Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Klingon Language

There are more ways to learn Klingon than there are varieties of gagh (qagh). Okrand’s foundational publications are key, of course; everything about language, as properly codified, begins with The Klingon Dictionary and goes from there.

If you like, however, you can also get lessons by signing up to the Klingon Language Institute, which even offers a certification programme through various levels. Numerous are the YouTube courses on the subject such as those of the 'Klingon Teacher' from Germany.

You may not know that the popular language learning platform Duolingo also offers a course in Klingon, currently in beta but with nearly 300 000 "active learners," boasting the "art form" that is Klingon insults.

Klingon has been the subject of study at the university level – not as an effort to speak the language itself, but to learn from it within the framework of other constructed languages. Various linguistic and sociological studies have been published about Klingon, such as Judith Hermans’ 1999 Masters thesis 'Klingon and its Users: A Sociolinguistic Profile,' or a more recent 2019 UK undergraduate dissertation that compared the morphological features of Klingon with those of natural languages.

One linguist, Dr d’Armond Speers even tried to raise his child, Alec, as a native speaker of Klingon. For about three years, Speers spoke to his son pretty much only in Klingon (including singing him a lullaby to end all lullabies, 'The Klingon Imperial Anthem'). For a while, his son responded to, and began to communicate in, the language. After this point, however, Alec lost interest (seemingly because no one else around him was speaking this strange tongue), and so Speers didn’t persist with his 'experiment'.

Either way, it's never too late to learn.

Qapla’!