Alex Rawlings

I don’t think I will ever speak this language. Many people see immersion as the holy grail of language learning techniques. You just feel better when you can speak to people normally. It just goes to show: so many of the problems we have in this world come down to the fact that people just can’t talk to each other.

Dothraki creator David Peterson kept referring to how he’d drawn on languages he’d studied like Arabic and Japanese when inventing the languages of Game of Thrones, while Dr. Rob Leonard, who uses the forensic analysis of language to solve crimes, revealed himself to also be a fluent Swahili speaker. As we took our final group photo and left the theatre for the last time, I heard people buzzing with plans to learn new languages and improve before the conference in Thessaloniki next year (where of course Greek will be very handy! ). Ask any polyglot in the world which languages they speak best, and you’ll be sure it won’t be the ones they picked like this. These are languages that I get to use every time I go to an event like the Polyglot Conference, and that most people generally ‘expect’ you to learn.