A Preliminary Approach to Linguistic Variation in the TV Series Game of Thrones

Abstract

One of the main features that defines a community is its language. Generally speaking, when TV series recreate the language of a specific community in a given period of time, their characters try to imitate that particular variety as closely as possible, not only in terms of pronunciation and accent, but also in terms of vocabulary, syntax and so on and so forth. This research will focus on the varieties of English observed in the fictional TV show Game of Thrones, by concentrating, if possible, on features such dialectal diversity, register, jargon and idiolect(s). The project will consist of two main parts: (i) an introductory section, in which I will present Game of Thrones from a linguistic point of view, along with a brief description of the varieties of English represented in the series; (ii) a practical section, in which I will study some of the linguistic features that characterize those varieties the way they are used in the fictional TV show. For this purpose, I will analyze a number of scenes where the characters reflect those linguistic features chosen for the analysis. Hopefully, the information gathered will allow me to draw some relevant conclusions on the linguistic singularities that characterize the language recreated in the series