Klingon language

• 1. Introduction

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  The Klingon language has a word for "What do you want?" that doubles as the nearest equivalent to "hello." That single fact tells you almost everything about the culture this language was built to serve. Klingon, or tlhIngan Hol, was constructed for a fictional alien race in the Star Trek universe, yet it grew into something no one anticipated: a living language with its own speakers, its own literature, and its own arguments about grammar.

  The story begins not with a linguist but with an actor. James Doohan, who played the Scottish engineer Scotty, devised the language's basic sounds and a handful of words for Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. Before that film, Klingons had always spoken English, even when talking to each other on their own ships. How a few words scratched onto a tape by a Canadian actor became a fully documented constructed language is the question this documentary sets out to answer. Along the way, we will meet the scholar who turned those sounds into a grammar, the people who learned to speak fluently, and the unexpected corners of the world where Klingon has turned up.

• 2. From Tape to Grammar

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  Mark Lenard, the actor who first spoke Klingon on screen in 1979, transcribed Doohan's recorded sounds in whatever way he found personally useful for memorizing them. That method was sufficient for a film, but not for a franchise.

  For Star Trek III: The Search for Spock in 1984, director Leonard Nimoy and writer-producer Harve Bennett decided the Klingons needed a real structured language rather than improvised gibberish. They commissioned the job from Marc Okrand, who had already constructed four lines of Vulcan dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Okrand took Doohan's original dozen or so words and built outward from them, enlarging the vocabulary and creating a complete grammar.

  Okrand had studied Native American and Southeast Asian languages during his academic career, and features from those language families found their way into Klingon, though he has said this happened largely without deliberate planning. His stated design principle was to make Klingon dissimilar to existing human languages, especially English. He avoided patterns that appear frequently across the world's languages and deliberately chose features that are typologically rare. Kwantlen journalist Robert Jago later noted a resemblance between Klingon and Halkomelem, a language spoken by Indigenous people in the region where James Doohan grew up, a connection that was apparently unintentional on Okrand's part.

  The language appeared intermittently in the films that followed. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country in 1991, translation difficulties between the characters became a plot device, which meant the language had moved from background texture to a structural element of storytelling.

• 3. How Klingon Sounds

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  Paramount Pictures wanted Klingon to sound guttural and harsh. Okrand wanted it to sound unusual. Both goals pushed in the same direction: toward sounds that feel uncomfortable to speakers of English.

  The language has twenty-one consonants and five vowels. Its vowel inventory is actually quite simple, with spacing similar to Spanish or Japanese. But the consonants are another matter. Klingon has no velar plosives, and only one sibilant fricative. Common sounds absent from most human languages include /k/, /g/, /f/, /h/, /s/, and /z/. What it has instead is a cluster of retroflex and uvular consonants, sounds made far back in the mouth or throat. The combination of an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive and a voiced retroflex plosive is described in phonological terms as particularly unusual.

  When written in the Latin alphabet, Klingon uses a case-sensitive system Okrand created specifically to help Star Trek actors pronounce unfamiliar sounds. Capital letters mostly signal phonemes not native to American English. For instance, the letter D in Klingon represents a retroflex sound rather than the dental stop an English speaker would expect. The vowel written as capital I looks nearly identical to the consonant written as lowercase l in sans-serif fonts such as Arial, which led generations of Klingon writers to use serif fonts like Courier instead.

  The apostrophe in Klingon is not punctuation. It represents the glottal stop, a full consonant, in the same way the okina functions in the Hawaiian alphabet.

• 4. Grammar and Word Order

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  Klingon follows object-verb-subject word order, which in most cases is the exact reverse of an equivalent English sentence. A speaker of English saying "The warrior sees the enemy" would, in Klingon structure, produce something closer to "The enemy sees the warrior" if they applied English order.

  The language is agglutinative, building meaning through chains of affixes. Nouns take suffixes from five ordered classes covering grammatical number, deixis, possession, and syntactic function. A single noun can carry up to twenty-nine different suffixes in theory, one from each class, with the classes appearing in a fixed sequence. Verbs take a prefix indicating the number and person of both subject and object, and suffixes drawn from nine ordered classes plus a special group called rovers, each with its own rule governing placement.

  Klingon distinguishes three classes of plural noun. Beings capable of using language take one suffix; body parts take another; everything else takes a third. A Klingon animal called a targ, which resembles a boar, belongs to the third class.

  An officially recognized grammatical feature is what Okrand calls intentional ungrammaticality. Speakers may deliberately break rules in a practice Okrand translates as "to misfollow the rules" or "to follow the rules wrongly." There is also Clipped Klingon, which abbreviates grammar in situations where speed is a priority by dropping sentence parts considered superfluous. This places intentional rule-breaking at the center of fluent Klingon expression, which is itself a culturally consistent choice for a warrior society.

