Word: klingons
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...growing number of other earthlings. Not only is Klingon a real language, sort of, it is the fastest growing language in the universe (if you consider that it started with a base line of zero speakers in the mid-1980s). It was invented by a linguist named Marc Okrand, whose business is producing closed captions for television. He happened to be in the Paramount cafeteria having lunch with a friend just when the producers of the film Star Trek II were desperately looking for someone with a Ph.D. to do a bit of Vulcan dialogue. Okrand offered his services...
Vulcan, mother tongue of the pointy-eared Spock, never really took off, but Okrand hit linguistic pay dirt when he was hired a year later to do Klingon dialogue for Star Trek III. He took his job more seriously than anyone expected, creating a substantial vocabulary and some kinky and sophisticated grammatical rules that are linguistically solid, albeit "kind of unnatural from a human point of view." (Klingon sentences, for instance, follow a bizarre object-verb-subject syntax.) In 1985 Okrand published the vocabulary and rules in The Klingon Dictionary, which now has 250,000 copies in print...
...Trek's cultlike status. But what has stunned Okrand and his delighted publisher, Simon & Schuster, is that folks are assiduously studying -- and speaking -- the language, though learning it is a real oy (pain). To his amazement, Okrand has been accosted by ardent students and subjected to barrages of fluent Klingon. Yampell, who once perpetrated such a barrage, was disappointed to find that the idiom's inventor responded with a blank stare. "He doesn't really speak the language, although he does pronounce it much better than I do." Despite his lack of fluency, Okrand is revered by students...
Then there's the year-old Klingon Language Institute (P.O. Box 634, Flourtown, Pennsylvania 19031), which has about 200 members and publishes the quarterly journal HolQeD (translation: Linguistics). "It started out as sort of a joke," says founder Lawrence Schoen, who sometimes uses Klingon in the linguistics courses he teaches at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. But now HolQeD includes scholarly articles as well as Klingon word games and other light features. Thanks to some press reports mentioning the organization, the institute has recently been flooded with nearly a thousand inquiries from Klingon fanciers on five continents. (Send stamped, self...
...humans can take credit for inventing an entire language, and Okrand feels the weight of his responsibility. "I'm stuck," he says. "I've got this book out. I can't violate it." The question is, How to build on his own Klingon Empire? Seth Gershel, of Simon & Schuster Audio, sees a niche for Klingon motivational tapes: how to think like a warrior. Of course, he's not serious, is he? Says Gershel: "I don't know if I'm joking...