David J. Peterson creates languages for movies and television shows. He has worked on Game of Thrones, Defiance, The 100, Dominion, Thor: The Dark World, Star-Crossed, Penny Dreadful, and Emerald City to name a few.
Peterson recently published a book called The Art of Language Invention, “a creative guide to language construction for sci-fi and fantasy fans, writers, game creators, and language lovers.” In an AMA today on Reddit, Peterson revealed that how little influence J.R.R. Tolkien played on his work. Check it out:
After I’d been working on my very first language for…almost a full year, I think, I found the Conlang-Listserv and that was the first time I’d heard of languages creators other than L. L. Zamenhof and Johann Martin Schleyer. I thought it was a joke when I saw list members discussing Tokien and his created languages, at first (“That hobbit dude created languages?! lol”), and ditto with Klingon, despite the fact that I watched ST:TNG religiously as a kid. I was completely oblivious. I only knew about Esperanto and Volapük because I took a class on Esperanto while I was at Berkeley.
Anyway, after finding the listserv, it was really list members’ languages that influenced me more than anything else—that and both studying a number of languages at Berkeley and majoring in linguistics. I don’t think I even looked at Tolkien’s languages till late (though if anyone’s interested, there’s an amazing resource here).