The Lands of Ice and Fire

The known universe of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is much larger than the continents of Westeros and Essos. In this course you’ll be building an undescribed language from the Lands of Ice and Fire. This will be a semester long project that you’ll build up incrementally, but the first step starts here: Selecting your language. So that you’ll be working with entirely new data, you will not be able to select a language related to or descended from either Dothraki or Valyrian. (For a similar reason, languages related to the Old Tongue, Ghiscari, or Rhoynish are off the table.) If the people whose language you’re building would come into contact with the Dothraki or with Valyrian speakers, you may borrow words from the language, if appropriate, but you’ll be evolving all the new roots, phonologies, and grammatical descriptions of your new language.

In the interest of saving time, I’ve developed proto-phonologies for the language spoken in the following places, and provided you some basic cultural descriptions culled from the Wiki of Ice and Fire (note: I’ve left the Island of Ulos and the Island of Marahai blank, for advanced students who also want to develop their own proto-phonology. You may create the language of a group not on this list with my permission. Also, here’s a video that provides some extra background on the lands outside Westeros):

Click to enlarge.

As a reminder, all these pages are going to give you is a bit of backstory (with links to provide you with more), a rough assessment of how complex it will be to work with the given language or group, and a list of phonemes for the proto-language (not the full phonotactics). Everything else will be up to you!