Game of Thrones Linguist Denies Criticizing The Show’s Biggest Star & He Might Have a Point

One of Game of Thrones‘ biggest stars appeared on Late Night With Seth Meyers on Monday night, and she said that the show’s linguist insulted her dialect for a fictional language he created. Game of Thrones was a fantasy series that created plenty of unique languages, including the two main ones, Dothraki and High Valyrian. Linguist David J. Peterson created the two languages from book phrases, with several dialects appearing in the series. In a past interview, Peterson talked about how hard it is to learn these fictional languages, and he pointed to one star whose pronunciations were purposefully rough.

In her appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers, Emilia Clarke said she was hurt and pissed that Peterson said that her Dothraki dialect sucked. While Meyers agreed with her sentiments, Entertainment Weekly reveals that Peterson has spoken up and repeated what he originally said. It was clear that Clarke misunderstood his entire sentiment.

“I think Emilia may have misunderstood what I said, because I’ve never criticized her Dothraki,” Peterson said. The linguist said that Daenerys Targaryen was supposed to be bad at Dothraki because it wasn’t her first language. In fact, he said that she was given recordings with butchered dialogue so she wouldn’t sound right when saying it. On the other hand, Jason Momoa, Amrita Acharia, Elyes Gabel, and Steven Cole were given recordings with the proper use of the dialogue to show their mastery of the tongue since they were born with the language.

Peterson said that Daenerys not speaking it correctly was part of her character’s plot. “Criticizing any imperfections in her Dothraki performance would be like criticizing Colin Firth for stuttering in The King’s Speech. It would be entirely missing the point,” Peterson said. “In fact, grammatical and punctuation errors were built into many of her Dothraki lines—and these were included in the MP3s I recorded for her—for this very purpose.”

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Emelia Clarke Didn’t Seem to Understand Her Character’s Language Struggles

The biggest problem when watching Emilia Clarke’s appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers is that she didn’t seem to understand her character was supposed to struggle with the language. “The creator of the language, I read in an article, said that I sucked at Dothraki,” Clarke said. However, when looking at the original statement, Peterson said, “It’s always funny to hear Emilia Clarke speak Dothraki. I mean, of course, her character is not supposed to be fluent, and it really sounds not fluent. It’s great for her character. She understands, and she can speak, she just doesn’t sound quite right.”

However, the talk show appearance had Meyers and Clarke mock Peterson because it isn’t a real language. Meyers even said the way Daenerys speaks Dothraki is “Dothraki now,” which completely misunderstands the idea that the character was trying to learn a language she had no knowledge of. It makes it sound like the native speakers were the ones saying it wrong. From the sound of it, Clarke thought Peterson was mocking her when, in fact, her character was meant to sound awkward.

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