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One of the many tasks that faced Benioff and Weiss was creating a new language for the Dothraki clan – a fearsome group of riders and raiders with their own harsh tongue. They turned to the Language Creation Society to create the sprawling language, asking members to come up with a single proposal – ultimately selecting David J. Peterson’s submission.

Drawing on vocabulary from Russia, Turkey, Estonia, Inuktitut and Swahili, he set about the mammoth task.

Peterson said in a statement, released by HBO:

In designing Dothraki, I wanted to remain as faithful as possible to the extant material in George R. R. Martin’s series. Though there isn’t a lot of data, there is evidence of a dominant word order (subject-verb-object), of adjectives appearing after nouns, and of the lack of a copula (to be). I’ve remained faithful to these elements, creating a sound aesthetic that will be familiar to readers, while giving the language depth and authenticity. My fondest desire is for fans of the series to look at a word from the Dothraki language and be unable to tell if it came from the books or from me and for viewers not even to realise it’s a constructed language.

For his part, Weiss added in the same statement:

We’re tremendously excited to be working with David and the LCS. The language he’s devised is phenomenal. It captures the essence of the Dothraki and brings another level of richness to their world. We look forward to his first collection of Dothraki love sonnets.

Peterson didn’t take the task lightly. In Martin’s books, there are some choice words in Dothraki, but Weiss and Benioff were convinced the series needed an actual language, and not just some regurgitated mumbo jumbo, for certain scenes.

He created an extensive database of English to Dothraki terms, using nearly 2,000 vocabulary words, and recorded each on to CD so that the cast could hear how each word should sound. Those actors who would be speaking Dothraki would learn their language in English at first to get the pitch and emotion right, before then listening to the CDs in Dothraki.

Undeterred by learning a whole new language for the part, Jason Momoa, who plays Drogo, was just desperate to get started. ‘Some of the stuff I say, I’ve never heard said on TV or in the movies. So, to top it off with this amazing language that they’ve created, it was an honour. I don’t think I’ll ever get to play a character like that ever again. It’s just fantastic to submerge yourself in this foreign language. I can’t speak any other languages, it’s English and Dothraki now, but it was a trip.’

Emilia Clarke, who plays Daenerys (Dany), added to thisisfakediy.com, ‘I remember on the first day filming Dothraki I was beyond petrified. You just have a mind blank when it comes to it. But once you get through that and the words start to become far more familiar you kind of almost just have to turn your brain off and you know it. It just comes out. So yeah, just trying to get some good acting in there as well is the difficult bit!’

A Dothraki day could make for a very long day’s filming, she added. ‘Basically it is a language that I could be fluent in but I’m not. You get the scripts through and the Dothraki on top of it so you get to kind of map the English onto the Dothraki, find the right intonations and all that kind of stuff, but it’s a language and a culture that has come from George’s imagination and we’re trying to put it on screen, so you kind of have liberty to sort of create it for yourself really as actors. So it was really, really good fun and it was a way of getting into Dany even more, and her world.’

However, creating a new language, unsurprisingly, has its hardships.

On 10 October 2011, Peterson was woken up around two in the morning. Being woken up wasn’t a new thing working on the show, with the production team hastily demanding a translation request despite the time difference, but he believed he had finished with series two.

Recalling the moment on his blog, he said, ‘I received an e-mail from Bryan Cogman at 4.03am [his time] entitled “EMERGENCY Dothraki line!!!” He said they needed the Dothraki for “Take all the gold and jewels”, and they needed it in a couple hours. Even though it was late, I quickly translated the line and sent it off to Bryan at 1.09pm [their time]. Unfortunately, it did not, in fact, make it in time. Bryan wasn’t on set that day, but he said he thought they did it in Common language, which is unfortunate (the more Dothraki, the better!), but what could I do? So I chalked that one up to bad luck, and promptly forgot about it.’

However, he was stunned to find months later that Iain Glen had ad-libbed it. Luckily, he was impressed with Glen’s attempt and managed to work it in to fit the language that he created.

Glen himself said of the Dothraki language to westeros.org, ‘They’re a nightmare. It’s this gobbledygook language that’s very, very hard to learn, but it’s very much worth the effort because when you try and just make up your own, it always sounds very foolish. This very bright linguist developed this entire language, and so whenever a line is needed he’s referred to. He comes up with it, and it’s always very consistent. But it’s really hard. One line is okay, but if you have a speech, man, it’s hard – it’s really hard.

‘You really just need to learn it by rote. It’s this series of nonsense syllables. David says the line for you, so you learn the pattern but he doesn’t really do the intonation and he’s also American, so it sounds different. But he gives you the right sound. And then you think very clearly about the line in English and how you’d say it as you say the Dothraki line. So if it’s a line in Dothraki where you’re angry, you’ll learn it again and again to get it right.’

A hugely impressed Martin now seeks Peterson’s advice while working on the last two books, as he told Empire, ‘I now consult him when I want to invent a new Dothraki word. He’s prepared a dictionary and a lexicon. It’s amazing; it added so much to the show to have them speak Dothraki with subtitles rather than just English.

‘In 2010, I visited the Jenolan Caves in Australia, and in some of the caves they have self-guided tours where you pick up a headset and get descriptions of what you’re looking at. Since this is a big tourist destination they offer these in many languages. One of which is Klingon. I was startled when I saw that. I do wonder how many people choose to take the Klingon tour. But that has now become my ambition, to have the Dothraki language added to that, so we have equality with the damn Klingons.’