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.
And that became an entire language?
Klingon had maybe half a dozen lines in the first movie. So I wrote down what they were saying and made a list of all the sounds I heard. And then I imposed a grammar on it. I made arbitrary decisions about how it worked, and then I just added and added. I only made up what was needed for the movie at the time, and then I expanded it later. While we were filming, the crew would come up to me and say, “How do you say this in Klingon?” And I thought, “If these guys are interested, then maybe ‘Star Trek’ fans will be interested.” So I proposed the idea of a book explaining how Klingon works. Later I discovered to my surprise that people were starting to study it intensely and building up a little speech community. I’d hear people say this stuff, and I’d think, “Hey, I just made that up in my living room.”
Are you a Trekkie?
I’ve become one. I never became one of those people who could hear the first three notes of the music and know which episode it was, but now I’m familiar with the characters.
— Liz Essley
