Within days of James Cameron’s Avatar premiering in theaters in 2009, a website devoted to teaching fans the language of the film’s alien Na’vi people had sprung up on the Internet. But before there was Na’vi, there was Klingon. For more than two decades, die-hard Star Trek fans have been studying and speaking the language of the warrior race.
Marc Okrand, the creator of the language, visited Georgia Tech in March to deliver a lecture titled “What is Klingon?” at the Student Success Center. The talk was part of a writing and communication program speaker series hosted by the Georgia Tech library, the School of Literature, Communication and Culture and the School of Modern Languages.
A linguist and closed-captioning expert, Okrand was hired to develop the Klingon language for the 1984 film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
“We wanted to have consistent grammar, consistent vocabulary, things like that, the idea being that in order for it to seem real, it had to be real — at least it had to be real to me,” Okrand said.
Tasked with creating a language for a nonhuman race, Okrand decided to violate the rules of sound, rhythm and grammar typically found in human languages. He began by studying the sounds of the first Klingon words, which appeared in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and then added his own sounds, avoiding those common to English. He also decided on a very uncommon sentence structure for Klingon: object, verb, subject.
“It’s actually backwards from English,” Okrand said. “And I chose that one not because it’s backwards from English, but because it’s not common in the world’s languages. Therefore, in a weird way it’s the least human.”
What Okrand created was a language of deep, guttural sounds, with 23 consonants and five vowels. He made tapes to help the actors in the film memorize their lines, and he was on set to make sure they pronounced the words correctly.
By the time he began assisting with the fifth Star Trek film, Okrand had published a Klingon dictionary. It was about that time, Okrand said, that he discovered people were taking the language more seriously than he thought possible.
“Klingon was made up basically as props for a film,” Okrand said. “My thinking was it’s going to make the film interesting and more realistic in the same way that the weapons were really cool in Star Trek. They won’t work, they’re just a thing. So is the language — I thought.”
There now is a Klingon Language Institute, which publishes a quarterly journal of scholarly papers on the language. There is a Klingon summer camp, at which students take language lessons and play baseball, Okrand said, adding, “There’s no way in Klingon to say, ‘You’re out,’ or ‘You’re safe.’ You’re dead, or you’re alive.”
He has heard fans perform songs in Klingon, including renditions of the Sesame Street theme song, Patsy Cline’s Crazy and Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant. And some Trekkies have gone so far as to begin translating all of Shakespeare’s works into Klingon. Okrand said their Hamlet “really is a brilliant translation,” maintaining puns and iambic pentameter.
Fans wait on Okrand to add to the language’s vocabulary. The linguist confessed he is not fluent in Klingon, although he believes he has the best pronunciation skills of anyone. He said he feels a bit uneasy when fans try to speak to him in the language he created.
“What I’ve discovered is that if I do say something and make a mistake, because I said it, it becomes right, and it really messes stuff up,” he said. “So I’m really careful when I speak Klingon. One of these days, I should sit down and listen to my tapes I guess.”
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