Anyone who has poured serious hours into Duolingo will know how hard it is to pick up a language, let alone a fictional one that has to be delivered to an audience of millions.
So you can imagine Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke’s displeasure at supposedly reading that she “sucked” at speaking Dothraki by the language’s creator.
“I put so much energy into learning Dothraki,” Clarke said of her time as Daenerys on a recent Late Night with Seth Meyers appearance. “I read in an article, the creator of the language said that I sucked at Dothraki. I was like, ‘Bro, it’s not a real language!’ I can’t suck at it because me saying it on a TV show – that’s the language, that’s how it goes.”
“I was so hurt and really pissed,” Clarke added.
“I think Emilia may have misunderstood what I said, because I’ve never criticized her Dothraki,” Peterson said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly. “Why would I? Her character was never supposed to speak it like a first language, so she never had to be good at it.”
For his part, linguist and Dothraki creator David J. Peterson has seemingly been nothing but kind to Clarke’s performance in interviews – and it may all be a case of Westeros whispers spiralling out of control.
Speaking to Rolling Stone back in 2017, Peterson said, “It’s always funny to me to hear Emilia Clarke speak Dothraki. Of course, her character is not supposed to be fluent, and it really sounds…not fluent.”
Without context, that could be seen as dismissive. However, Peterson added, “It’s great. For her character, she understands and she can speak. She just doesn’t sound quite right.”
In a later Vanity Fair video, Peterson lauded Clarke’s language skills, saying her Dothraki always “sounded very nice.”
Game of Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, an adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Dunk and Egg novellas, is set to release on January 18. For our verdict, click through to our A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms review.
