[red.:] Iedereen weet dat je aan de universiteit kunt afstuderen op Engels, Duits, Chinees, Latijn, Russisch, Arabisch… Maar: afstuderen op een niet-bestaande taal? Oud-leerling Laura Tangelder (eindexamen 2020) schreef een academische scriptie over het Klingon, een fictieve alien-taal uit de TV-serie Star Trek. De onderstaande bijdrage is een bewerking van de popular paper die zij voor haar afstuderen presenteerde.
When Star Trek: The Original Series was first released, it was not a big success. Around the time the second season aired, the TV show almost had to be canceled due to the absence of enough viewers. Luckily, the fans requested more of the show, so the producers gave in and created a third season. Over time, support for the TV series grew and grew. Nowadays, Star Trek is one of the biggest franchises in the world. An important feature of the series is the made-up language that is spoken by a group of characters that play a big role in the show. The name of that language is Klingon. Here (click) you can listen to a sample of it.
practicality versus alienness
Screenwriter Marc Okrand had a difficult job in creating Klingon. He had to maintain a balance between practicality and alienness. On the one hand, American English speaking actors had to be able to speak the language, so elements of the language could not have been too difficult. On the other hand, everyone involved in producing the movies and episodes wanted Klingon to be as far removed from any other language as possible and English in particular. They wanted this alienness, because firstly the Klingons, that were meant to speak this improved language, were enemies of the English-speaking characters, so a large difference in language would enhance this contrast. Secondly, almost everyone in the vicinity of the franchise was American English. Producers, actors and most importantly a large part of the audience spoke English. So, it was important to create an alien feel also for them.
This meant that Okrand took American English as a starting point and strayed from it as much as he could in all elements of the language. However, doing that is not an easy task. Okrand’s own mother tongue is English. On top of that, he has knowledge of plenty more languages, especially Native American ones and languages from Southeast Asian. There is a principle in inventing languages that says that “one cannot help but be influenced by what one knows” (Adams, 2011, p. 118). For the case of Klingon and Okrand this means that, unintentionally, elements of English and other languages that Okrand was familiar with have worked their way into the language.
my research project
In my research, I have tried to answer the question: did Okrand succeed in making the building blocks of Klingon as distinct as possible from other languages, especially English? I have placed the focus on building blocks instead of, for example, sounds or word order. The reason for this is that research has already been done on the sounds of Klingon. Also, I found the word order of the language was a lot less interesting to look at than the building blocks. I started my investigation at The Klingon dictionary by Okrand (1992) himself. In it are not just vocabulary sections, but also elaborate descriptions of the building blocks of the language. On top of that, each section is equipped with examples. After the analysis, to show the alienness, I compared the elements with the ones from English through the database GramBank (2023). Below, I will illustrate this with an example.
diminutive formation
SuS means ‘wind’ in Klingon. When –Hom is added to this, the whole word comes to mean ‘wisp of air’. This diminutive building block turns a regular noun into one that is smaller, less important or less powerful. In (American) English this process of making a noun smaller does also exist, even though the building block used for that is not –Hom, but, for example, –let like in ‘booklet’. This means that English on the map below has received a yellow circle to indicate that the language does have a diminutive building block that is attached to the noun. Klingon would receive the same, even if the language cannot be located on the map. Since both languages have the same process for the diminutive phenomenon, this part is not very alien. Speakers of English would probably have no trouble understanding it, because their language works the same in that aspect.
Languages that have diminutives on the noun. yellow circles indicate ‘yes’, green squares indicate ‘no’ (GramBank, 2023)
Not only English and Klingon have diminutives that are tied to the noun, but also in 30.1 percent of the other languages that are in the database. In the other cases, there is either no building block that makes the noun indicate something smaller (37.0%) or it is unclear if the language has it (32.8%). All three groups are around the same size, so none of them are a really alien option.
the ‘Latin of Hollywood’
Some elements of Klingon are not so alien, like the one discussed here. Others do not seem to occur in the exact same way as Klingon at all in any other language. All in all, it can be concluded that Klingon could have been more alien than it is now. Even so, the Latin of the Hollywood languages remains the biggest language from one of the largest franchises in the world. Until this day the Star Trek universe continues to exist. Posters of a new series can be seen all over town even after over 50 years. Equally, the popularity of Klingon has not diminished and the language remains an interesting topic for research.
References
Adams, M. (2011). From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages. New York: Oxford University Press
Grambank -. (z.d.). https://grambank.clld.org/
Okrand, M. (1992). The Klingon Dictionary. New York: Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster
