Do you speak Dothraki?

If you think learning Spanish or French is tough, try making up your own language. These days, Hollywood wants more of its movies, TV shows, and video games to feel authentic, so they're creating entire languages, with grammar rules, alphabets, and enough vocabulary for characters to have real conversations. "The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over," says Paul Frommer, who created Na'vi for Avatar. David Peterson invented 12 languages before conjuring up Dothraki, now spoken on the HBO series Game of Thrones. As for why some people try to learn these tongues--including Klingon, which thousands of Star Trek fans speak--it's no different than taking up German or Russian, says one language expert: "It's about belonging to a group."

----------

Please note: Some tables or figures were omitted from this article.