Marc Okrand
The Story of Klingon
Course 1 · Chapter 2 · Marc Okrand
The person who turned a few shouted words into a language was not a science-fiction writer but a working linguist. This chapter looks at who Marc Okrand is, how a captioning job led to Star Trek, and what he was asked to do. It follows The Story of Klingon, Chapter 1, which ended with the producers wanting more than gibberish.
A Linguist, Not a Fan
| Year | Step |
|---|---|
| 1948 | Born in Los Angeles (3 July, according to Wikipedia). |
| 1970 | B.A. in linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz. |
| 1977 | Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation was a grammar of Mutsun, an extinct language of the Ohlone (Costanoan) group. |
| 1975 to 1978 | Taught undergraduate linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. |
| From 1978 | Postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. |
| Later | Joined the National Captioning Institute, working on closed captions and live captioning for television; he retired from it in 2013. |
His training matters for the story. Okrand knew how real languages are put together, especially Native American ones, so he knew which features a made-up language could borrow and which would give itself away as invented.
Vulcan First: Star Trek II
In 1982, while coordinating captions for the Academy Awards, Okrand met a friend who was working with the producer Harve Bennett on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He was hired to write Vulcan dialogue: four lines, dubbed over the English that Leonard Nimoy and Kirstie Alley had already filmed. Okrand later remembered thinking, "Oh, my God, I just taught Mr. Spock how to speak Vulcan!"
The Klingon Commission: Star Trek III
Two years later, Bennett asked Okrand to create a language for the Klingons. He had a head start and a constraint: James Doohan had coined a few Klingon words for the 1979 film, and Okrand built on their sounds (see The Story of Klingon, Chapter 1). Paramount hired him both to develop the language and to coach the actors in it for Star Trek III and, later, Star Trek V and Star Trek VI.
Make It Alien
A source from the Klingon Language Institute says his task was to make the language as alien as the Klingons' ridged foreheads.
Make It Speakable
Actors had to be able to say it on set, and it had to stay consistent with the battle cries of the first film.
Make It Stick
On set he coached the cast and had veto power over any take in which a line was mispronounced, though he is reported to have used it sparingly.
How He Built It
The sources say little about the design in detail, but three points are clear:
- No model language. The KLI says he did not base Klingon on any existing language.
- Influences by accident. Wikipedia says Okrand studied some Native American and Southeast Asian languages and that their features "worked their way into Klingon, but for the most part, not by design". The linguist Robert Jago has pointed out similarities with Halkomelem, though Wikipedia does not say whether this is accepted.
- The language bent to the actors. Okrand amended the language to match actors' mispronunciations and changes made to the subtitles, so some of Klingon is a record of what was said on set.
Beyond Klingon
Okrand later worked on other invented languages: an alien language for the Intel film The Journey Inside (1994), Atlantean for Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), some lines for the 2009 Star Trek film and Kelpien lines for Star Trek: Discovery (2018). He wrote three Klingon books (The Klingon Dictionary, The Klingon Way, Klingon for the Galactic Traveler), recorded audio courses and co-wrote the libretto of a Klingon opera, 'u', first staged in The Hague in September 2010. The next chapters follow those books.
Sources for This Chapter
- Wikipedia, "Marc Okrand" and "Klingon language".
- The Conlang Library, "Conlangers Extraordinaire #3: Marc Okrand".
- The Klingon Language Institute, "Development and Use of the Klingon Language".
Hands-On Exercises
List the steps that took Okrand from a university degree to the Klingon commission, in order, with the year or period of each.
The chapter says the language was shaped in the studio as well as on paper. Give two pieces of evidence from the sources.
One source says Klingon was not based on any existing language. Another says features of other languages appeared in it "not by design". Explain how both can be true.
Quick Reference
- Who: Marc Okrand, linguist (Ph.D. Berkeley 1977, Mutsun grammar), later in television captioning.
- 1982: hired to dub four lines of Vulcan for Star Trek II.
- 1984: asked by Harve Bennett to create Klingon for Star Trek III, building on Doohan's few words.
- Method: no model language; some features crept in by accident; the language bent to the actors' pronunciation.