Development and Use of the Klingon

Language
The Klingon language was originally created to add realism to a race of fictional aliens who
inhabit the world of Star Trek, an American television and movie franchise. Although Klingons
themselves have never existed, the Klingon language is real. It has developed from gibberish to a
usable means of communication, complete with its own vocabulary, grammar, figures of speech,
and even slang and regional dialects. Today it is spoken by humans all over the world, in many
contexts.

Klingons first glowered from television screens in 1968. These aggressive warriors were scripted
speaking only English until the 1979 release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, when viewers
heard guttural shouts from the crew of a doomed Klingon spaceship. Only the subtitles knew
what they were saying: the actors themselves put emotion into what were then meaningless
sounds. Then, two Star Trek movies later, the producers called on professional linguist Dr. Marc
Okrand to create authentic speech for the Klingons. His task was to make their language as alien
as their ridged prosthetic foreheads, while still remaining pronounceable by human actors and
consistent with the battle cries from the first movie.

Dr. Okrand did not base Klingon on any particular language, but drew on his knowledge of how
language works to construct a wholly new language. During filming, he coached the actors on
pronunciation, and then amended Klingon to match not only their mispronunciations, but also
changes made to the subtitles after the lines were recorded. Dr. Okrands description of the
language he created was published in 1985 as The Klingon Dictionary. Over 300,000 copies
were sold, and while to many fans the book was merely another collectible, some realized that
the vocabulary and grammar made up a usable language, and a few took it upon themselves to
learn it. Most use the writing system that Dr. Okrand devised, but some use pIqaD, a writing
system based on the glyphs used in set decoration.

The alien-seeming sounds all exist in natural human languages, as does almost every aspect of
the grammar, but the combination makes an interesting and unique language. Human students of
the Klingon tongue found each other and began to communicate using the Internet. In 1992 Dr.
Lawrence Schoen founded the Klingon Language Institute, an organization that facilitates
communication among Klingonists through publications, language proficiency certification, an
annual conference, this website and a sense of community. The KLI has published Klingon
language editions of works including Hamlet, the Tao Te Ching, and Gilgamesh.

Dr. Okrand continues to support the language, attending conferences, publishing additional
books and providing additional vocabulary and grammatical clarification through consultation
with his purported Klingon informant, Maltz. A second edition of The Klingon Dictionary was
published in 1992, and the reference book has been translated into German, Czech, Italian, and
Portuguese.
The language has entered popular consciousness, being referenced and used in television series
and movies that have nothing to do with Star Trek, in advertising, in art, and as a language option
in software. An original opera u has been written and performed in Klingon, and a Klingon
language stage play adaptation of Dickens A Christmas Carol entertained audiences in four
cities over seven years. The language has even been used as a yardstick for unintelligibility in a
publication as stolid as The Economist.

While most Star Trek fans know a few words of Klingon, and many may know a few common
phrases, very few have any degree of fluency. Learning Klingon to a conversational level takes
more time and intellectual discipline than simply watching the television show. The people who
do speak Klingon well are not necessarily hard core Star Trek fans. When they get together they
use Klingon to recount adventures, reveal plans, write fiction, play games, and get in and out of
arguments. Klingon speakers have spoken the language to meet as strangers, bond as friends and
even continue into romance. Even the harshest consonants fall sweetly on the ear when they are
in the voice of a friend.

https://www.kli.org/

For the sake of Star Trek newcomers, you are considered the creator of the Klingon
language. But before we get into that, take us through what you were doing before you
connected with Trek, how you first connected with Star Trek, and what you actually did on
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Okrand: My background is in linguistics, and I have a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University
of California, Berkeley. For a while, I taught linguistics, but for the past 30 years or so, Ive
been involved with the closed captioning of television programs. Closed captioning first went on
the air in 1980, and for the first couple of years, the only programs that were captioned were
those on tape -- movies, sitcoms, dramas, and so on. In 1982, we devised a way to caption live
shows like news and sports. The first program to be captioned live besides some tests that we
didnt publicize -- was the Academy Awards presentation in 1982. That was chosen because we
wanted something with high publicity value -- and with the Oscars, thats obvious -- and low
possibility of things going wrong. The Oscars are mostly scripted, so we could get the script
ahead of time, enter it into a computer file, and then just play back the dialogue as it was spoken.
When the got to And the Oscar goes to wed switch to live and caption the winners name
and the acceptance speeches. If the new technology didnt work, only parts of the show would be
affected, and everything else would be fine. Everyone thought that was a good plan, but the
production people pointed out that the script keeps changing up until the last minute, so wed
need someone to keep track of all of that. I was chosen for that task.