• 5. Speakers and the KLI

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  Arika Okrent, writing in her 2009 book In the Land of Invented Languages, estimated that roughly 20-30 people could hold a genuine conversation in Klingon. That figure is small, but the community around the language is larger and more organized.

  The Klingon Language Institute, known as the KLI, exists to promote the language and considers only vocabulary and grammatical forms introduced by Okrand himself to be canonical Klingon. New words collected by the KLI until 2005 were later maintained by Klingon expert Lieven Litaer until the organization's website was updated in 2015. The KLI provides a Learn Klingon Online series of lessons, with early lessons available to non-members as a sample.

  One of the more remarkable experiments in Klingon use involved d'Armond Speers of the KLI, who raised his son Alec to speak Klingon as a first language while the boy's mother communicated with him in English. Alec's pronunciation was described as excellent on the occasions when he did respond in Klingon. After Alec's fifth birthday, Speers reported that his son had stopped responding in Klingon because he clearly did not enjoy it, at which point Speers switched to English.

  In September 2011, Eurotalk released a Learn Klingon course in its Talk Now! series, making it the first language course written in the Klingon script pIqaD with approval from CBS and Okrand. The course was translated by Jonathan Brown and Okrand and used a TrueType font. On the 15th of March 2018, the language learning platform Duolingo opened a beta course in Klingon. The course proved popular enough that Duolingo offered to promote it out of beta, but the course developers declined until software issues involving Klingon's use of the apostrophe as a consonant and its case-sensitive letters could be resolved.

• 6. Literature and Performance

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  At least nine translations of major works of world literature into Klingon have been published, including Hamlet, The Epic of Gilgamesh, Much Ado About Nothing, the Tao Te Ching, The Art of War, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Little Prince, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

  The Shakespeare choices carry a specific joke. In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the Klingon High Chancellor Gorkon tells his human guests, "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon." Screenwriter Nicholas Meyer and actor William Shatner both explained in bonus material on the DVD that this line was an allusion to the German nationalist myth that Shakespeare was actually German.

  On the 25th of September 2010, the Washington Shakespeare Company, now known as WSC Avant Bard, performed selections from Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing in Klingon in Arlington County, Virginia. The performance was proposed by Okrand himself in his capacity as chairman of the group's board. A reprise on the 27th of February 2011 featured Stephen Fry as the Klingon character Osric and was filmed by the BBC as part of a five-part documentary on language called Fry's Planet Word.

  In 2010, a Chicago theatre company staged a version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in Klingon, set in a Klingon world. A Klingon Christmas Carol is noted as the first production performed primarily in Klingon, with only the narrator speaking English. There is also a Klingon opera that is performed entirely in the language, with no English at all. The Klingon Bible Translation Project, coordinated by Melanie Roney and supported by the KLI, has been working to translate both the Old and New Testaments into Klingon, a project the KLI endorses for secular linguistic rather than missionary reasons.

• 7. Klingon in the Wider World

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  In July 2015, the Welsh Government issued an official written statement in Klingon. The circumstances were specific: a press officer in the office of Economy Minister Edwina Hart sent a reply in Klingon after Member of the Senedd Darren Millar formally questioned the minister about funding for research into UFO sightings near Cardiff Airport. The reply translated roughly as "The minister will reply in due course. However this is a non-devolved matter."

  In 2007, a report emerged that Multnomah County, Oregon, was including Klingon among the languages for which it was prepared to provide translators in its mental health program. Subsequent coverage implied the county had already treated Klingon-speaking patients; the original report clarified this was a precaution for a hypothetical situation, with translators paid only if actually needed. The county later issued a statement calling the release of the original report a mistake.

  In the Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill Volume 1, released in 2003, the opening credits attribute the proverb "Revenge is a dish best served cold" to an old Klingon saying. Microsoft's Bing Translator has offered Klingon translation, with reasonable accuracy for individual words and phrases already in its training data, though it has struggled with Klingon's system of prefixes and suffixes.

  The digital-only launch of Star Trek: Discovery in 2017 came with an announcement from Netflix that it would provide Klingon subtitles for the entire first season, translated by Lieven Litaer. The subtitles were displayed in romanized transliteration rather than the Klingon script. When the series transferred to Paramount+ in 2021, those subtitles were lost. In 2020, the German artist Hans Solo, also known as Ai-Tiem, released an EP called NuqneH whose five tracks are rapped entirely in Klingon.