The High Valyrian Language: A Complete Guide

Quick Answer: High Valyrian is the constructed language David J. Peterson created for HBO's Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, built out of the handful of Valyrian words George R. R. Martin used in the novels. It has four noun genders (lunar, solar, terrestrial, aquatic), eight grammatical cases, a mostly subject-object-verb word order and well over a thousand attested words. In the story it is the dead classical tongue of the Valyrian Freehold, spoken by the Targaryens the way Latin was spoken by medieval scholars. Its best-known phrases are valar morghulis ("all men must die"), valar dohaeris ("all men must serve") and dracarys ("dragonfire").

This is the full guide to the High Valyrian language on one page: where it came from, what it sounds like, how its grammar works, the phrases everyone knows, and how to actually learn it. Every High Valyrian word quoted here already appears in the site's dedicated guides, which go deeper on each topic. At the end you'll find a complete list of those guides, so you can treat this page as the map and the others as the territory.

What Is High Valyrian?

High Valyrian is a fictional language with a real grammar. In the world of A Song of Ice and Fire it was the language of the Valyrian Freehold, a dragon-riding empire centred on the Valyrian peninsula in Essos. When the Doom of Valyria destroyed the Freehold, the language stopped being anyone's mother tongue, but it never disappeared. By the time of Game of Thrones it lives on as a language of learning, ritual and lineage.

Outside the story, High Valyrian is the work of David J. Peterson, the linguist HBO hired to build languages for its adaptation. Martin had sketched only a few words in the books. Peterson turned them into a system with its own sounds, inflections and thousands of possible sentences, then kept extending it for House of the Dragon, where the Targaryens speak it far more often than they do in Game of Thrones.

If you want the short version of that story first, read What Is High Valyrian?. If your real question is whether it counts as a language at all, Is High Valyrian a Real Language? answers it with the criteria linguists actually use.

From George R. R. Martin's Words to a Full Language

Martin did not design Valyrian as a working language. In the novels it appears as atmosphere: a greeting here, a dragon command there, names and titles that sound old and grand. The most famous of these fragments are valar morghulis and valar dohaeris, the exchange associated with the Faceless Men of Braavos, and dracarys, the word Daenerys uses to make her dragons breathe fire.

When HBO needed full lines of High Valyrian dialogue for Game of Thrones Season 3, Peterson had a problem every conlanger faces with a licensed world: the existing words were fixed and had to keep their meanings. So he worked backwards. He gave valar a place as the collective form of vala, "man, person." He made morghulis and dohaeris forms of real verbs, related to morghon, "death," and dohaeragon, "to serve." He kept dracarys as a noun meaning "dragonfire" that can be shouted as a command. Around those fixed points he built everything else.

That approach is why High Valyrian feels consistent rather than improvised. The words from the books are not decorative leftovers; they are explained by the grammar. For the full story behind each phrase, see Valar Morghulis Meaning, Valar Dohaeris Meaning and What Does Dracarys Mean?.

High Valyrian vs Low Valyrian

Fans often mix these up, and the show itself uses both.

High Valyrian is the classical form: grammatically conservative, prestigious, and mostly learned rather than inherited. In Game of Thrones it is the language of Targaryen heritage, of maesters and scholars, and of formal speech. Daenerys uses it to command dragons and to address the slavers of Astapor. In House of the Dragon, set much closer to the fall of Valyria, Targaryen family members speak it to one another more naturally.

Low Valyrian is not a single language. It is a family of everyday dialects spoken across the Free Cities and Slaver's Bay, each of which drifted from High Valyrian in its own direction. The closest real-world comparison is Latin and the Romance languages: Italian, Spanish and French all descend from Latin, but nobody in Rome today speaks Cicero's Latin at the market. In the show, the dialect of Astapor and Meereen is one such descendant, which is why characters there understand Daenerys's High Valyrian even though their own speech has changed.

Dothraki, by contrast, has nothing to do with the Valyrian family in-world. It is a separate language of the horse lords, which Peterson also created. The two are compared side by side in High Valyrian vs Dothraki.

High Valyrian in Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon

The language's on-screen history falls into two eras.

In Game of Thrones, High Valyrian is rare and therefore memorable. The breakout scene is Season 3, Episode 4 in Astapor, where Daenerys trades her dragon for the Unsullied and then reveals she has understood every insult the slaver Kraznys mo Nakloz made about her. Her line Zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor, "a dragon is not a slave," followed by dracarys, is the moment most viewers first realised the show's languages were real. The whole scene is broken down word by word in A Dragon Is Not a Slave in High Valyrian, and every one of her lines is collected in Daenerys High Valyrian Quotes.

