Speaking It

The Story of Klingon

Course 1 · Chapter 6 · Speaking It

Klingon was built to be heard, so its sound is the first thing most people notice. This chapter looks at why it sounds the way it does, and then at the harder question of who actually speaks it. The numbers are small, and the stories about them are better known than the facts.

Why It Sounds the Way It Does

Wikipedia reports that the film studio wanted the language "guttural and harsh" and that Okrand wanted it "unusual". The result is a sound system with twenty-one consonants and five vowels, and a deliberately odd mix:

Retroflex and Uvular

Much of the harshness comes from retroflex consonants (made with the tongue curled back) and uvular ones (made far back in the throat), such as Q and S.

What Is Missing

No velar stops and only one kind of "s": common sounds such as /k/, /g/, /f/, /h/ and /s/ are absent from the language.

Open Vowels

The vowels e and I are "more open and lax" than an English speaker expects. That makes the consonants stand out, so the language sounds clipped.

Letter	Sound (as described on Wikipedia)
q / Q	the only minimal pair: Qat "be popular" vs qat "accompany"; Q is an uvular affricate
H	a velar fricative, like the "ch" in German "ach"
gh	a voiced velar fricative
tlh	a voiceless lateral affricate
ng	a velar nasal
'	a glottal stop, counted as a letter, not punctuation

Syllables and Stress

A syllable must begin with a consonant (the glottal stop counts) and have one vowel. After the vowel it may take one consonant or one of three codas: -w', -y' or -rgh. So ta, tar and targh are legal, but tarD and ar are not. Stress is usually on the verb stem and the final syllable of a noun stem, and syllables ending in ' attract it.

The Capital I Spelling is case-sensitive: capitals stand for sounds unlike English ones. The capital I is a vowel, and in some fonts it looks like a lower-case l. Software that ignores case therefore breaks the spelling.

Who Speaks It?

Source	Estimate of fluent speakers
Wikipedia infobox	none as a first language; around a dozen fluent speakers cited in 1996
Arika Okrent, 2009	"twenty or so. Maybe thirty"
A KLI mailing-list teacher (via a search result)	perhaps about 100, by experience and not statistics

There is no official count; the KLI does not publish membership numbers. Wikipedia says skilled speakers can hold "mundane conversations", but the vocabulary leans on Star Trek ideas, so everyday talk is awkward (see The Story of Klingon, Chapter 5).

Readers Are Not Speakers The same mailing-list source argues that many more people can read and write simple Klingon than can speak it, for example through Duolingo. One paper reports almost half a million active learners on the Duolingo Klingon course while it was still in beta. A learner is not a fluent speaker.

The Boy Raised in Klingon

The best-known experiment is that of d'Armond Speers of the Klingon Language Institute, who raised his son Alec to speak Klingon. Wikipedia says Alec's pronunciation was "excellent", but after his fifth birthday he stopped answering in Klingon, and his father switched to English. The story is often retold as a failure, but it is also a rare test of whether the language can carry a child's everyday world, and it could not, in part because the vocabulary was too narrow.

On Stage and in Music

Theatre. A Klingon Christmas Carol is described as the first production primarily in Klingon, with only the narrator speaking English. The Washington Shakespeare Company performed selections from Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing in Arlington County, Virginia, on 25 September 2010, with a reprise on 27 February 2011 featuring Stephen Fry as Osric.
Opera. 'u' is "entirely in Klingon".
Music. The EP NuqneH (2020) by Hans Solo (Äi-Tiem) is rapped in Klingon, and the death metal band Stovokor writes its lyrics in Klingon. Rebecca Romijn is also said to sing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" in Klingon in an episode of Strange New Worlds.
Public life. In 2007, Multnomah County, Oregon, reportedly hired Klingon translators as a precaution for its mental health programme, to be paid only if needed.

What the Numbers Mean Klingon is a living hobby language: it is used in conversation, on stage and in songs, and it is learned by thousands. But its fluent speakers can be counted in tens, and none learned it as a first language. That is a different thing from a community language, and Chapter 9 returns to the question of what counts as a "language" at all.

Not Yet Verified The Hague performance of 'u' (September 2010), which Chapter 2 gave from the Okrand article, did not turn up in a separate search, so treat that date and place as unconfirmed. The Multnomah County story is marked "reportedly". The Strange New Worlds detail is from Wikipedia, and I have not checked the episode. I have not heard the language spoken for this chapter, so the sound descriptions are Wikipedia's.

Sources for This Chapter

Wikipedia, "Klingon language" (phonology, speakers and uses).
A web search, for the range of speaker estimates (a Nerdist article, a Tampere University thesis and a KLI mailing-list post).

Hands-On Exercises

Exercise 1

Give three features of Klingon's sound system that make it sound harsh, and one set of common sounds the language lacks.

→ Solution

Exercise 2

The chapter gives three different estimates of how many people speak Klingon fluently. List them and explain why no single number can be trusted.

→ Solution

Exercise 3

Describe what happened to Alec Speers's Klingon and what the story does and does not show about the language.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

Sounds: 21 consonants and 5 vowels; retroflex and uvular consonants; no /k/, /g/, /f/, /h/, /s/.
Case matters: q and Q differ; the glottal stop is a letter.
Speakers: none as a first language; estimates run from about a dozen (1996) to perhaps 100.
Uses: conversation, theatre, opera, music.

Coming Next The Story of Klingon, Chapter 7 turns to translation: Hamlet, Gilgamesh and other works put into Klingon.