Thread by @Dedalvs

Tonight's the last episode of #GameOfThrones, and if you'll allow, I'd like to reflect. The whole things started for me ten years ago on September 9th—the first day of the Dothraki competition. But the real story starts before that. (Longish thread.) #conlang

Back when they were auditioning actors, Dan Weiss and David Benioff had some gibberish lines for the Dothraki, and had those auditioning kind of make stuff up, and they found the results unsatisfactory. They decided they needed a real language for the Dothraki to speak.

At that point, they COULD have done a number of things. They could've asked their assistant to make something up. They could've gone to Google Translate and done a mashup. They could've reached out to a random nearby linguistics department. Other productions have done just that.

Instead they heard about @arikaokrent's book about people who actually create languages. Who better to create a language than someone who knows how to do so?

They contacted @arikaokrent who put them in contact with the Language Creation Society (@FiatLingua). The president of the LCS, @saizai, decided the fair thing to do would be to hold a competition, so @HBO agreed to contract with the LCS and subcontract to the competition winner.

Had ANY of those things not happened, I wouldn't be here today, and in a position to hire conlangers on my own to work with me, which I've recently done, and will be doing again soon (stay tuned).

I wanted to take this time to thank @saizai and @FiatLingua for their early work setting this up; to thank @arikaokrent for putting the producers in contact with @FiatLingua; and to thank Dan Weiss and David Benioff for having the very much NON-obvious idea of hiring a conlanger.

I can't stress that last bit enough. It might seem obvious that if you want someone to create a language, you should hire someone who knows how to create a language and has experience doing so, but it simply did not happen before 2009.

Anyone who was a part of that competition would have done a fantastic job with Dothraki and Valyrian. It happened to be me that won, so it's my job to draw attention to the fact that there are conlangers who are still not widely known that can do equally good work—or better.

Part of the reason #GameOfThrones has been so successful are the production values—the work the crew puts in, and the skill involved. The work I've done was wrought because of what I'd learned from the conlanging community, and there are conlangers who are far better than me.

For the Hollywood folks who follow me, think about what the Dothraki and Valyrian languages brought to #GameOfThrones throughout its run, and think about what quality language work can bring to yours.

Also, I'm super busy right now, so know this: YOU DO NOT NEED TO HIRE ME SPECIFICALLY! I can help you find others! I've got more than a hundred names off the top of my head. I've already handed off jobs that are going to have high quality work (stay tuned for those; NDA atm).

The past ten years have absolutely transformed my life. If you'd asked me ten years ago what my dream was, it wasn't to be a professional language creator: It was to not have to live paycheck to paycheck, and to maybe (MAYBE) one day own my own home.

I've far, far exceeded my wildest dreams already—both in life, and as a language creator. Now it's my turn to give back. And it never would have happened had not Dave and Dan decided that gibberish is not okay. San athchomari yerea. Kirimvose. Love and respect. <3