Klingon language

Klingon
Klingon
tlhIngan Hol
Pronunciation	[ˈt͡ɬɪ.ŋɑn xol]
Created by	Marc Okrand, James Doohan, Jon Povill
Setting and usage	Star Trek films and television series (TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, Discovery), the opera ʼuʼ and the Klingon Christmas Carol play.
Users	Around a dozen fluent speakers (1996)
Purpose	Constructed languages Artistic languages Fictional languages Klingon; ; ;
Writing system	Latin script (Klingon alphabet); Klingon script
Sources	Constructed languages; A priori languages
Official status
Regulated by	Marc Okrand
Language codes
ISO 639-2	tlh
ISO 639-3	tlh
	This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.
	This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

The Klingon language (tlhIngan Hol, IPA: [ˈt͡ɬɪ.ŋɑn xol]) is a language that was made for the Klingons in the Star Trek universe. It is a constructed language, not one that developed naturally. Only a few people can speak the Klingon language well enough to talk in it. The Klingon Language Institute helps people learn Klingon.

History

The first Klingon words were made by the actor James Doohan in 1979 for the first Star Trek movie. When they made the third movie in 1984, Gene Roddenberry wanted to have a real language for the Klingons. Marc Okrand, a linguist (a language scientist) made the Klingon language. He has written some books about the Klingon language.

Grammar

Marc Okrand wanted the language to be as complicated as possible. He did this to make it sound very alien. The word order in a sentence is always object-verb-subject. This is the opposite of English's word order, which is subject-verb-object. The English sentence "I see the cat" is said as "the cat see I" in Klingon.

This language uses affixation to denote the subject and negation:

Klingon	English
qet	run
maqet	we run
maqetbe’	we do not run

Writing

When writing in Klingon, some letters are always in uppercase and some are lowercase. This never changes because the letters are spoken differently when they are written differently.

Latin transcription	Klingon script	IPA
a		/ɑ/
b		/b/
ch		/t͡ʃ/
D		/ɖ/
e		/ɛ/
gh		/ɣ/
H		/x/
I		/ɪ/
j		/d͡ʒ/
l		/l/
m		/m/
n		/n/
ng		/ŋ/
o		/o/
p		/pʰ/
q		/qʰ/
Q		/q͡χ/
r		/r/
S		/ʂ/
t		/tʰ/
tlh		/t͡ɬ/
u		/u/
v		/v/
w		/w/
y		/j/
ʼ		/ʔ/