A Brief History of the Klingon Language

For forty years, "Star Trek" has been considered by many to be the television standard for science fiction. For its millions of fans on planet Earth, it has become almost a religion. As with most religions or subcultures, Trekkie culture includes a vast library of historical apocrypha along with technical and, yes, erudite minutiae. There are even thousands of hardcore fans who have attempted to master the Klingon language.

For those non-Trekkies, Klingons are a race of swarthy, bearded, mostly villainous aliens. In the beginning years of the original television series, Klingons only grunted and groaned at each other. For the 1984 film, "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock", Paramount Pictures hired linguistics professor Marc Okrand to create the Klingon language, an artificial language for fictional characters, fully-conceived in the spirit of one of the first artificially created languages, "Esperanto."

Dr. Marc Okrand

As a University of California Santa Barbara professor, Marc Okrand's specialty had been difficult one-of-a-kind Native American languages of the west coast. This made him a natural fit to create a difficult one-of-a-kind language for "Star Trek." Unlike other artificial languages like Esperanto and Tolkien's Middle Earth language "Elvish", Klingon speak has no connection to any earthly human language.

For the third "Star Trek" movie, Dr. Okrand had the complex task of coming up with a full-blown vocabulary of 2,000 Klingon words. However, if the truth be known, it's actor James "Scotty" Doohan who's most often been credited with creating the actual sound of the Klingon language for the first movie, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." It was Doohan's sound improvisations that had established the direction that Okrand would take in order to expand Klingon into a full language.

Besides developing Klingon, Marc Okrand had also coached the actors in Klingon language pronunciation for "Star Trek III."

Note that the language's unique structure contains 22 consonants and five cardinal vowels and has an object-verb-subject word order. Also note that Dr. Okrand also created a Vulcan language for "Star Trek III", but this language didn't capture a fan following like the Klingon language.

In 1992, Marc Okrand published the very extensive "Klingon Dictionary."

The Klingon Language Institute

Also in 1992, the Klingon Language Institute was established. It's a serious non-profit organization devoted to the study and advancement of the Klingon language. They even publish an erudite quarterly academic journal called "HolQeD."

Besides hardcore "Star Trek" fans, KLI members include professional linguists and psychologists along with "Star Trek" role-playing gamers wanting to add authenticity to their in-game characters.

SOURCES:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A744860

Klingon FAQ