Klingon: The Final Frontier

By JAMES GORMAN

Rich Yampell, a software engineer in Stoughton, Massachusetts, was at a party recently in Washington State, and the conversation was just great. "The Klingon speakers were all at one end of the table," he reports, "and nobody else could understand a word we were saying."

Klingon? That's right, Klingon -- the alien tongue spoken in Star Trek movies and TV shows by bellicose fellows with the permanently furrowed brows. It sounds a bit like Japanese, a bit like Yiddish, with a lot of choking sounds and rough, saliva-spraying sibilants. (A handkerchief is recommended for novice speakers.) The idiom of a warrior culture, Klingon doesn't have words for "nice" or "pretty" or even "hello" -- the standard greeting is "What do you want?" (nuqneH?). But if you want to say "Surrender or die!" and sound like you mean it, Klingon is for you.

And for a growing number of other earthlings. Not only is Klingon a real language, sort of, it is the fastest growing language in the universe (if you consider that it started with a base line of zero speakers in the mid-1980s). It was invented by a linguist named Marc Okrand, whose business is producing closed captions for television. He happened to be in the Paramount cafeteria having lunch with a friend just when the producers of the film Star Trek II were desperately looking for someone with a Ph.D. to do a bit of Vulcan dialogue. Okrand offered his services.

Vulcan, mother tongue of the pointy-eared Spock, never really took off, but Okrand hit linguistic pay dirt when he was hired a year later to do Klingon dialogue for Star Trek III. He took his job more seriously than anyone expected, creating a substantial vocabulary and some kinky and sophisticated grammatical rules that are linguistically solid, albeit "kind of unnatural from a human point of view." (Klingon sentences, for instance, follow a bizarre object-verb-subject syntax.) In 1985 Okrand published the vocabulary and rules in The Klingon Dictionary, which now has 250,000 copies in print and is still going strong. Last fall he came out with an audiotape, Conversational Klingon (50,000 copies). On it, Okrand and Michael Dorn, who plays Klingon Lieutenant Worf in TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation, teach you how to insult your enemies, curse and ask where the bathroom is when you visit the Klingon Empire.

The success of these products is perhaps less than startling, given Star Trek's cultlike status. But what has stunned Okrand and his delighted publisher, Simon & Schuster, is that folks are assiduously studying -- and speaking -- the language, though learning it is a real oy (pain). To his amazement, Okrand has been accosted by ardent students and subjected to barrages of fluent Klingon. Yampell, who once perpetrated such a barrage, was disappointed to find that the idiom's inventor responded with a blank stare. "He doesn't really speak the language, although he does pronounce it much better than I do." Despite his lack of fluency, Okrand is revered by students of the warrior tongue. "When it comes to Klingon," says one disciple, "anything Marc Okrand writes is the word of God."

Of course, being a deity isn't what it used to be. In some ways, the language has started to get away from its author. Informal courses have been given by Klingish folk at M.I.T., Northeastern Illinois University and other institutions. Some students of the language have tried to change its difficult spelling. Others are extrapolating new grammatical rules.

Then there's the year-old Klingon Language Institute (P.O. Box 634, Flourtown, Pennsylvania 19031), which has about 200 members and publishes the quarterly journal HolQeD (translation: Linguistics). "It started out as sort of a joke," says founder Lawrence Schoen, who sometimes uses Klingon in the linguistics courses he teaches at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. But now HolQeD includes scholarly articles as well as Klingon word games and other light features. Thanks to some press reports mentioning the organization, the institute has recently been flooded with nearly a thousand inquiries from Klingon fanciers on five continents. (Send stamped, self-addressed envelopes, pleads Schoen.) Those with access to Internet can pick up Klingon on-line. Some 100 enthusiasts trade Klingon barbs and fine grammatical points on the worldwide computer network.

Few humans can take credit for inventing an entire language, and Okrand feels the weight of his responsibility. "I'm stuck," he says. "I've got this book out. I can't violate it." The question is, How to build on his own Klingon Empire? Seth Gershel, of Simon & Schuster Audio, sees a niche for Klingon motivational tapes: how to think like a warrior. Of course, he's not serious, is he? Says Gershel: "I don't know if I'm joking."

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CAPTION: Quintessential Klingon