In the Land of Invented Languages

by Arika Okrent

  The phonological system of the language is by design harsh, guttural, and alien, like Klingons, but it also makes a certain kind of linguistic sense. The language doesn’t include barks, growls, or other sounds not used in human languages. And the sounds it does use are not even that exotic as far as real languages go: no clicks, trills, ingressives, or voiceless vowels.

  “The goal was for the language to be as unlike human language as possible while at the same time still pronounceable by actors,” I was told by Marc Okrand, the inventor of the Klingon language. “The alien character of Klingon doesn’t stem so much from the sounds it uses as from the way that it violates the rules of commonly co-occurring sounds. There’s nothing extraordinary about the sounds from a linguistic standpoint. You just wouldn’t expect to find them all in the same language.”

  Okrand, who has a Ph.D. in linguistics, came to be the creator of Klingon through a happy accident involving the 1982 Academy Awards. At the time, he was working for the National Captioning Institute (where he still works), developing methods for the production of real-time closed-captioning for live television. That year’s Oscars presentation, the year of Chariots of Fire and On Golden Pond, was the first major live closed-captioned event. “I arrived in Hollywood a week before the broadcast, and they weren’t ready for me yet. I had nothing to do, so I called an old friend, who happened to work for Paramount. While we were having lunch there at the commissary, a secretary for the associate producer of Star Trek II came by, and my friend introduced me, mentioning that I was a linguist. The secretary said they happened to be looking for a linguist. They needed a few lines of dialogue in Vulcan [the language of Mr. Spock] for the movie, and I think an arrangement with another linguist had just fallen through. I thought it sounded like fun, so I asked when did they need it? End of the week.”

  Despite his other obligations Okrand came through on time and skillfully—the scene, between Leonard Nimoy and Kirstie Alley, had been filmed in English, and he had to create lines that could be dubbed over their mouth movements in a believable way—so two years later, when the production team of Star Trek III wanted some scenes in Klingon, Okrand was their go-to linguist. This time he was not constrained by preexisting mouth movements—the actors would be filmed speaking Klingon—but there were two other preexisting conditions he had to take into account. The first was the existence of a few words of Klingon already invented by James Doohan (the actor who played Scotty) for a short scene in the first Star Trek movie. He had to incorporate those lines of Klingon into his own language. Second, he knew the language was supposed to be tough sounding, befitting a warrior race—which he achieved through the preponderance of back-of-the-throat sounds and the intentional absence of small-talk greetings such as “Hello.” (The closest translation in Klingon is nuqneH—“What do you want?”)

  Okrand did not just make up a list of words. Knowing that fans would be watching closely, he worked out a full grammar with great attention to detail. Klingon both flouts and follows known linguistic principles, and its real sophistication lies in the balance between the two tendencies. It gets its alien quality from the aspects that set it apart from natural languages: its phonological inventory of sounds that don’t normally occur together, its extremely rare basic word order of OVS (object-verb-subject). Yet at the same time it has the feel of a natural language. A linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it with the same tools he would use in describing a remote Amazon language.

  He would quickly deduce, for example, that Klingon is an agglutinating language. Such languages, like Hungarian and Finnish, build words by affixing units that have grammatical meanings to roots, one after the other. In these languages, entire phrases can be expressed in single words. This is how the Klingon proverb “If it is in your way, knock it down” can be expressed in only two words: “Dubotchugh yIpummoH.” The words are composed of smaller meaningful units:

  “If it blocks you, cause it to fall!”

  Klingon has twenty-six noun suffixes, twenty-nine pronominal prefixes, thirty-six verb suffixes, two number suffixes, a phrasal topicalizing suffix, and an interrogative suffix. Words have the potential to be very long. The Klingon Language Institute publishes a journal called HolQeD (Language Science, or Linguistics), which held a contest asking readers to come up with the longest possible three-word Klingon sentence. The winning entry, from David Barron:

  “The so-called great benefactors are seemingly unable to cause us to prepare to resume honorable suicide (in progress) due to their definite great self-control.”

