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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."
The Atlantean in the movie is mostly written, rather than spoken.
"It's all real," Okrand said. "They developed an alphabet. It really means stuff."
He also developed a language for space invaders in an advertisement for the Intel Pentium chip, and a South Seas language for a television show that never got on the air.
Klingon is the only one of Okrand's languages that has developed a life of its own, however.
"The movie crew was very interested in this language. They'd come up and ask me, 'How do you say this?'" Okrand said.
Figuring that if there was that much interest among the people on the soundstage then die-hard "Star Trek" fans would would lap it up, he wrote a Klingon dictionary.
"Something you could pick up and read," he said. "It's called a dictionary, but it's more of a grammar book."
"The Klingon Dictionary" was followed by "The Klingon Way: A Warrior's Guide" and "Klingon for the Galactic Traveler." In addition, Okrand has created two audio tapes, "Conversational Klingon" and "Power Klingon."
The appeal of the Klingon language has its roots in the Klingon character, Okrand said.
"Klingons are wild and crazy--it's fun to be one."
Okrand's creation of a whole language--vocabulary, grammar, syntax, etc.--has been likened to the languages J.R.R. Tolkien invented for his "Lord of the Rings" books.
Okrand agreed that the two efforts are similar in what the creators set out to do, but the specifics are very different.
"His is restricted to books," Okrand said. "My language is more of a living language. My language has changed because it's being used by people."
Judith Parker, associate professor of linguistics at Mary Washington College, said she became familiar with Okrand through the textbook for the basic linguistics class she teaches. The book, which deals with the application of linguistic knowledge and concepts, includes the chapter from Okrand's Klingon dictionary about nouns.
"It has information about the linguistic concept of morphology, which is the structure and composition of words," she said.
One of her advanced students knows Okrand and told Parker she thought it would be great to have him come to the school.
Previous speakers in the Linguistics Speaker Series have been Ronald Scollon, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University specializing in mediated discourse, and Deborah Tannen, also a linguistics professor at Georgetown, who specializes in gender differences in communication.
Okrand is director of live captioning for the National Captioning Institute in Vienna. The institute started captioning television programs for the hearing-impaired. Now television sets at fitness centers and noisy bars carry captioning for their clients. Okrand's department handles captioning for news and sports programs as well as soap operas.
To reach LUCIA ANDERSON: 540/374-5405 landerson@freelancestar.com