Okrand, a linguist and Adams Morgan resident, is a director at the National Captioning Institute. But he’s better known as the inventor of Klingon, the language of choice for “Star Trek” fans. Why did you create Klingon?

Paramount hired me to do it. They hired me because two years before that I did Vulcan. And that was luck — that’s the very, very short version. I went for a sandwich [with a friend who worked for Paramount] and ended making up four lines of Vulcan. I left Hollywood and realized I had just taught Mr. Spock to speak Vulcan. That was weird. Then they hired me to do Klingon for the third “Star Trek” movie.