So I arrived in L.A. the Monday before the Oscars and called the people I was supposed to call.
They said something like, Welcome to L.A. Well have a script for you on Thursday. So I had
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday with no Oscar work to do. I grew up in L.A. and had family
and friends there, but I hadnt contacted any friends because I thought Id be working the whole
time. Now that I had free time, I got on the phone and started making lunch and dinner plans.
During one of these calls, one friend asked where I was calling from. My company at the time
had an office in Hollywood and I told her thats where I was. She said, Thats about a mile from
here. Why dont you come by today for lunch? By here, she meant where she worked, which
was Paramount Pictures.

Your friend was Sylvia Rubinstein, who was the administrative assistant to Star Trek II
executive producer Harve Bennett

Okrand: Star Trek II was in postproduction at the time. She and Harve and I had all known each
other for many years. I knew my friends were working on Star Trek, and I thought that was very
cool, but I had no further connection. Anyway, Sylvia and I and Deborah Arkelian, another
producers assistant, went to lunch, and during the lunch conversation, somehow the fact that I
had a degree in linguistics came up. Deborah said that that was interesting because theyd been
in contact with the Linguistics Department at UCLA. I asked why, and she told me that there was
a scene in the film where Mr. Spock and a new character, a female Vulcan, have a brief
conversation. This conversation was filmed with the actors speaking English, but, for various
reasons, they thought it would be better if they were speaking Vulcan accompanied by English
subtitles. The person they were talking to at UCLA was to make up nonsense phrases that
matched the English lip movements, then theyd dub them in as if it were a foreign film. I said I
thought that was a good idea a linguist would know which sounds you can see on the lips,
which you cant, and so on, so a linguist would do a good job. Deborah and Sylvia said they
thought so, too, but there was some sort of logistics problem and they were worried that the work
would not be done in time. I asked when it had to be done. Deborah said, By the end of this
week which was exactly how long I was in town. I said, I can do that. Sylvia concurred.
And at that point, Bill Phillips, one of the producers, walked by with his lunch. They told him
about our conversation, and he said, Come see me after lunch. And I was suddenly working for
Star Trek.

I need to point out that the fact that I was friends with Harve Bennett is not irrelevant to the
story. He and I had talked about linguistics over the years from time to time. It was Harves
decision to hire me. I was a known quantity, not someone who just showed up. But, honestly, I
thought I was just going over to have lunch with a friend. Later that afternoon, Bill Phillips, the
producer, showed me the scene in the film that needed to be switched to Vulcan. I wrote down
the dialogue, only four lines, and then went back to where I was staying and made up syllables
that matched the lip movements but sounded different. For example, if the English syllable were
boo, Id switch it to Moe looks the same, sounds different.

The next day, Bill showed me a bit of the beginning of Star Trek: The Motion Picture where Mr.
Spock is about to accept his achievement of Kohlinar. This scene was entirely in Vulcan, but I
hadnt heard it before I had devised my lip-sync lines. So I quickly made a few changes so the
new Vulcan would fit in with what was already on film. I then was introduced to the actress
playing the female Vulcan, an actress very new to Hollywood by the name of Kirstie Alley, and
began working with her so she could dub in her lines. On Friday of that week, I worked with
Leonard Nimoy so he could dub in his. By this time, Oscar rehearsals were under way, and I had
to attend them. So after helping Leonard with his lines, I got in the car and drove downtown to
the Oscars, thinking, I just taught Mr. Spock how to speak Vulcan.
For Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, you basically created the Klingon language. What
went in to doing so?

Okrand: I started by looking at Star Trek: The Motion Picture, because thats where Klingon was
actually first spoken. There are perhaps a half dozen lines in Klingon with subtitles at the
beginning of the film. I wrote down those lines as best I could, made a list of the sounds in the
words and figured out what a legitimate syllable was. That was the beginning. All of the sounds
and all of the syllables and, for that matter, all of the phrases in the first movie formed the
skeleton of what I was to build. When I was looking at the first film, I didnt know who made up
those lines. When I met Mark Lenard, the actor who spoke them in that film, he told me that they
were devised by James Doohan. So James Doohan actually originated Klingon. I came along and
fleshed it out.