  The sentence contains three roots (give, kill, control) and twenty-three affixes. Here is the breakdown:

  “

  As for these so-called great benefactors,”

  “they are apparently unable to cause us to prepare to resume honorable suicide (in progress)”

  “due to their defi nite great self- control.”

  The functions of these affixes are common, from a linguistic point of view. The representation of causation (-moH) or verbal aspects such as “in progress” (-lI') by verbal suffixes is routine in the language world. The use of an augmentative suffix (-‘a’) to convey literal or figurative largeness of the root to which it attaches occurs in languages as familiar as Italian, where the augmentative -one makes padre (father) into padrone (boss, master, big daddy). The -law' ending in the second word belongs to a class of suffixes called evidentials, used in languages such as Turkish, which qualify statements according to how strongly the speaker can attest to their validity. Honorifics (-neS), used to recognize superior social status in the person being spoken to or about, are a part of Korean and Japanese.

  The nu- that attaches before the verb “to kill” in the second word is part of a complex verb-agreement system that uses prefixes to show who did what to whom. Most people are familiar with a system that uses word endings that indicate who is doing the verb. For example, in Spanish, the -o ending on a verb like hablar (to speak) indicates a first-person-singular subject (hablo—“I speak”), while the -amos ending indicates a first-person-plural subject (hablamos—“we speak”). Klingon has such affixes, but they attach before rather than after the verb root, and instead of having six or seven of them, like most Romance languages, it has twenty-nine. The prefixes proliferate because they indicate person and number not only of the subject (who is doing) but also of the object (who is being done to). For example, qalegh means “I see you,” and vIlegh means “I see them”; cholegh means “you see me,” and Dalegh means “you see them.” This type of system is unusual in the realm of languages that people typically study, but not as a general possibility for language.

  Subject and object agreement by prefix is quite common, for example, in the Native languages of North America. However, it is not a feature of Mutsun, a West Coast language of the Utian family and the subject of Okrand’s dissertation. Many have speculated that Klingon is based on the Native languages that Okrand studied as a linguist. “I used some features from other West Coast languages, like the ‘tlh’ sound, for example,” said Okrand, “but my basic strategy was to switch sources whenever it started becoming too much like any one language in particular.” This strategy explains my reaction, as a linguist, to Klingon: it is completely believable as a language, but somehow very, very odd.

  And very, very difficult for the average English speaker to learn. But neither the mind-bending complexity of putting Klingon sentences together nor the uvula-twisting chore of articulating Klingon words prevents the Klingonists from studying, speaking, and writing the language. In fact, the challenge is part of the attraction, maybe the main one. Learning the Klingon language, though mocked as the most absurd thing a person could do, is what makes Klingon speakers feel above the usual Star Trek fandom. Lawrence Schoen, the head of the KLI, recalls how after an article about the Klingon language appeared on the front page of the lifestyle section of the Chicago Tribune, “memberships poured in from people who thou
ght this was all about playing Klingon. You know, the foreheads, the costumes. But when they found out what we really did, they couldn’t hack it. It was too much work.” Those who can hack it feel a haughty pride in their linguistic accomplishments, despite the fact that no one who hasn’t attempted to hack it can understand what they have to be proud of. The difficulty of the language keeps it from being just another part of the costume. The ones who end up sticking with it are in it for the language—and the cachet, the respect, that comes (from however small a group) with showing that you can master it. Anyone can wear a rubber forehead, but the language certification pins must be earned.

  When I arrived at the Klingon conference in Arizona, I didn’t know a thing about Star Trek. I hadn’t seen any of the movies. I couldn’t name one Klingon character from the show. But I knew one thing for sure: I wanted one of those pins.

  What Are They Doing?

