Marc Okrand Designed Klingon to Sound Aggressive Because Star Trek Asked Him To

Marc Okrand was a linguist at the National Captioning Institute in Washington when Paramount Pictures hired him in 1982 to translate dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan into Vulcan. Two years later, the studio called back: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was going to give the Klingons several minutes of dialogue, and they wanted those scenes to sound like an actual language. Okrand had a few weeks to invent one. He inherited a small, ad-hoc set of Klingon phrases that the actor James Doohan (Scotty) and the producer Jon Povill had improvised for the original 1979 film. He kept some of them, built a phonology and a grammar, and wrote The Klingon Dictionary, published in 1985.

The language is engineered to sound alien on purpose. Object–object–verb word order; ergative-style suffixes; an inventory of consonants drawn from the rare end of the IPA — retroflex stops, velar fricatives, glottal stops at the start of syllables — that sound consistently un-English. Okrand has said he avoided every obvious phonological pattern that English speakers' ears find pleasant.

Fans took it from there. The Klingon Language Institute, founded in 1992, sponsored translations of Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, the Tao Te Ching, and the Epic of Gilgamesh into Klingon, partly inspired by a Chancellor Gorkon line in Star Trek VI about reading Shakespeare "in the original Klingon." An estimated 20 to 30 people speak it conversationally. The most ambitious experiment was by computational linguist d'Armond Speers, who tried to raise his son Alec bilingually in Klingon and English in the mid-1990s. The boy's pronunciation was reportedly excellent — for a few years. Around age five he simply stopped responding in it.