|Created by||Marc Okrand, James Doohan|
|Setting and usage||Star Trek films and television series (TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise) and the opera 'u'.|
|Users||(Unknown. Around 12 fluent speakers in 1996, according to Lawrence Schoen, director of the KLI. cited 1984)|
|Writing system||Latin, Klingon alphabets|
a priori languages
|Regulated by||Klingon Language Institute|
The Klingon language (Klingon: tlhIngan Hol) is a language that was made for the Klingons in the Star Trek universe. It is a made-up language. This means that there is no country that uses the language. Only a few people can speak the Klingon language well enough to talk in it. The Klingon Language Institute helps people learn Klingon.
History[change | change source]
The first Klingon words were made by the actor James Doohan in 1979 for the first Star Trek movie. When they made the third movie in 1984, Gene Roddenberry wanted to have a real language for the Klingons. So it was the linguist (a language scientist) Marc Okrand who made the Klingon language. He has written some books about the Klingon language.
Grammar[change | change source]
The Klingon language feels like talking backwards. Marc Okrand wanted the language to be as complicated as possible. He did this to make it sound very extraterrestrial. The word order in a sentence is always object-verb-subject. So the English sentence "I see the cat" is said as "the cat see I" in Klingon.
This language uses many syllables that are attached to the word:
|maqetbe’||we do not run|
Writing[change | change source]
When writing in Klingon, some letters are always in uppercase and some are lowercase. This never changes because the letters are spoken differently when they are written differently. This is the Klingon alphabet:
- a b ch D e gh H I j l m n ng o p q Q r S t tlh u v w y ’
References[change | change source]