  In 1999, the satirical paper the Onion ran a story under the headline “Klingon Speakers Now Outnumber Navajo Speakers.” This is absolutely not true, but it would have been true had they picked nearly any other Native American language. How many speakers are there? It depends on your definition of “speaker.” The Klingon Dictionary, written by Okrand and licensed by Paramount, has sold more than 300,000 copies of its two editions. But a dictionary buyer does not a speaker make. There are probably more than two thousand people who have learned to use Klingon in some way. Many of them have learned a word or two. Others have composed poems, stories, or wedding vows in Klingon without regard to the grammar, simply by popping dictionary words into English sentences. They haven’t done the work. They count only as dabblers, not speakers. At least a few hundred, however, have done the work and are pretty good at written Klingon.

  But what about speakers in the sense of people who can carry on a spontaneous live conversation in Klingon? How many of them are there? I would say, oh, twenty or so. Maybe thirty.

  This estimate doesn’t sound very exciting, but considering the difficulty of the grammar, and the relatively small vocabulary size, it’s amazing that spontaneous conversations happen at all. The annual qep’a' is one of the few places where such conversations occur.

  On the first afternoon of the conference, I stepped timidly into the over-air-conditioned lobby of the hotel with Mark Shoulson. He and I had spent the long flight to Phoenix going over the finer points of Klingon colloquialisms, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to put them to use. I saw a small group gathered around a table, PalmPilots in hand. They were conversing in Klingon, haltingly, and with much use of their PalmPilot dictionaries, but nonetheless getting their points across. No one was in costume. Mark introduced me to the group, and I smiled and waved weakly, not sure what to say or how to say it. I sat and listened for a while. I was privately pleased when I understood my first spoken Klingon sentence: “Ha’DIbaH vISopbe'” (Animal I-it-eat-not)—“I’m a vegetarian.” Not a very Klingon sentiment.

  I wasn’t impressed with the fluency level of the conversation. It seemed that nearly every sentence was repeated two or three times to the request of “nuq?” (What?). But because people were out of practice and the group was of mixed skill level, this particular conversation wasn’t the best display of Klingon-speaking potential. I saw that later, as we walked over radiating sidewalks to a Mexican restaurant for the opening banquet, when I witnessed Captain Krankor and his girlfriend holding hands and chatting in Klingon, sans PalmPilots.

  Captain Krankor (also known as Qanqor) is a software engineer and musician from Massachusetts known as Rich when he’s in regular clothes. When he wears his Klingon costume, he is Krankor, and he only speaks Klingon. In both of his personas he is round and compact, with a large, appreciative laugh that shows off his dimples. His costume includes a travel guitar, on which he might strum a few bars of his translations of the Beatles or the Stones, or lead the group in the Klingon anthem “taHjaj wo'” (May the Empire Continue), a stirring and complex round of his own composition. He is known for being the first speaker of Klingon, and he speaks as smoothly as one could speak a language with so many glottal stops—especially when he speaks with his incredibly fluent girlfriend, Agnieszka, a delicate, shy linguist from Poland.

  But no matter how well one speaks Klingon, he admits, it isn’t easy to “take the vow,” as the Klingonists call it when they make the commitment to speak only Klingon. None of the conference goers took a vow that lasted for the entire weekend. Some, like Krankor, attached the vow to the costume, and wore the costume only for certain events. Daniel, a newspaper deliveryman from Colorado, told me a little sheepishly that he was postponing putting on his costume, because then he couldn’t participate as much in the general socializing, which takes place in English. Others, like Scott, a magician from Florida who, before he discovered the language, “couldn’t give a shit about Star Trek” didn’t have a costume and simply declared they were taking the vow for a particular day.