In House of the Dragon, High Valyrian becomes a family language. Rhaenyra commands Syrax with sōvēs, "fly," dragon riders calm their mounts with lykirī, "be calm, easy," and kinship words like muña, "mother," kepa, "father," and valonqar, "younger sibling," turn up in ordinary conversation. Peterson added a large amount of new vocabulary for the prequel, and that expansion is collected in High Valyrian Phrases from House of the Dragon.

Sounds and Pronunciation

High Valyrian is one of the more English-friendly constructed languages to pronounce. There are no clicks, no tones and no sounds that English speakers fundamentally lack. Three features matter most.

Vowel length. A macron over a vowel (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū, ȳ) marks a long vowel, held roughly twice as long as a short one. Length can change meaning, so it is not decoration. Jorrāelan has a long ā; zaldrīzes has a long ī; sōvēs has two long vowels in a row.

Stress. Stress generally falls on the second-to-last syllable when that syllable is heavy (it has a long vowel or ends in a consonant), and moves further back when it is not. That is why zaldrīzes is said zal-DREE-zes: the long ī pulls the stress onto itself.

Consonants. Letters mostly sound as they do in Italian or Spanish, with no silent letters. R is tapped or rolled. J sounds like the English Y in "yes," so jorrāelan begins with a Y sound. The letter Y used as a vowel, as in sȳz, "good," is an "ee"-type sound rather than the English "why."

A few pronunciations to practise straight away:

The High Valyrian pronunciation guide covers every letter, the stress rule in detail and the sounds learners most often get wrong.

Grammar Overview

High Valyrian grammar is where the language earns its reputation. It is closer to Latin than to English: words change their endings to show their role in the sentence, and those endings carry most of the meaning. Here is the shape of the system; the High Valyrian grammar guide goes through each part with tables and example sentences.

Word order

The default order is subject, object, verb. Where English says "the queen sees the dragon," High Valyrian puts the verb last. Because case endings already mark who does what to whom, the order can shift for emphasis, but verb-final is the neutral pattern. Zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor shows it: "dragon slave is not," with the verb iksos near the end and the negative daor closing the sentence.

Four noun genders

High Valyrian does not split nouns into masculine and feminine. Instead it has four gender classes with evocative names:

These are tendencies, not strict meaning rules; in practice you learn each noun's gender along with the noun. The gender matters because adjectives must agree with it.

Eight cases

Nouns change their endings for eight grammatical cases:

The pronoun "you" is a handy example of why this matters. As a subject it is ao; as an object it is avy. That is why "I love you" is Avy jorrāelan and not a word-for-word copy of the English: avy is the object form, and the subject "I" is already built into the verb.

Verbs

Verbs conjugate for person and number, so subject pronouns are often dropped. The verb "to be," sagon, gives some of the most useful forms in the language: iksan, "I am," and issa, "is." The citation form of a verb usually ends in -gon, as in jorrāelagon, "to love," dohaeragon, "to serve," emagon, "to have," and sōvegon, "to fly." Commands have their own forms, which is how sōvēs comes to mean "fly!"

Adjectives

Adjectives agree with the noun they describe in gender, number and case, so a single adjective has many possible endings. Sȳz, "good," is one of the first you will meet, as in sȳz issa, "it is good."

If you are coming from Dothraki, the contrast is useful: Dothraki is simpler in its noun system, while High Valyrian asks you to track gender and case on almost every word. High Valyrian vs Klingon makes a similar comparison with the other great television conlang.

The Most Famous High Valyrian Words and Phrases

Most people arrive at High Valyrian through a handful of lines from the shows. These are the ones worth knowing first:

A few words show how meaning is layered in the vocabulary. Morghon, "death," sits behind morghulis. Kostys, "power, strength," sits behind the adjective kostōba, "powerful, strong." Qrinuntos is fire in the general, elemental sense, which is different from dracarys, dragonfire specifically. Learning words in these families is one of the fastest ways to build vocabulary.

For more, the site has three vocabulary guides at different depths: 50+ High Valyrian Words and Phrases for the phrases people search for most, 50 Common High Valyrian Words for a first study list, and the High Valyrian Dictionary by category for looking up words by topic. If you want a single romantic line explained properly, read How to Say I Love You in High Valyrian.

High Valyrian for Tattoos and Personal Use

A lot of interest in High Valyrian is personal rather than academic: people want a line for a tattoo, a wedding, a pet's name or a gift. The language works well for this precisely because its most famous phrases are short and carry real meaning. The risk is the same as with any conlang: fan-made translations circulate online with wrong endings, missing macrons or words that were never attested.

Before you put anything permanent on your skin, check every word against a source and keep the macrons, because jorrāelan without its long ā is a different spelling. The High Valyrian tattoo phrases guide collects verified options and flags the common mistakes.

Is High Valyrian Hard to Learn?

