Encyclopedia
The
Klingon language or
Klingonese is the constructed language spoken by
Klingons in the fictional
Star Trek universe. Deliberately designed by Marc Okrand to be "alien", it contains many peculiarities, such as Object Verb Subject word order. The basic sound was first devised by
James Doohan for
. That film marked the first time the language had been heard on screen, all previous appearances of the Klingons being in English. Klingon was subsequently developed by Okrand into a fully fledged language.
Klingon is sometimes referred to as Klingonese , but among the Klingon-speaking community this is often understood to refer to another Klingon language that is described in John M. Ford's Star Trek novels as Klingonaase.
A small number of people, mostly dedicated
Star Trek fans or language aficionados, can converse in Klingon. However, its vocabulary, heavily centered around Star Trek or 'Klingon' concepts such as "
spacecraft" or "warfare", makes it impractical for everyday use.
History
Though mentioned in the original
Star Trek series, Klingon was first used on-screen in
; for
, Okrand enlarged the lexicon and developed grammar around the original dozen words Doohan had created. It would be used intermittently in later movies featuring the original cast: in
,
translation difficulties would serve as a plot device.
With the advent of the series
– in which one of the main characters was a Klingon,
Worf – and successors, the language and various cultural aspects for the fictional species were expatiated. Worf would later reappear among the regular characters in
and B'Elanna Torres, a Klingon-human
hybrid, would become a main character on
. Later in the pilot episode of the
prequel , "Broken Bow" , the Klingon language is described as having "eighty polyguttural dialects constructed on an adaptive syntax"; however, Klingon as described on television is often not entirely congruous with Klingon developed by Okrand.
Language
The fictional language has spawned an actual language with a following and numerous reference works. A description of the actual Klingon language can be found in Okrand's book
The Klingon Dictionary . Other notable works include
The Klingon Way ,
Klingon for the Galactic Traveler and the two audio productions
Conversational Klingon and
Power Klingon.
Three books have also been published in the tongue:
ghIlghameS ,
Hamlet , and
paghmo' tIn mIS . These last two choices were inspired by a remark by a Klingon general in
that
Shakespeare is best read in the original Klingon.
Some
Trekkies take the time to learn it and at some Star Trek conventions one can hear enthusiasts use it amongst themselves. They often greet each other with the Klingon word
nuqneH , which is said to be the closest thing to a polite greeting that exists in the language. Another phrase commonly heard among Star Trek fans is "
Qapla'", the Klingon word for "success".
In 2005 a documentary film called Earthlings: Ugly Bags Of Mostly Water, was released. The film exposes the lives of obsessive Star Trek fans who speak Klingon; featuring Michael Dorn.
In May 2003, the
Multnomah County, Oregon Department of Human Services named Klingon on a list of 55 languages for which it might conceivably need interpreters; this story was circulated out-of-context as an urban legend claiming that the department was looking to hire a Klingon interpreter.
County Chair Diane Linn called the listing the "result of an overzealous attempt to ensure that our safety net systems can respond to all customers and clients."
Paramount owns a
copyright to the official dictionary and other canonical descriptions of the language. Some people dispute the validity of Paramount's claim of copyright on the language itself in light of the
U.S. Supreme Court's Feist decision, but no challenge has actually been brought to court.
A proposal to add support for Klingon to
Unicode was rejected.
A
programming language called var'aq was inspired by Klingon.
Google is available in Klingon.
Features of the Klingon language were taken from various real Earth languages:-
- Using a sentence as a noun clause by appending 'e' to it was inspired by Sanskrit .
- The relative pronoun suffix for verbs is similar to a Swahili construction.
- Pronoun verb prefixes occur in Swahili and Nahuatl.
- Amalgamating the subject and object pronoun prefixes is paralleled in Nahuatl.
- The rules for use of the word je = "and" are about the same as in Sanskrit .
d'Armond Speers
Dr. d'Armond Speers is an American computational linguist and a member of the Klingon Language Institute.
He graduated from
Georgetown University in the Spring of 2002. His dissertation topic was "Representation of American Sign Language for Machine Translation."
Dr. Speers is known for having undertaken the endeavour to raise his child bilingually in
English and Klingon; Speers spoke in Klingon and his wife in
English. A few years into his life, the child began rejecting Klingon and gravitating towards English, as he could use English with many more speakers. The fact that Klingon lacked many words for things that were important in a baby's life, such as "diaper", and "pacifier", was a lesser issue. At the time of Speers' attempt, Klingon even lacked words for many objects common around the house, such as "table". The experiment ultimately failed when the child refused to use Klingon when he got older.
