Klingon

Background

The Klingon language is the constructed language spoken by the fictional Klingons in the Star Trek universe.

Described in the 1985 book The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Okrand and deliberately designed to sound "alien", it has a number of typologically uncommon features. The language's basic sound, along with a few words, was first devised by actor James Doohan ("Scotty") for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That film marked the first time the language had been heard on screen. In all previous appearances, Klingons spoke in English. Klingon was subsequently developed by Okrand into a full-fledged language.

Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese (most notably in the Star Trek: The Original Series Episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", where it was actually pronounced by a Klingon character as "Klingonee") but, among the Klingon-speaking community, this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language called Klingonaase that was introduced in John M. Ford's 1984 Star Trek novel The Final Reflection, and appears in other Star Trek novels by Ford. A shorthand version of what had previously termed as "Klingonaase", is called "battle language", or "Clipped Klingon".

External history

Though mentioned in the original Star Trek series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", the Klingon language first appeared on-screen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). According to the actor who spoke the lines, Mark Lenard, James Doohan recorded the lines he had written on a tape, and Lenard transcribed the recorded lines in a way he found useful in learning them.

For Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) director Leonard Nimoy and writer-producer Harve Bennett wanted the Klingons to speak a proper language instead of made-up gibberish and so commissioned a full language based on the phrases Doohan had come up with from Marc Okrand, who had earlier devised four lines of Vulcan dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Okrand enlarged the lexicon and developed a grammar based on the original dozen words Doohan had created. The language appeared intermittently in later films featuring the original cast—for example, in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) and in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), where translation difficulties served as a plot device.

Two "non-canon" dialects of Klingon are hinted at in the novelization of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, as Saavik speaks in Klingon to the only Klingon officer aboard Capt. Kruge's starship after his death, as the survivors of the Enterprise's self-destruction transport up from the crumbling Genesis Planet to the Klingon ship. The surviving officer, Maltz, states that he speaks the Rumaiy dialect, while Saavik is speaking to him in the Kumburan dialect of Klingon, per Maltz's spoken reply to her.

With the advent of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)—in which one of the main characters, Worf, was a Klingon—and successors, the language and various cultural aspects for the fictional species were expanded. In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "A Matter of Honor", several members of a Klingon ship's crew speak a language that is not translated for the benefit of the viewer (even Commander Riker, enjoying the benefits of a universal translator, is unable to understand) until one Klingon orders the others to "speak their [i.e. humans'] language". A small number of non-Klingon characters were later depicted in Star Trek as having learned to speak Klingon, notably Jean-Luc Picard and Jadzia Dax.

Worf would later reappear among the regular characters in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993) and B'Elanna Torres, a Klingon-human hybrid, would become a main character on Star Trek: Voyager (1995). The use of untranslated Klingon words interspersed with conversation translated into English was commonplace in later seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, when Klingons became a more important part of the series' overall story-arcs.

The pilot episode of the prequel series Star Trek: Enterprise, "Broken Bow" (2001) describes the Klingon language as having "eighty polyguttural dialects constructed on an adaptive syntax". However, Klingon as described on television is often not entirely congruous with the Klingon developed by Okrand.

Language

Hobbyists around the world have studied the Klingon language. Four Klingon translations of works of world literature have been published: Epic of Gilgamesh, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and Tao Te Ching. The Shakespearian choices were inspired by a remark from High Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, who said, "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon." In the bonus material on the DVD, screenwriter Nicholas Meyer and actor William Shatner both explain that this was an allusion to the German myth that Shakespeare was in fact German.

The Klingon Language Institute http://www.kli.org/ exists to promote the language.

Okrand had studied some Native American and Southeast Asian languages, and phonological and grammatical features of these languages "worked their way into Klingon, but for the most part, not by design." Okrand himself has stated that a design principle of the Klingon language was dissimilarity to existing natural languages in general, and English in particular. He therefore avoided patterns that are typologically common and deliberately chose features that occur relatively infrequently in human languages. This includes above all the highly asymmetric consonant inventory and the basic word order.

Speakers

A small number of people are capable of conversing in Klingon. Arika Okrent guessed in her book In the Land of Invented Languages that there might be 20–30 fluent speakers. Its vocabulary, heavily centered on Star Trek–Klingon concepts such as spacecraft or warfare, can sometimes make it cumbersome for everyday use. For instance, while words for transporter ionizer unit (jolvoy’) or bridge (of a ship) (meH) have been known since close to the language's inception, the word for bridge in the sense of a crossing over water (QI) was unknown until August 2012.Nonetheless, mundane conversations are common among skilled speakers.

One Klingon speaker, d'Armond Speers, raised his son Alec to speak Klingon as a first language, whilst the boy's mother communicated with him in English. Alec rarely responded to his father in Klingon, although when he did his pronunciation was "excellent". After Alec's fifth birthday, Speers reported that his son eventually stopped responding to him when spoken to in Klingon as he clearly did not enjoy it, so Speers switched to English.

In May 2009, Simon & Schuster, in collaboration with Ultralingua Inc., a developer of electronic dictionary applications, announced the release of a suite of electronic Klingon language software for most computer platforms including a dictionary, a phrasebook, and an audio learning tool.

In September 2011, Eurotalk released the "Learn Klingon" course in its Talk Now! series. The language is displayed in both Latin and pIqaD fonts, making this the first language course written in pIqaD and approved by CBS and Marc Okrand. It was translated by Jonathan Brown and Okrand and uses the TrueType font.

Appearance and use

The Klingon language was first developed only for the purpose of being used in Star Trek. A daily conversation or a perfect translation of literature  are difficult because of the small vocabulary of only 3000 words. Fans enjoy using the language at cosplay conventions and for role-playing to give their character a more realistic appearance. There are Klingon language meetings and linguists or students are interested in researching this topic, even writing essays about the language or its users. In the media (music, literature and television) Klingon is also used frequently as a reference to Star Trek.

Phonology

Klingon has been developed with a phonology that, while based on human natural languages, is intended to sound alien to human ears. When initially developed, Paramount Pictures (owners of the Star Trek franchise) wanted the Klingon language to be guttural and harsh and Okrand wanted it to be unusual, so he selected sounds that combined in ways not generally found in other languages. The effect is mainly achieved by the use of a number of retroflex and uvular consonants in the language's inventory Klingon has twenty-one consonants and five vowels. Klingon is normally written in a variant of the Latin alphabet. In this orthography, upper and lower case letters are not interchangeable (uppercase letters mostly represent sounds different from those expected by English speakers).

Sources for learning Klingon

Books

The Klingon Dictionary (TKD)

The Klingon Way (TKW)

Klingon for the Galactic Traveller (KGT)

Federation Travel Guide, a pamphlet from Pocketbooks

The Klingon Epic (ISBN 978-90-817091-2-5)

Audio tapes

Conversational Klingon (CK)

Power Klingon (PK)

The Klingon Way (TKW)

Electronic resources

The Klingon Language Suite, language-learning tools from Ultralingua with Simon & Schuster

Star Trek: Klingon, a CD-ROM game (KCD, also STK). The CD-ROM includes a Klingon learning module with speech recognition to train the player in Klingon pronunciation; this module was developed by Dragon Systems, Inc. (which is credited on the box and in the CD-ROM) in collaboration with Marc Okrand.

Talk Now! Learn Klingon a beginners' language course for Klingon by Eurotalk and translated by Jonathan Brown