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Emilia Clarke appears as Daenerys in a scene from ‘Game of Thrones.’ The seventh season of the HBO series will debut Sunday.
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Language app adds ‘Game of Thrones’ tongue

HBO

Language app adds ‘Game of Thrones’ tongue

Parlez-vous Valyrian?

“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.

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Last week, East Liberty, PA.-based language learning app Duolingo released 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” — meaning the courses are still being developed.

Currently, the site has at least 170 million users.

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.

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According to the incubator site, the High Valyrian course’s estimated completion date is Sunday, 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, 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 [J. R. R.] Tolkien. It’s an expansion of people getting into a world.”

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 cult-like 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.

And Mr. Kiesling believes learning a new language, even if it’s fictional, can prove instructional in learning others afterward.

“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.’”

The Block News Alliance consists of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Blade. Courtney Linder is a reporter for the Post-Gazette.

First Published July 15, 2017, 4:00 a.m.

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Emilia Clarke appears as Daenerys in a scene from ‘Game of Thrones.’ The seventh season of the HBO series will debut Sunday.  (HBO)
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