| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m /m/ | n /n/ | ñ /ɲ/ | |||||||||||
| Plosive | p /p/ | b /b/ | t /t/ | d /d/ | j /j/c | k /k/ | g /ɡ/ | q /q/ | ||||||
| Fricative | v /v/b | (th /θ/)a | s /s/ | z /z/ | (kh /x/)a | gh /ɣ/d | h /h/ | |||||||
| Approximant | ||||||||||||||
| Trill | rh /r̥/ | r /r/ | ||||||||||||
| Lateral | l /l/ | lj /ʎ/ | ||||||||||||
Notes:
- a. ⟨th⟩ and ⟨kh⟩ are not native to High Valyrian but are present in some loanwords, such as the Dothraki arakh.
- b. ⟨v⟩ varies between [v] ~ [w].
- c. ⟨j⟩ varies between [dʒ] ~ [ʒ] ~ [j].
- d. ⟨gh⟩ varies between [ɣ] ~ [ʁ].
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close / High | ī, i [iː, i] ȳ, y [yː, y] |
ū, u [uː, u] | |
| Mid | ē, e [eː, e] | ō, o [oː, o] | |
| Open / Low | ā, a [aː, a] | ||
Vowels with a macron over them (ī, ȳ, ū, ē, ō and ā) are long, held for twice as long as short vowels. Some words are distinguished simply by their vowel length in High Valyrian. The rounded vowels ⟨ȳ⟩ and ⟨y⟩ may not be pronounced in modern High Valyrian, as a non-native or prestige language and did not survive into the descendant languages. As a result, while Daenerys Targaryen's first name may generally be pronounced [də.ˈnɛː.ɹɪs] by characters in Game of Thrones, in High Valyrian it would have been closer to [ˈdae.ne.ɾys], with a diphthong in the first syllable and a rounded vowel in the last. The long vowels have also been lost in some derived languages; in season 3 of Game of Thrones, we hear Astapori Valyrian, from which all long vowels have been lost.
Syllable stress is penultimate unless the penultimate syllable is light and the antepenultimate syllable is heavy, in which case stress is on the antepenultimate. As a highly inflected language, word order is flexible (a feature lost in derived languages), but sentences with relative clauses are head-final.