Phonology
Klingon has been developed with a
phonology that, while based on human natural languages, is intended to sound
alien. When initially developed, Paramount Pictures wanted the Klingon language to be guttural and harsh and Okrand wanted it to be unusual, so he selected sounds that combined in ways not generally found in other languages. The effect is mainly achieved by the use of a number of
retroflex and
uvular consonants in the language's inventory. Although natural languages use a number of different airstream mechanisms besides the common pulmonic egressive, these other mechanisms are not used in Klingon. This is perhaps because these sounds are a lot more difficult to learn to produce if one's language does not use them. Klingon has twenty-one consonants and five cardinal vowels. Klingon is normally written in a variant of the
Latin alphabet . In this orthography, upper and lower case letters are not interchangeable . In the discussion below, standard Klingon orthography appears in
<angle brackets>, and the phonemic transcription in the
International Phonetic Alphabet is written between
/slashes/.
Consonants
The inventory of consonants in Klingon is spread over a number of
places of articulation. In spite of this, the inventory has many gaps: Klingon has no
velar plosives, and only one sibilant. Deliberately, this arrangement is quite bizarre by the standards of human languages. The combination of aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive and voiced retroflex plosive is particularly unusual, for example.
;Labials
- <p> — — aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive
- <b> — — voiced bilabial plosive
- <m> — — bilabial nasal
- <v> — — voiced labiodental fricative
;Coronals
- <t> — — aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive
- <D> — — voiced retroflex plosive
- <D> — — retroflex nasal, an allophone of the above consonant
- <n> — — alveolar nasal
- <r> — — alveolar trill
- <S> — — voiceless retroflex fricative
- <l> — — alveolar lateral approximant
;Dorsals
- <q> — — aspirated voiceless uvular plosive
- <ng> — — velar nasal
- <H> — — voiceless velar fricative
- <gh> — — voiced velar fricative
- <y> — — palatal approximant
- <w> — — labial-velar approximant
;
Glottal- <'> — — glottal stop
;Affricates
- <ch> — — voiceless postalveolar affricate
- <j> — — voiced postalveolar affricate
- <tlh> — — voiceless alveolar lateral affricate
- <Q> — — voiceless uvular affricate
Vowels
In contrast to consonants, Klingon's inventory of vowels is simple and similar to many human languages, such as Spanish. There are five vowels spaced evenly around the vowel space, with two back rounded vowels, and two front or near-front unrounded vowels — the most common for human languages. There is also a back unrounded vowel.
The two front vowels, <e> and <I>, represent sounds that are found in English but are more open and lax than a typical English speaker might assume when reading Klingon text written in the Latin alphabet, causing the consonants of a word to be more prominent. This enhances the sense that Klingon is a clipped and harsh-sounding language.
;
Vowels
- <a> — — open back unrounded vowel
- <e> — — open-mid front unrounded vowel
- <I> — — near-close near-front unrounded vowel
- <o> — — close-mid back rounded vowel
- <u> — — close back rounded vowel
Diphthongs can be analyzed phonetically as the combination of the five vowels plus one of the two semivowels and . Thus, the combinations <ay>, <ey>, <Iy>, <oy>, <uy>, <aw>, <ew> and <Iw> are possible. There are no words in the Klingon language that contain *<ow> or *<uw>.
Vowel stress
In verbs, the stressed syllable is usually the verb itself, as opposed to a prefix or any suffixes except when a suffix ending with ' is separated from the verb by at least one other suffix, in which case the suffix ending in ' is also stressed. In addition, stress may shift to a suffix which is meant to be emphasized.
In nouns, the final syllable of the stem is stressed. If any syllables ending in ' are present, the stress shifts to those syllables.
The stress in other words seems to be variable, but this is not a serious issue because most of these words are only one syllable in length. Still, there are some words which should fall under the rules above, but do not, although using the standard rules would still be acceptable.