In this process, I had four things in mind as far as the sounds go: (1) the language had to include
all the sounds in the first film; (2) the language had to have non-English sounds since it was to be
alien; (3) the language had to be guttural, since the script for Star Trek III explicitly referred to
Klingon as a guttural language; and (4) it had to be learnable and pronounceable by the English-
speaking actors, so it contains many ordinary English sounds in addition to the more exotic
sounds. I also tried to make the grammar non-English-like. The vocabulary was easy I made up
only what was needed for the film. If a word didnt come up, I didnt come up with a Klingon
equivalent. The same went for the grammar if a particular construction or grammatical
element, say a pronoun, wasnt needed for the film, I didnt make it up. Later on, I added lots of
vocabulary and grammar stuff not in the film. But initially, the script drove what was made up.

What was it like, teaching the actors to speak Klingon and/or Vulcan for Star Trek III?

Okrand: The main speaker of Klingon in Star Trek III was Christopher Lloyd, who played
Captain Kruge. He was a great student. He was interested not only in getting the pronunciation
right, he wanted to know what the words meant and how the sentences fit together. Wed work
together pretty much every day they were shooting a scene with spoken Klingon. Most of the
other speakers of Klingon in the film were Kruges crew. For the most part, they had one line
apiece that they shouted out as things were going wrong. I dont think I ever saw a group of
people more enthusiastic about what to them must have been gibberish. Oh there was one other
key speaker of Klingon, and that was Captain Kirk. He had one line, the Klingon equivalent of
beam me up, towards the end of the film. I wasnt able to be on the set the day William Shatner
filmed that scene, but I worked with him a bit a week or so beforehand. I had no idea how it
would come out until I saw the film. He remembered his lessons well and did a great job. There
was only one speaker of Vulcan in that film, and that was the new Saavik, Robin Curtis. Robin
was a quick study and gave the Vulcan an appropriately emotionless but still meaningful
reading.

On that film, Lloyd was your best student. Be honest: who was the worst?

Okrand: The worst was a member of Kruges crew whose name I dont remember who just
couldnt get it. Im not quite sure what he was shouting out, but he got the spirit right.
You worked as well on Star Trek V and Star Trek VI. Give us a memory or two from each
production. And in what ways did the Klingon language evolve from film to film.

Okrand: Star Trek V was different from Star Trek III in two ways. First, the characters had
conversations. In Star Trek III, it was mostly, though not entirely, Kruge giving orders. But in
Star Trek V, Klaa and Vixis had, relatively speaking, long lines. This was really more of a
challenge for the actors than for me because each one had to learn not only his or her own lines,
but also the lines of the other actor so that they knew when to begin speaking. The other way
Star Trek V was different from Star Trek III is that after Star Trek III The Klingon Dictionary had
come out. When I was making up the lines for Star Trek III, I was doing just that making them
up. If I didnt like something, I could change it. And if an actor mispronounced something, but it
still sounded like Klingon, I could change the Klingon word to match what the actor said. In Star
Trek V, I had to go by the book. I was stuck with what I had written whether I liked it or not. Of
course, there were new words and new pieces of grammar I had to devise for Star Trek V, but I
had to make sure that I used material from the book if it existed.

Speaking of the book

Okrand: The book was originally supposed to come out at the same time Star Trek III came out,
but it was delayed for reasons that are actually interesting and that I should have written down,
but now I mostly forget. After I had finished it, and while nothing was happening with getting it
published, the film went into postproduction. During postproduction, they changed some lines
that were originally in English into Klingon, so we did something like we did with the Vulcan for
Star Trek II, except I had to make it sound like the Klingon in the rest of the film, both in terms
of sounds and grammar. I didnt have the relative freedom Id had with Vulcan. They also
changed a couple of subtitles, so a Klingon line that had originally meant one thing suddenly
meant something else. This, of course, meant that, in some cases, the dictionary no longer
matched the film or lacked some words that were in the film. Because of the delay in publication,
however, I was able to make changes to the dictionary so that all of the changes made in
postproduction were incorporated into the book.

But by the time of Star Trek V, the book had been published, so I could no longer fudge. This
made the creation of dialogue for Star Trek V actually harder than it was for Star Trek III. Its
harder to follow rules than to make them up. Actually, one of the actors did misspeak a line in
Star Trek V in a scene that was too complex to reshoot. After Star Trek VI came out, the
dictionary was reissued with an addendum to incorporate material created after Star Trek III. I
figured out a way for the muffed line to make sense and match the subtitle and included that in
the revised book. So the line in Star Trek V is correct after all.

