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Inventor of Klingon to lecture at MWC

Marc Okrand, inventor of the Klingon language used in "Star Trek," will speak about the linguistic structure of his creation at Mary Washington College tomorrow evening By LUCIA ANDERSON

By LUCIA ANDERSON

Date published: 11/17/2003

By LUCIA ANDERSON Okrand appears as part of annual speaker series

When Marc Okrand created the Klingon language for a movie back in 1984, he never thought anyone else would use it. But when he met a Polish linguistics professor at a conference in Belgium two years ago, the only way they could communicate was by speaking his invented language.

Tomorrow evening, Okrand will be at Mary Washington College to speak about "Language and Science Fiction: The Case of Klingon" as this year's installment of the Linguistics Speaker Series.

"Even though it's a made-up language, it works," Okrand said in a telephone interview last week. "It was developed on sound linguistic principles."

And now there are hundreds of Klingon speakers in 45 countries around the world. There is even a Klingon Language Institute with a Web page, a quarterly academic journal, an annual literary magazine with Klingon poetry and fiction, and annual conventions.

It was Okrand's Ph.D. in linguistics that got him into the business of inventing languages. During a luncheon date with a friend who was working on the second "Star Trek" movie, he volunteered to help her out with the few lines of Vulcan called for in the script.

After creating the lines and coaching the actors, Okrand said, "I thought, 'Oh, my God, I just taught Mr. Spock how to speak Vulcan!'"

And that was that, he thought.

But the next time Paramount Pictures did a "Star Trek" movie, there was supposed to be a lot of dialogue among the Klingon warriors. Another job for Okrand.

"Klingon was developed from scratch. It's a whole language with its own grammar," Okrand said. "It comes from my studies of how language works, the kind of sounds that go together. There are certain universal patterns."

Only with Klingon, he said, he purposely violated those patterns.

"It's not a human language," he said.

Okrand now seems to be the go-to guy for movie languages. He's responsible for the Atlantean in Disney's "Atlantis--The Lost Empire."

"Both [Klingon and Atlantean] start from scratch, but they have totally different starting points," Okrand said.

"Klingon was designed as not human, so I violated a lot of rules. Atlantean is called a root language, the one all other [human] languages were derived from, so I looked for sounds and structures very common around the world."

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Date published: 11/17/2003