Hi! I'm a really big fan of the work you do on Game of Thrones. I was wondering if there is a gender-neutral form of Khal/Khaleesi? And if there isn't one in the actual language, can you think of a plausible one if one were going to make up a gender-neutra

There is not, and I think this is reflective of the culture, in this instance. Unless I’m misremembering, a khal is the only one who has ever led a khalasar. Khaleesi actually comes from an older compound *khal ghesi, which translates, literally, to “khal woman”, and means, basically, “female khal”. Since the leaders were always khals, the female khal was always the wife of the khal. As I understand it, Daenerys is the first khaleesi ever to lead a khalasar.

If you look at it historically, though, the word khal is, in fact, gender-neutral. There’s nothing inherently masculine about it: It’s just always referred to a man. There is no way to make it less masculine, because Dothraki is inherently gender neutral. It doesn’t even mark gender in its pronouns. I think khal is kind of like the English word actor. There’s nothing inherently masculine about the word; it just so happens that somewhere along the line, we created a specifically female word actress. This turned word actor into a kind of male-first word, but there’s nothing in the word that makes it so. Consider the word doctor. There’s no such thing as a doctress (actually let out a sigh of relief when that got flagged as misspelled. No surprises here!). We just accepted doctor as a word for any medical physician. In this case, khal is more like actor than doctor.

So this leaves us in a dilemma. It’d be great if Dothraki were actually a gendered language, because then we could just strip off the gender somehow and produced a non-gendered form. As I said, though, there is no further neutered form for khal. What you could do is modify the word in some other way and use that word. It would inherently be gender-neutral (as all Dothraki words are that don’t refer specifically to some gender [e.g. mahrazh “man”, chiori “woman”, etc.]), and would be upon us to keep it that way in our real word use of the term. Looking at the possibilities available, I would recommend khalof. I don’t know if we have an equivalent strategy in English, but you know how adding -y makes things smaller in English (cat > kitty; pup > puppy; dog > doggy, etc.)? This is the opposite of that. A khalof is like a bigger, badder khal. It’s an animate noun, on account of its ending, but you could treat it like an animate one for semantic reasons. But the point is it’s not a word that exists in canon, so we’re free to use it as we wish. What do you think? Will that serve?