Do You Speak Klingon?

The Klingons are, arguably, the most compelling alien race in Star Trek, first as sworn enemies, and then as uneasy allies, of the Federation. Their language, originally developed to lend authenticity to the movies, has since been taken up by fans and linguists and assumed a spirited off-screen life of its own. It’s impossible to know exactly how many people are proficient in Klingon, but around 250,000 copies of The Klingon Dictionary have been sold, and the Klingon Language Institute, or KLI, claims to have members in at least 45 countries, including Antartica, [1] and declares Klingon “the fastest growing language in the galaxy”. [2] Klingon is far from unique in being an artificial language – other notable examples include Esperanto and Tolkien’s Elvish – but it is, nevertheless, a remarkable phenomenon: created specifically for a pop culture product with no thought to any wider application outside its fictional universe, it has grown exponentially, largely thanks to the Internet, and elbowed its way into general cultural awareness – despite (or because of) having been created by a trained linguist to be unlike any other human language.

Though Klingons were formidable opponents in the original series of Star Trek, they weren’t heard speaking their own language until Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), when actor James Doohan (Scotty) improvised a few suitably harsh and alien-sounding words. Harve Bennett, the producer and writer of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) hired Marc Okrand, a linguist with a background in American Indian and Tibeto-Burman languages, to expand these into a more fully formed, “guttural” language; Okrand’s Klingon Dictionary was published in 1985.

The appointment of Worf, a Klingon, as a Starfleet officer in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) and the consequent proliferation of Klingon-centred storylines, triggered a further expansion of the language. Okrand told FT that although he was at first taken aback by the way Klingon blossomed, he can now see the reasons for its popularity. “First, it’s the language of the most beloved (odd choice of words, I know) of the Star Trek aliens, so there are automatically a lot of people at least a little bit interested in it. But it’s also real – you can actually carry on a conversation – so that made it interesting to people who like languages. So it’s a fusion of the two. Some people started to learn Klingon because they liked Star Trek and Klingons and wanted to be able to speak properly at Klingon functions and so on (but then they got hooked on the language itself); other people started to learn it because it was intellectually interesting to learn another language (but then they got hooked on Klingon culture).”

Okrand’s own enthusiasm for his assignment is palpable.

“When offered the task, I was attracted to the idea of using what I had learned about languages over the years to produce a fictional language that was based on linguistic (that is, scientific) principles. Of course, since Klingon is not a human language, I violate a number of human language rules and patterns. But I had to take these rules and patterns into account in order to violate them. So I guess the attraction was the challenge and the fun of integrating language fact and fiction.” That his standing in the academic community has not been dented by his involvement with the Klingon language, or tlhIngan Hol, perhaps indicates that it is not merely window dressing for the more eccentric fringe of fandom but a serious scholarly exercise. “A section of The Klingon Dictionary is in an introductory linguistics textbook and I’ve been invited to give lectures at a number of universities. The first inkling I got that the academic community had embraced what I did was when a university professor told me, referring to The Klingon Dictionary, that she was very pleased that there was now a ‘real linguistics book you can buy at an airport’.”

The KLI describes its membership as including “students and professionals in the fields of linguistics, philology, computer science, and psychology who see the Klingon language as a useful metaphor in the classroom or simply wish to mix vocation with avocation.” An American computational linguist, Dr d’Armond Speers, even experimented with raising his son to be bilingual in Klingon and English. [3] It is not only those working in associated disciplines who see the intellectual value of Klingon. Many speakers originally take it up as a mental puzzle, or challenge. qe’San, for example, the founder of tlhIngan Qummem, a British-based website for Klingon speakers, [4] says: “The first time I heard there was a Klingon dictionary I couldn’t believe it and had to get one. Once I did, it was an interesting read and a challenge… I enjoyed languages at school but was never very good at them so I thought if I could learn tlhIngan I could learn any language.” [5]

There are also those who approach the language from the other direction, fans hungrily embracing all things Klingon (though many of those who set out to learn the language quickly give up due to lack of aptitude or application). There is an important distinction between the elaborate dressing-up, role play and assorted ships and guilds (such as the Klingon Imperial Brewers and Bartenders Guild, the Klingon Imperial Theatre Company and the Klingon Komputer Repair Guild) of Klingdom and the people whose chief interest is the language. Still, for many, part of the attraction of learning tlhIngan Hol (in addition to reasons of identity and belonging that are common to any subculture) is the nature of the Klingon character and culture – tellingly, Okrand also devised some Vulcan dialogue, but the language of the emotionless logicians sparked no comparable popular interest. The Klingon is not shackled by the conventions of polite society, and aggression, directness and freedom from social niceties are ingrained in the language, with its rich choice of insults – for example, Hab Sosll’ Quch!, “Your mother has a smooth forehead” – and in which the closest to a polite greeting is nuqneH, or “What do you want?”.