The major new thing in Star Trek VI was the incorporation of Shakespeare...

Okrand: The script was filled with lines from Shakespeare, some spoken in English and some in
Klingon. So I had to translate bits of Shakespeare into Klingon, which meant I had to figure out
what a Klingon petard was, among other things. None of the Klingon lines was used in the
film by the time it was finished, theyd been switched back to English or cut out. There is one
line of Shakespeare that is spoken in Klingon in the film, though it wasnt part of the original
script. That line is To be or not to be. When the films director, Nick Meyer, asked me to create
a Klingon version of that, I said okay, but I thought oh, no. The problem was that there is no
verb in Klingon that means to be, and I make a big deal about that in the book. I thought a bit
and asked Nick if the line could mean to live or not to live. He said that was fine and I should
go teach Chris. Chris was Christopher Plummer, who was playing General Chang and who was
to speak the line. The word for live in Klingon is yIn, and what I came up with was yIn pagh
yInbe, literally, live or live not, though there are many other ways I might have done it as
well. When I said the line for Christopher Plummer, he thought it was a little too timid and asked
if there might be some other way to say it. I thought some more, and suggested that taH replace
yIn: taH pagh taHbe. This sounded good to him, especially with the harsh, guttural H at the end
of taH, so that became the line. The syllable taH, up until that moment, had been a suffix
meaning to continue doing whatever the verb it was attached to was, so eat plus taH meant
to continue eating. I sort of gave it a promotion to full verb status, but keeping the same
meaning. So a new word meaning to go on, to continue, to endure, was created: To continue
or not to continue, to go on or not to go on.

If you listen carefully in Star Trek VI, you can hear me speaking Klingon. Theres a scene on the
Klingon ship after its been attacked where there is chaos loss of gravity, then gravity returns,
lots of casualties. And theres lots of shouting and orders being shouted out by various people.
My voice is in the mix there. Somewhere. In the background.

- See more at: http://www.startrek.com/article/qapla-klingon-language-creator-marc-okrand-part-

1#sthash.TYXiBbb8.dpuf

Klingon is the solution to an artistic problem, not a linguistic one. Okrand set out
to create a believable language for a fictional culture, a language about which fans
could say, If Klingons existed, there is no question that this is what they would
speak, a language with the mysterious quality of having just the right feel.

And that urge, to create a language that captures an artistic vision, is the motivation
for a new generation of language inventors. Their languages are designed for
creativity's sake, not to shape thought or change the world, or even to be spoken by
anyone, but to satisfy the urge that J. R. R. Tolkien called his secret vice. For
his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien crafted an entire family of languages, along with
a realistic and extremely detailed explanation of the historical derivation processes
through which the languages were related. Actually, it is more accurate to say that he
crafted The Lord of the Ringsfor his languages. By the time the books were published
in the mid-1950s, he had been working on his languages for over forty years. The
creation of these languages consumed him almost against his will. At twenty-four
years old he wrote of his obsession, I often long to work at it and don't let myself
'cause though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby! He later claimed that he
wrote The Lord of the Rings to legitimize his madness: Nobody believes me when I
say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language
agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.

As a boy, Tolkien had become enchanted with the Welsh words he saw printed on
the freight cars that stopped at the train station behind his home. He loved the way the
words looked and later, when he began to study the language, found he loved their
sound even more. He explained his feeling for Welsh in the following way: Most
English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is beautiful,
especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say,sky,
and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are
extraordinarily frequent. (p.170)

Plenty of other authors throughout history have provided fictional

languages for their imagined lands. The citizens in Sir Thomas
More's Utopia (1516) have a Utopian language that looks very much
like Latin. The inhabitants of the moon in Francis Godwin's Man in
the Moone (1638) speak a musical language. The people in Terre
australe connue (1676) by Gabriel de Foigny speak a philosophical
language like that designed by Wilkins and his contemporaries. From
the strange cries of Swift's Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels to
Orwell's Newspeak to the street slang of Burgess's ruffians in A
Clockwork Orangeto the x- and z-filled jabber of countless works of
science fiction, language creation has always been practiced for
artistic purposes. However, these creations usually aren't languages
so much as they are ideas, a bit of vocabulary, a few phrases. They
don't invite further examination. They serve the story, never the
other way around. P.170-171
Arika Okrent, In the Land of INVENTED LANGUAGES,