of Thrones” stabs its way back onto our screens? Then why not use your time learning to speak the language of the Dothraki, the nomadic warriors featured on the hit show.
Game of Thrones, the enormously popular HBO TV show adapted from a series of books, spins an epic yarn of kings and commoners, as disparate forces across a fantasy realm vie for control of the Iron Throne. One people less concerned with world domination however are the Dothraki, the famed horse riders who roam the Dothraki Sea (actually a broad stretch of grassland) in tribes called Khalasars, raiding, enslaving and speaking in a coarse, guttural tongue.
The app, which provides an alarmingly comprehensive guide to speaking that fictional tongue, talks you through basics of Dothraki pronunciation, vocab, grammar and dialogue, teaching you useful verbs such as erolat (to learn) and key Dothraki phrases such as, Hash yer dothrae chek? (How are you?) and Anha zhilak yera (I love you. Aww). Najahak, used above in the headline, is the adjective or noun for “victor” or “winner”.
Random House
The bad news is that the app isn’t free. In fact, it’ll set you back $3.99, or £2.49 in the UK. For your money however you’ll also get flash cards, memorisation games and practise conversations, and if you’re already fluent in Klingon and Elvish, this could be a rare chance to get to grips with a new fantasy dialect.
The Dothraki launguage was complied for the purposes of the “Game of Thrones” TV show by linguist David J. Peterson, based on the phrases used by author George R. R. Martin in the original books. The language of the horselords, who have no writing system, follows a subject-verb-object order and uses four vowels.