The Internet has done much to encourage and enable the promulgation of Klingon. There are Klingon versions of Google and Wikipedia, Klingon language reference sites and, most importantly, many web-based groups and forums, which both lend learning the language a sociable aspect and give students an opportunity to apply and hone their skills. Chief amongst these is undoubtedly the Klingon Language Institute, in operation since 1992, its declared aim: “to facilitate the scholarly exploration of the Klingon language and culture”. In addition to the Institute’s tutorials, glossaries, directories and email discussion forum, Okrand uses its website and quarterly journal, HolQeD, to add words to the canon and to adjudicate on points of grammar. HolQeD carries dense articles on linguistics, as well as artwork, games, and competitions such as the Great Insult Contest (won by the monstrous “quv vawwl’ Say’moHmeH nuj blQ bllo’chugh, nuj blQ vllammoH” – “If I use spit to clean your father’s honour, I only dirty the spit.”). [6] The KLI also holds an annual conference (the qep’a’) and sponsors a Kor Memorial Scholarship.

Alongside the wealth of tutorial material produced for the aspiring Klingonist sit some perhaps more surprising publications. Hamlet, for example, was translated into Klingon, [7] inspired by a gag in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country – a Klingon chancellor declared Shakespeare best read in the original Klingon – and the Klingon Shakespeare Restoration Project is working through the rest of the Bard’s oeuvre. The ‘Warrior’s Tongue’ is also used to compose original poetry and fiction; though this might initially seem rather incongruous, Worf and his fearsome compatriots are keen devotees of opera and love poetry. The musical achievements of Earthbound Klingon speakers include an Imperial Anthem (the first line of which, translated, reads: “Our Empire is wonderful. Anyone who disagrees may be crushed under our boots.”) and some rather terrifying rock music.

Klingon, then, is in rude health. But is it a passing fad, a white elephant doomed eventually to fall into the same obscurity that has suffocated so many minority languages – real and imaginary – before it? Much, of course, depends on whether Klingons feature prominently in future Star Trek movies. But given that Klingon
has, to a considerable extent, taken on an independent life of its own, there are also other factors to consider. Importantly, there are many smart, enthusiastic people who have gone to considerable effort in learning Klingon and have a keen interest in keeping it alive.

The involvement of Schoen and Okrand is also vital. For Schoen, heading the KLI is a time-consuming responsibility yet affords him, as a psycholinguist, a unique insight into the Internet-fuelled growth of a new, entirely fabricated language. Okrand, as the sole arbiter of the canon (thus ensuring the language stays consistent and its speakers are able to communicate without the obstructions of splintering dialects) and a unifying figure, appears crucial to its vitality and coherence. Luckily, he still has much affection for the language, though he admits that: “It’s still my baby, and I feel protective of it. But babies grow up and get lives of their own eventually”.

Okrand believes that, leaving aside the constant evolution of the language [8] and the growing number of speakers, “the notion that a Klingon language exists is with us for a long time”. This year’s UK Big Brother set the housemates a task which involved learning some Klingon; the German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle celebrated 10 years of its online service by publishing pages in Klingon. [9] He finds encouraging the manner in which it is starting to crop up in everyday speech: “Already people are saying or writing things like: ‘He used so much technical jargon he might as well have been speaking Klingon’.
Or, if someone makes a grunting sound, someone else will ask what that means in Klingon. (Not only people – I heard someone say that reindeer in Finland` sound as if they’re speaking Klingon.) So even among people who can’t speak the language and never will, it’s become part of our culture. In that sense, it has a very good future.”

NOTES
1 Though the KLI’s founder, Lawrence Schoen, admits to having been the one who initiated contact with Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station: “I sent them issues of HolQeD [the KLI journal] on my own. Okay, I wanted to be able to say we had copies on every continent. But I also knew they’d love it – and my intuition was correct… I figured that any scientist crazy enough to live in Antarctica for six months must have grown up on Star Trek.” Jeff Greenwald, Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth, Penguin, 1998, p174-175.
2 www.kli.org.
3 Initally quite successfully, though the boy eventually gravitated towards English as he found he could speak it with more people.
4 www.btinternet.com/~qeSan/
5 qe’San also contends that, “Some people get into Klingon because when it started there was complete equality between the sexes and in fact there is no word in Klingon for he or she.”
6 Greenwald, p171.
7 On Qo’noS, Hamlet is considered a deeply subversive work – Hamlet’s vacillation and slowness to take revenge ill befits a true Warrior.
8 Klingon was developing even while Star Trek III was being filmed, as Okrand had to change the language he’d devised to accommodate mistakes made by the actors and so avoid reshooting scenes while maintaining the integrity of the language.
9 The pages were initially published as a joke by DW engineers in their spare time but proved extraordinarily popular. BBC News, 15 Sep 2004. There were media reports in May 2003 that the office that treats mental health patients in Multnomah County, Oregon were advertising for a Klingon interpreter. This was later proved to be an urban legend, though the county had named Klingon on a list of 55 languages that could be spoken by incoming patients; the result, according to their official news release, of “an overzealous attempt to ensure that our safety net systems can respond to all customers and clients.” CNN.com, 13 May 2003.

