Okrand also has released two Klingon-language audiotapes: Conversational Klingon and Power Klingon (where one learns the proper etiquette for doing business with a Klingon). Thinking that there were enough Star Trek fans who would be interested in a Klingon language book _ if only for fun _ Okrand published Star Trek: The Klingon Dictionary in 1985.Įleven years later, the book has sold about 250,000 copies, and gone through one revision and at least nine printings. Okrand added more sounds to those already created by Doohan, then imposed a grammatical structure on the sounds.

The foundation Okrand was given: snippets of guttural sounds created by James Doohan (who plays Scotty on classic Trek), which passed as Klingon on the first Star Trek movie and the dictates that the language be guttural, sound good yet be a real language with words, systems of word arrangement, sound patterns and grammatical structures.

Okrand first came to the attention of Star Trek producers when they were looking for a linguist to create a few lines of Vulcan dialogue for 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.Ī year later, the producers called on Okrand again for the third movie _ this time to create some Klingon dialogue. The Klingon language was created by Washington, D.C.-based linguist Marc Okrand, 48, who works fulltime at the National Captioning Institute. Not to mention possibly the first full-fledged language born out of popular culture, spoken by people worldwide. The show, which celebrates the 30th anniversary of its debut this month, has spawned three spinoff series, seven movies (the eighth is scheduled to debut in November), an animated series, hundreds of books and comic books and countless merchandise lines.

Not bad for an artificial language that sprang from a fictional culture on a television show.Įven if that show is Star Trek.

The Klingon Dictionary by Marc Okrand