Syllabification
Klingon
syllable structure is extremely strict: a syllable must start with a consonant followed by one vowel. In prefixes and other more rare syllables, this is enough. More commonly, this consonant-vowel pair is followed by one consonant or one of three biconsonantal codas: /-
w' -
y' -
rgh/. Thus,
ta "record",
tar "poison" and
targh "targ" are all legal syllable forms, but *
tarD and *
ar are not. Despite this, there is one suffix that takes the shape vowel+consonant: the endearment suffix -
oy.
Grammar
Klingon is an agglutinative language, using mainly affixes in order to alter the function or meaning of words. Some nouns have inherently plural forms:
jengva' "plate" vs.
ngop "plates", for instance.
Klingon nouns take suffixes to indicate grammatical number, gender, two levels of deixis, possession and syntactic function. In all, 29 noun suffixes from five classes may be employed:
jupoypu'na'wI'vaD "for my beloved true friends". Speakers are limited to no more than one suffix from each class to be added to a word, and the classes have a specific order of appearance.
Gender in Klingon does not indicate sex, as in English, or have an arbitrary assignment as in Danish or many other languages. It indicates whether a noun is a body part, a being capable of using language, or neither of these.
Verbs in Klingon are even more complex, taking a prefix indicating the number and person of the subject and object, plus suffixes from nine ordered classes, plus a special suffix class called
rovers. Each of the four known rovers has its own unique rule controlling its position among the suffixes in the verb. Verbs are marked for aspect, certainty, predisposition and volition, dynamic, causative, mood, negation, and honorific, and the Klingon verb has two moods: indicative and imperative.
The most common word order in Klingon is Object Verb Subject, and in some cases the word order is the exact reverse of word order in English:
DaH mojaq-mey-vam DI-vuS-nIS-be' 'e' vI-Har now suffix
-PL-DEM 1PL.A.3PL.P-limit-need
-NEG that
1SG.A.3SG.P-believe
"I believe that we do not need to limit these suffixes now."
Klingons apparently dislike redundancy such that, for example, since the
DI prefix in the previous example indicates that the direct object
mojaq is plural, a Klingon speaker will quite typically omit the plural suffix
mey and say:
DaH mojaq-vam DI-vuS-nIS-be' 'e' vI-HarUnlike most artificial auxiliary languages, which seek to either emulate elements of several evolved human languages in order to be easier to learn, or to be more regular with fewer exceptions than is the case in evolved existing languages, the Klingon language tries to break away from the most common features of other languages and embraces the exceptions to its own rules.
Writing systems
The official Klingon writing system is the
Latin alphabet as used above, but on the television series, the Klingons use their own alien writing system. In
The Klingon Dictionary this alphabet is named as
pIqaD, but no information is given about it. When Klingon symbols are used in Star Trek productions they are merely decorative graphic elements, designed to emulate real
writing and create an appropriate atmosphere.
The Astra Image Corporation designed the symbols for
, although these symbols are often incorrectly attributed to Michael Okuda. They based the letters on the
Klingon battlecruiser hull markings first created by Matt Jeffries, and on
Tibetan writing because the script had sharp letter forms — used as a testament to the Klingons' love for knives and blades.
KLI pIqaD
Although the Latin alphabet is used officially to write Klingon, the speaking community also makes use of an artificial script designed to emulate Klingon writing on the show. This alphabet was created by an anonymous source at
Paramount, who based their alphabet on letters seen in the show. This "source" sent in their alphabet to the Klingon Language Institute and the KLI uploaded it onto their website as the Klingons' way of writing their language. This alphabet has gained some acceptance within the speaker and fan community although many
Klingonists still prefer the Latin alphabet.
The alphabet is quite simple: It contains twenty-six letters with a one-to-one
grapheme-phoneme correspondence: that is, one letter represents one sound and one sound is written with one letter. There are also ten numerals in the set. It is written from left to right, top to bottom like English. There is no actual punctuation, however those that use punctuation with the alphabet, use Skybox punctuation symbols .
In September 1997,
Michael Everson made a proposal for encoding this in
Unicode. The Unicode Technical Committee rejected the Klingon proposal in May 2001 on the grounds that research showed almost no use of the script for communication, and the vast majority of the people who did use Klingon employed the Latin alphabet by preference. Everson created a mapping of pIqaD into the
Private Use Area of
Unicode, which he listed in the ConScript Unicode Registry . Since then several fonts using that encoding have appeared, and software for typing in pIqaD has become available. As a result, blogs in pIqaD have begun to appear, raising the possibility of reapplying for inclusion in Unicode when there is a sufficient corpus. Existing text in Romanization can easily be converted to pIqaD also.
