David Peterson is a language creator and author. David is best known for having created the Dothraki and High Valyrian languages for HBO’s Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. Since then, he has gone on to create languages for many television series and films, including Syfy’s Defiance, Netflix’s The Witcher, Legendary’s Dune, and the CW’s The 100. He is the author of Penguin’s The Art of Language Invention, an intensive introduction to language creation, and the creator of Duolingo’s High Valyrian course. He received a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and English from UC Berkeley (2003), and a master’s degree from UC San Diego (2005). While at Berkeley, he served as secretary and then president of the Society of Linguistics Undergraduates (2002-2003), and has remained engaged with the club ever since. He's a lifetime member of the California Alumni Association, and, in 2019, spoke at TEDxBerkeley. / Jessie Peterson has a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and was a professor of linguistics at Stephen F. Austin State University for 13 years, where she created a conlanging course in which she taught students how to construct a language from the ground up. She is now a full-time professional conlanger and works with her husband, David Peterson. Her work appears in a number of TV shows and films, including Pixar’s Elemental, Legendary’s Dune: Part Two, Peacock's Vampire Academy, Netflix’s Shadow and Bone, and Freeform's Motherland: Fort Salem. With her husband she co-hosts the weekly live stream LangTime Studio on YouTube, where they create new languages from scratch and share the process.
