High Valyrian Alphabet – An Original Glyph Script

The script that was never finished

Search for a Valyrian alphabet and you will find plenty of results. Almost all of them are one of two things: a decorative font that maps English letters onto invented squiggles, or a screenshot of a prop from the show. Neither is a writing system. You cannot read either one back.

The reason is straightforward. Inside the fiction, the Valyrian Freehold used a logographic script where symbols stood for whole words rather than individual sounds, closer to Chinese characters than to an alphabet. A handful of those symbols were designed for on-screen inscriptions. A complete inventory was never made, because a television production only needs enough to fill a frame.

What actually exists as a working orthography is the Latin transliteration, the system of Roman letters plus diacritics used to write every published word of the language. That is what the High Valyrian dictionary uses, and it is what you need if you want to read the language rather than decorate with it.

Dracarīs Stroke-Glyphs sits alongside that transliteration rather than replacing it. Each Latin letter and digraph gets one glyph. Because the glyphs encode sound rather than shape, the system is reversible: anything written in it can be read back by anyone who knows the rules.

Count the petals, read the vowel

Vowels are built from a single template, so you never have to memorise twelve separate shapes. One rule generates all of them.

Every vowel is a ring sitting on a stem, with petal strokes radiating from the top of the ring. The number of petals identifies which vowel it is. They follow the order of the alphabet, so the count is not arbitrary and does not need memorising as a separate fact.

Length is marked twice, on purpose

High Valyrian distinguishes long vowels from short ones, and the distinction changes which word you have written rather than merely how emphatically you said it. Because that difference carries meaning, the glyph system marks it in two ways at once.

That redundancy is deliberate. A writing system that loses a meaningful distinction when you shrink it is a writing system with a bug. If you engrave one of these at 8mm, the length marker still reads.

Branches on a spine, grouped by sound

Consonants share a vertical spine. What branches off it, and where, tells you which consonant it is. Sounds made in similar ways get similar shapes, so the chart is easier to learn than thirty unrelated symbols.

The sibilants are the deliberate exception. They stand alone with no spine, which makes them instantly identifiable in a line of text and reflects the fact that s and z behave differently from everything around them.

Digraphs inherit from their parents

Five letter pairs represent single sounds. Rather than inventing new shapes, each takes the glyph of its base letter and adds one stroke. The relationship is visible, so learning the parent gets you the child.

Three letters share a glyph, and should

The system encodes sound, not spelling, so letters that sound identical are written identically. C takes the k glyph because it is pronounced /k/, which is why dracarys writes with a k shape in the middle. X takes the ks glyph for the same reason, and w takes the v glyph because High Valyrian has no English-style w sound at all.

This is a feature rather than a gap. Any writing system built on sound rather than orthography does the same thing, which is why English spelling is difficult and phonetic alphabets are not.

Four strikes, not twelve marks

The punctuation is deliberately sparse. Where English uses many marks to draw fine distinctions, this system groups them into four functions.

Grouping the question mark with the full stop is the choice that surprises people most, and it reflects how the language works. In High Valyrian a question is marked grammatically, through particles and word order, rather than by punctuation at the end. The mark does not need to carry that information because the sentence already does. The question formation guide covers the mechanics.

Writing your first word

The transliterator above does the work instantly, but understanding what it produces is worth five minutes. Here is the most recognised word in the language, assembled by hand.

Read back, the pattern is legible: two spined consonants, a short vowel, a chevron, a short vowel, a spined consonant, a six-petal vowel, and a free curve. Someone who knows the rules can decode that without having seen the word before, which is the test any real writing system has to pass.

Words worth trying

1. Start with a short word. Try riña or kepa. Four glyphs each, and both contain a feature worth seeing: the palatal dot on ñ, and the paired short vowels in kepa.
2. Then something with a long vowel. Zaldrīzes and ānogar both carry a macron, so you can watch the filled ring and crossbar appear.
3. Then a full phrase. Valar morghulis runs to fourteen glyphs and shows how the system reads across a space.
4. Then your own name. Latin letters all map, so anything you type will render. Names with c, x, or w will show the shared-glyph rule in action.

If you want vocabulary to feed it, the dictionary holds 541 words with phonetic transcriptions, and the phrases guide collects the set expressions worth writing out in full.

Artwork and things you cannot undo

A large share of people who reach a page like this are planning something permanent. That deserves a direct answer rather than a disclaimer.

The grammar point matters more than people expect. A noun in its dictionary form is not always the form a sentence would use, because High Valyrian marks grammatical role through case endings. Writing a citation form where an inflected one belongs produces something that reads as an error to anyone who knows the language, and it is difficult to fix once it is on skin or stone. The declension guide and the case system guide cover what changes and when.

Where to go next

The glyphs give you a way to write the language. These guides give you something worth writing.