Moderately, and it is worth being honest about why.

The easy part is sound. If you can read Italian or Spanish aloud, you can read High Valyrian aloud after a short introduction to vowel length and stress.

The hard part is grammar. Every noun you learn comes with a gender and a set of case endings, adjectives must agree with those, and verbs conjugate for person and number. For an English speaker, that is real memorisation work, similar to a first year of Latin.

The other honest point is how much material exists. High Valyrian has well over a thousand attested words, which is enough to say a great deal, but its canon comes mostly from two television series plus Peterson's own additions. Compared with Klingon, documented since the 1980s, or Tolkien's Elvish, built from decades of his own writing, you will run into gaps sooner. The fan community fills some of them, but a learner should know that going in.

How to Learn High Valyrian

A practical path looks like this.

1. Start with Duolingo. Duolingo's High Valyrian course was built in partnership with HBO and expanded with new vocabulary from House of the Dragon. It is the only structured, gamified course for the language, and it covers pronunciation, vocabulary, noun classes and verb conjugation in short daily lessons. It is free with ads. The site reviews it in detail in Duolingo for High Valyrian, and Best App to Learn High Valyrian ranks every other option honestly.

2. Learn the famous lines as grammar lessons. Take valar morghulis, avy jorrāelan and zaldrīzes buzdari iksos daor apart word by word. Each one teaches a real rule: collective nouns, object pronouns, verb-final word order, negation.

3. Study grammar deliberately. Gender and case will not stick from exposure alone. Work through the grammar guide with a notebook and copy the tables out by hand.

4. Watch with transcripts. Rewatch Daenerys's scenes and the House of the Dragon dragon-riding scenes with a line-by-line translation open, and try to recognise the words before you read them.

5. Follow a roadmap. How to Learn High Valyrian lays out the whole process phase by phase, from first words to reading scene transcripts without subtitles.

Tengwar does not teach High Valyrian. We cover Peterson's other Game of Thrones language, Dothraki, with structured lessons, spaced repetition and an AI tutor, alongside Elvish and Klingon. If you enjoy Peterson's work, Dothraki is the natural companion to Duolingo's High Valyrian course: the same creator, a different design philosophy, and a lot to learn from comparing them.

Complete High Valyrian Guides on This Site

Every High Valyrian article on learningelvish.com, grouped by what you want to do:

Start here

• What Is High Valyrian?: the short introduction
• Is High Valyrian a Real Language?: what makes it a language, not a prop

Learn the language

• How to Learn High Valyrian: the full study roadmap
• High Valyrian Grammar Guide: genders, cases, verbs, word order
• High Valyrian Pronunciation Guide: vowel length, stress and every letter
• Duolingo for High Valyrian: an honest course review
• Best App to Learn High Valyrian: every option ranked

Vocabulary

• 50+ High Valyrian Words and Phrases: the most searched words and lines
• 50 Common High Valyrian Words: a first study list
• High Valyrian Dictionary: common words by category

Famous phrases and scenes

• Valar Morghulis Meaning
• Valar Dohaeris Meaning
• What Does Dracarys Mean?
• A Dragon Is Not a Slave in High Valyrian
• Daenerys High Valyrian Quotes
• High Valyrian Phrases from House of the Dragon
• Daenerys's Dothraki Phrases: the other language she speaks

Personal use

• How to Say I Love You in High Valyrian
• High Valyrian Tattoo Phrases

Comparisons

• High Valyrian vs Dothraki
• High Valyrian vs Klingon

People Also Ask

Who created the High Valyrian language? David J. Peterson created it for HBO, starting with Game of Thrones Season 3, building on the few words George R. R. Martin used in the novels. He also created Dothraki.

Is High Valyrian the same as Low Valyrian? No. High Valyrian is the classical language of the old Freehold. Low Valyrian is a family of everyday dialects descended from it in the Free Cities and Slaver's Bay, like the Romance languages descended from Latin.

How many words does High Valyrian have? Well over a thousand attested words, drawn from the two HBO series and Peterson's own additions. That is enough for real sentences, though smaller than the corpus of Klingon or Tolkien's Elvish.

What does valar morghulis mean? "All men must die." The fixed reply is valar dohaeris, "all men must serve."

How do you say "thank you" in High Valyrian? Kirimvose, said roughly kee-RIM-voh-seh.

Related Reading

• What Is High Valyrian?
• How to Learn High Valyrian
• High Valyrian Grammar Guide
• 50+ High Valyrian Words and Phrases
• High Valyrian vs Dothraki
• What Is the Dothraki Language?

Want to learn one of Peterson's languages with structured lessons today? Tengwar teaches Dothraki, along with Elvish and Klingon, with spaced repetition and an AI tutor. Start learning free.