Michael Okuda, the long standing
Star Trek scenic arts designer, and other Paramount staff have repudiated the mapping.
Skybox pIqaD
The KLI pIqaD isn't the only mapping of Klingon letters. The
Astra Image letters were taken and used in the Paramount-endorsed Bitstream font pack. They were used to make a font with ten letters of the English alphabet: "e" to "n" being represented by the ten different klingon letters. This font itself has been used by the Star trek production team when creating Klingon graphics, however it is still used only as random gibberish on the shows.
The trading card company Skybox used this font, when they created the Klingon language cards in their
trading card collection. The Klingon cards themselves detail aspects of Klingon culture, and feature pIqaD text, and a transliteration and translation provided by Marc Okrand. Some of these cards, notably , and feature pIqaD, which corresponds to the Latin transcription.
Other known cards include
s19 and
s20 the season seven card selection
s37, s38 and s39 , and finally, the Checklist cards for each seasons' set of cards had the word
cards written in Klingon on them when listing the above mentioned cards.
The script is written in horizontal lines running from left to right, top to bottom, just like English. Klingon can be written with spaces between words and punctuation. When this is the case, four punctuation marks are used:
- An "up-turned triangle" with a function similar to a comma, semi-colon or colon.
- A "down-turned" triangle with a function similar to a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark.
- A mark similar in appearance to an hyphen .
- A mark similar to an apostrophe
The triangular punctuation marks have been accepted into the common usage of the KLI pIqaD .
Klingon can also be written with no spaces or punctuation at all; this form is more common on the TV shows. As in English, Klingon text can be left-justified, center-justified, or right-justified, and written in vertical columns on banners.
Due to its nature, the "Skybox" Alphabet is ill-suited to writing Klingon, in that ambiguity in the alphabet is apparent, so different words are spelled the same way: these are homographs. The heartiest commendations and the gravest insults could be written identically, though it should be noted that context would go a long way to disambiguating homographs.
Mandel script
A third script, known as the Klinzhai or Mandel script, was included in
The U.S.S. Enterprise Officer's Manual . It holds more closely to the D7 battlecruiser hull markings and is also loosely based upon the conceptual art of Matt Jeffries, set designer.
Its letters map to various letters and digraphs of English, but they have no relation to Marc Okrand's Klingon language. Like the other two alphabets, it is probably written in the same direction as English.
Some fans have suggested this alphabet could be used to write Klingonaase in its native form.Vocabulary
A design principle of the Klingon language is the great degree of lexical-cultural correlation in the vocabulary. For example, there are several words meaning "to fight" or "to clash against", each having a different degree of intensity. There are a plethora of words relating to warfare and weaponry and also a great variety of curses . This helps lend a particular character to the language.
There are also a very large number of "in jokes" built into the language. For example, the word for "pair" is
chang'eng, a reference to the twins
Chang and Eng.
According to
Guinness World Records for 2006, it is the
most spoken fictional language with a number of speakers.
Trivia
- In 1999, The Onion published a satirical article claiming that the number of Klingon speakers exceeded the number of Navajo speakers. . This is quite false, as Navajo, the most vigorous indigenous language in the United States, is spoken by over 100,000 people, far more than the highest estimate of Klingon speakers.
- The sixth episode of the tenth season of Frasier, "Star-Mitzvah", which first aired November 5, 2002, had Frasier reading a short blessing in Klingon at his son's Bar Mitzvah having been tricked into believing it was Hebrew.
- In the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode "Seeing Red", Xander unwittingly reveals his knowledge of Klingon when he instantly determines the language used in some of The Nerds' papers.
- The 2006 April Fools edition of webcomic Tao of Geek was rendered completely in Klingon.
- Big Brother in 2006 featured a "geek task" where housemates had to learn some Klingon phrases and then carry on a simple conversation with Big Brother in Klingon.
- Apple's Mac OS X operating system supports a number of different languages, however applications may not support the user's preferred language. So the operating system allows the user to pick the order that languages will be selected from the available options. Klingon is included in the possible selections although it is not included with the operating system itself.
References
See also
- Alien language
- Klingonaase, an earlier, non-canonical Klingon language put forth by author John M. Ford.
- Stovokor, a heavy metal band who sing exclusively in Klingon
External links
