It’s the start of the seventh season of Game of Thrones and to get fans excited the High Valyrian course was released on Duolingo. Duolingo is a free to use website and mobile app that provides courses for multiple languages. The language courses provided on Duolingo are usually that of natural languages, but the constructed language Esperanto is also available and Star Trek’s Klingon is in the process of being added. High Valyrian is the only language that was created for a work of fiction that is currently available to learn.

High Valyrian initially appeared in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels as a handful of words and phrases, such as the well-known phrase, “Valar morghulis.” When the novels were adapted into the massively popular television show Game of Thrones, linguist David J. Peterson fleshed out these words and phrases into an actual language. In universe, High Valyrian is the language of the Valyrian Freehold, the largest civilization of its time until the Doom of Valyria. In present day of the series High Valyrian is still spoken in Westeros by the Targaryen royal family and in Essos. Dialects derived from High Valyrian, known as Low Valyrian, are more commonly spoken in Martin's fantasy world.

Even though the High Valyrian course is available now, it is still in beta. While most courses on Duolingo include audio to help learners with pronunciation, High Valyrian hasn’t yet added that to the course. I asked Peterson if audio would be added later and he said that only 3/5 of the language tree is currently available and audio will be added when the full tree is completed. The course is currently only available on the website and cannot yet be accessed through the mobile app.

This is the second Game of Thrones language to be made available to learn. Peterson also created Dothraki for the show and released a book in 2014 for those wishing to learn the language of the horse-riding warriors. He also wrote a book called The Art of Language Invention that explains how he created these languages, as well as many others, as a professional conlanger.

Be sure to check out the High Valyrian course to prepare for the new season of Game of Thrones!