The Klingon language has been popular around Trekkies (Star Trek fans) since it was introduced on the big screen almost three decades ago. Now, non-Trekkies are having a go at learning the Klingon language.
Learn Klingon and join a group of very interesting people in a very exclusive language club, where you can be safe in the knowledge that not many people are going to be able to eavesdrop!
Here are the answers to the most common questions regarding Klingon.
Who are the Klingons?
Klingons were introduced in `Star Trek: The Original Series’ in 1968. They were depicted as an aggressive warrior species that were English speaking until 1979. Upon the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture the characters replaced English with guttural sounds. This was to be the basis of the Klingon language.
What is the Klingon language?
The Klingon language is the constructed (made-up) language spoken by the fictional Klingons in the Star Trek universe.
Initially, the Klingon language was just guttural sounds that had no particular meaning or structure. Actor James Doohan and producer Jon Povill of Star trek: The Motion Picture gave the initial words and sounds for Klingon.
A professional linguist, Dr. Marc Okrend, was then asked to develop this language further in 1984 for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Originally, the characters used guttural sounds or English in the series and films, until this fully-fledged language was launched.
How was the Klingon language developed?
Klingon language was developed from scratch. Yet the extraterrestrial seeming sound is similar to those that exist in all human languages and so does the grammar used. However, it’s the combination of the two that makes Klingon as unique as it is.
Okrend did not base Klingon on any particular language. He used his in-depth knowledge of language to create a completely different language. Not only did he coach the actors on using the language, he also corrected the mispronunciations and amended Klingon accordingly. He went on to publish his description of Klingon as ‘The Klingon Dictionary’. Some Trekkies, or Star Trek fans, found the book to contain sufficient information to attempt learning the language.
Is Klingon the only fictional language out there?
Fictional languages, or ‘conlangs’, have been used in various literature pieces, movies and television shows. The most popular conlang, apart from Klingon, was Elvish, as created and used by J.R.R Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings saga. Klingon, however, stands out as the most spoken language that is based on a movie.
Why do I need to know the Klingon language?
Though the exact numbers are not available, it is estimated that there exists only 30-40 speakers who are fluent in Klingon. Let’s put it like this. The population of the Earth is 7.5 billion. Amongst the 7.5 billion, there are only 30-40 fluent speakers. Should you learn Klingon, you have a very good chance of being the only person in your country to understand and speak Klingon!
Next time you want to pass a secret or help out a friend at ‘Pin the tail on the donkey’, use Klingon to help him/her out.
That said, Klingon has a small community of very faithful followers and users all around the world, who may now be fluent but can at least greet and meet in Klingon. It is a growing group and the sole basis for interaction is the language itself. You can meet people from all walks of life and from different corners of the globe and talk about your favorite movie of the Star Trek franchise.
How about bringing the characters to life at your next Halloween party or a Comic-con? Not only will you look like a Klingon, you will be able to communicate like one too, for real, prize-winning authenticity.
This energetic and expressive language has gained an iconic following amongst “Trekkies”, and if a language is all about communication, then this certainly qualifies. Don’t dream of going to a Trekkie convention without at least a few words of Klingon…
In Dept about How the Klingon language was invented
For Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), linguist Marc Okrand was asked to develop the Klingon language. Most of it he made up, but there was some raw material to begin with: Klingon names, improvised speech from an earlier film, and aspects of Klingon culture (they are a warrior race, honourable and direct).
‘Human languages are very patterned,’ he says. ‘There’s no 100% rules, but there’s a lot of tendencies, and more-likely-than-nots.’ Creating Klingon allowed him to subvert these patterns. So, for example, syntactically Klingon has OVS (object-verb-subject) word order, which is very rare in human languages.
Because Okrand was working with filmmakers to a studio budget and schedule, he couldn’t be too fussy. Sometimes he would make adjustments to the language (phonetic, lexical, or grammatical) simply in order to accommodate an actor’s imprecise delivery of a line.
Asked by the Wall Street Journal if he drew from real languages, he replied:
You can’t help being influenced by what you know, which (for me) was a bit of Spanish, French and American Indian. I also knew Southeast Asian languages. I’d be writing something and suddenly realize that it sounded like Navajo. I’d stop and make sure the next thing sounded as different as it could possibly be.
Okrand wrote a Klingon dictionary (which to date has sold hundreds of thousands of copies), and the language soon took on a life of its own. It remains a niche within other niches — Star Trek, conlanging — but by the standards of invented languages, it is thriving.
The Klingon Language Institute, founded in 1992, publishes a quarterly journal (HolQeD) and a literary supplement, offers resources for people who want to learn Klingon, and has created an extended corpus of Klingon vocabulary. People get married in Klingon ceremonies; one man tried (unsuccessfully) to make it his son’s native tongue.
Few of its many enthusiasts are fluent, but all are surely encouraged by the growing body of Klingon literature, which includes translations of Hamlet, the Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, and other great works.* Arika Okrent, a linguist who has studied Klingon, told me a Kama Sutra translation may be on the way.
In Okrent’s book In the Land of Invented Languages, she describes Klingon as ‘the solution to an artistic problem, not a linguistic one’; in this respect it is similar to Na’vi and Tolkien’s languages. She writes that Klingon
both flouts and follows known linguistic principles, and its real sophistication lies in the balance between the two tendencies. It gets its alien quality from the aspects that set it apart from natural languages . . . . Yet at the same time it has the feel of a natural language. A linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it with the same tools he would use in describing a remote Amazon language.
In the video below (21 minutes), Marc Okrand explains how he created Klingon. If you’re into Star Trek or constructed languages, you’ve probably seen it already. If, like me, you’re not particularly so, don’t be put off. It’s aimed at a general audience, and anyone curious about how languages work is likely to find it interesting.