GOOD NEWS FOR THE KLINGON RACE
Given that the first Klingons destroyed the gods who created them, it would be a foolhardy missionary indeed, you might think, who tried to take the Word of the Lord to them. Yet two distinct Terran groups ended up fighting for the honour of doing just that.

In 1994, Professor Glen Proechel resigned from the Klingon Bible project, set up by the KLI to translate directly from Greek and Hebrew, to work on a more colloquial translation.

“It’s not going to make any sense,” Proecher said of the KLI’s literalist version. “It will be describing things that don’t exist in their own culture.”

Not only is the Klingon vocabulary void of such biblical concepts as mercy and compassion, but it lacks words for things like lambs, which don’t exist on Qo’noS. Proechel felt that “the only way one could make Klingons understand God’s Word was to retell the story in symbols and in an environment with which they were familiar.” So the lamb, for instance, is replaced by the targh, a furry, piglike animal. Similarly with the line from Mark: “We have five loaves and two fishes”. The literalists use tlrSoj (“grain food”) and blQHa’Dlbah (“water animal”); Proechel translates the line as “vagh ‘IWchab cha’ ghargh wlghaj” - “We have five blood pies and two serpent worms.” And the geopolitical context is rather different:

“All of the Klingon Empire is under the military occupation of Romulan soldiers… The Vulcans control the religious and social life (they are the Scribes and Pharisees), and the Ferengis are in control of the business world. The Klingons are expecting a “warrior Messiah” who will drive out the Romulans and take the Emperor’s throne. Such a man appears in the form of Jesu Kahless... After a military attack to take the Holy City (Jerusalem) fails, Jesu is crucified on the ‘Claw’.”

While Proechel did publish his Good News for the WarriorRace, under the ægis of his Interstellar Language School, he and Dr Lawrence Schoen (director of the Klingon Language Institute) have, apparently, now made up.

See Glen F Proechel, ‘Good News for the Klingon Race’, Bible Collectors’ World, Oct/Dec 1994.

CREATING AN ALIEN LANGUAGE
Okrand’s brief was to devise a language that sounded alien, so he deliberately used grammatical patterns (the word order of object, verb, subject for example) and combinations of sounds rarely found in human languages. While trying not to let too much of any specific language or language family creep into Klingon, he was at least partly influenced by what little was known of Klingon culture at that time: “The ‘choppy’ sound of the language – the short words, or at least the short basic forms of the words – was probably influenced by Klingon culture somewhat. Klingons wouldn’t go in for elaborate speech; they’d just get down to business. Short and sweet.” And, of course, the initial 2,000-word vocabulary he devised for STIII was dictated by the script, and although it has been considerably expanded since, Klingon speakers on planet Earth soon find that holding an everyday conversation frequently requires considerably more inventiveness than does spitting out a curse, describing famous battles, or running through an inventory of weapons and spacecraft systems.

What may surprise many (to whom Klingon levity is not immediately apparent) is that a great deal of humour has been built into the language. Okrand explains: “A good percentage of Klingon vocabulary is bad puns or obscure – or not so obscure – references. They’re compiled on the KLI’s website, and maybe elsewhere on the web. I didn’t provide that list – people have figured these out on their own (and there are a few there that I didn’t do on purpose and a few no one has yet figured out, as far as I know.) Some examples are:
mon ‘smile’ (as in Mona Lisa)
raS ‘table’ (as in tabula rasa)
’om ‘resist’ (as in ohm)
tlhaq ‘chronometer’ (sort of sounds like ‘clock’)
mIY ‘brag’ (as in me)
DaS ‘boot’ (as in the film Das Boot)
HIq ‘liquor’ (no explanation needed)
and they get worse...”

What’s more, Klingons even have jokes. Okrand’s favourite? “Doq’q’ Suvwl’pu’? ghobe’ – SuD. This, of course, doesn’t work when translated. It means ‘Are warriors orange? No, green.’ But, you see, SuD means not only ‘green’, it also means ‘take a risk’, which warriors do and – well, it’s never funny when you explain a joke.” Indeed.

Any Klingon speakers who wish to defend the honour of the race and prove that Klingons can crack jokes that would slay an Earthling, please send your offerings to FT.