  Scott and I were the early risers of the group, and the first morning we chatted at breakfast (in English). He answered some questions I had about vocabulary, which he was well qualified to do as the current Beginner’s Grammarian, an official title at the KLI for the person who responds to newcomers' questions on the e-mail lists. Having such a title is a mark of distinction and an endorsement of language skill. He said he was having a great time so far, and he was really hoping Marc Okrand would make an appearance, as he sometimes does at the qep’a's. “I’m starstruck,” he said with a wide smile. “I brought a new copy of The Klingon Dictionary for him to sign.”

  The second morning, when I greeted Scott by the coffee machine, he would only speak to me in Klingon, having taken the vow for that day. Luckily, someone had beamed me a PalmPilot dictionary at lunch the previous day, so I had the means to understand him in a painfully pause-filled kind of way. As the rest of the group came down from their rooms, he gained more game conversational partners and I gained some interpreters, the most skilled of whom was my guide, Mark, who through the rest of the weekend made it a point to keep me included with unobtrusive simultaneous translation in a low, gentle voice.

  Mark’s translation was also for the benefit of Louise, another beginner who became my study partner. Louise, a French-Canadian ad copywriter in her late forties, had been to three previous qep’a's and had failed the first certification exam each time. She was going to try again. Unlike most of the other attendees, she didn’t seem to be into computers, games, science fiction, or even language. She went for a run every morning and then smoked a cigarette. She had short hair and tomboy clothes, but she traveled with a pile of stuffed animals, and when I saw them on the chair in her hotel room, all propped upright like a matinee audience, I asked her, a little embarrassed on her behalf, “Are they animals you’ve collected since your childhood?” “No,” she answered, not embarrassed in the least, “well, you might say my extended childhood.”

  I still don’t fully understand why she wanted to learn Klingon, and I asked her more than a few times, trying to make sense of her response: “When I saw Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, I saw those boots, yeah? In the Klingon costume? And I said, ‘Wow! I want to make those boots.’ I thought maybe Japanese Klingon speakers would love to buy them. So I started to learn Klingon.” As far as I know, there are no Japanese Klingon speakers, but she didn’t seem worried about this. As for the boot-making part of her plan, she had apprenticed herself to a cobbler in Montreal.

  Enigma though she was, Louise was relaxed and likable, and the only other person at the conference besides me who would have a drink at meals. We almost always sat next to each other, so Mark could translate for us and so we could study together.

  And I was studying constantly, feverishly. Until I arrived at the qep’a', I thought I was done studying. I had scored perfectly on my postal-course lessons. I was confident, bigheaded even. After all, I was a linguist (and we don’t get many opportunities to feel superior). I was already familiar with the grammatical concepts. I memoriz
ed the affixes and about forty words of core vocabulary. I leaned back and crossed my arms over my puffed-up chest.

  The language has a lexicon of about three thousand words, and there’s no way anyone knows all of them without peeking, or so I thought. The words are totally arbitrary and must simply be memorized one by one. You don’t get any help from cognates (for example, German Milch for English “milk”) or international words (for example, informazione), and you must deal with words for such things as dilithium crystal (cha’pujqut) and transporter ionizer unit (jolvoy'). How could anyone be expected to remember all of them? I assumed that for the first test, the smattering of words in the postal-course exercises would be sufficient.

  Soon after I arrived in Phoenix, I found out that the first test was “beginner’s” level because you were expected to know “only 500 words.” I frantically made five hundred flash cards on tiny slips of paper, and carried them around with me to every activity and every meal, cramming and cramming.

  If you have a sharp eye and an active imagination, Okrand does offer a narrow foothold into the lexicon. The word for “fish,” for example, is ghotI'. If you get the reference to the George Bernard Shaw anecdote about the absurdity of English spelling (“gh” as in “tough,” “o” as in “women,” “ti” as in “nation” = “fish”), you remember this word. The word for “guitar” is leSpal (parsed Les Paul). Other associations are simpler, but just as memorable. The word for “pain” is oy. “Hangover” is 'uH. This wink-wink tendency in the vocabulary, however, is no more than a faint undercurrent and can’t be relied upon as a study aid.