a writing system—nor do many of the surrounding peoples (e.g., the Lhazareen). If there were to be any written examples of Dothraki in the A Song of Ice and Fire universe, it would be in a writing system developed in the Free Cities and adapted to Dothraki, or in some place like Ghis or Qarth, which do have writing systems. Consonants There are 23 consonant phonemes in the Dothraki language. In the following IPA chart, each sound in Dothraki is given with approximate English equivalent in brackets. The letters and do not appear in Dothraki, although appears in the digraph . and seem to appear only in names, as in Pono and Bharbo. These consonants were used in the past but have since developed into and . They can still be used as variants of and . Voiceless stops may be aspirated. This does not change word meaning. The geminates of consonants marked with digraphs have a reduced orthography: represents (not ) represents (not ) represents (not ) represents (not ) Vowels Dothraki has a four vowel system shown below: There are no diphthongs. In the A Song of Ice and Fire books, never occurs as a vowel, appearing only after , and only in names, as in Jhiqui and Quaro. In sequence of multiple vowels, each such vowel represents a separate syllable. Examples: shierak ('star'), rhaesh ('country'), khaleesi ('queen'). The vowels are realized as after . turns into after dental consonants. can be pronounced as after . Grammar Parts of speech Though prepositions are also sometimes employed, the language is foremost inflectional. Prefixes, suffixes and circumfixes are all used. Verbs conjugate in infinitive, past, present, future, two imperatives and (archaic) participle; they also agree with person, number and polarity. Nouns divide into two classes, inanimate and animate. They decline in five cases, nominative, accusative, genitive, allative and ablative. Animate nouns also decline according to number. Word order The basic word order is SVO (subject–verb–object). In a basic sentence, the order of these elements (when all three are present) is as in English: first comes the subject (S), followed by the verb (V), and then the object (O). When only a subject is present, the subject precedes the verb, as it does in English: In noun phrases, there is a specific order as well. The order is as follows: In prepositional phrases, prepositions always precede their noun complements. Further examples