Just How Alien is the Klingon Language?
Maybe more so than you thought.
Klingons. You may have seen the ridged foreheads and highly aggressive behavior from this alien warrior species grace the screen in numerous iterations of the Star Trek universe. Often, these characters are accompanied with high tensions, shouting, and even the drawing of sharp bat’leths. Surprisingly though, this seemingly straight-forward race actually communicates in a fully fledged out language. Even language learning apps like Duo Lingo feature courses on Klingon. It is just another example of movies and television going above and beyond to truly make their made-up worlds believable.
Klingon was not an actual language until linguist Dr. Marc Okrand was contacted for the job. He was charged with making Klingon as “alien” sounding as possible — for obvious reasons — while still retaining their familiar guttural tone. To do so, he took a look as to what the opposite of most languages, specifically English, would be, and one of those would be in sentence structure.
Sentences are usually constructed with a subject, a verb, and an object. Put simply, the subject is doing the action of the verb to the object — simple enough — but the world’s languages differ on how these parts are put together. For instance, the most common word order is SOV, making up roughly 47.5% of languages. Some examples of these are Korean and the Dravidian languages. The second biggest category, SVO, consists of 41%. These languages include English, and the Romance languages. As you go down the list, there the categories become much smaller: VSO at 8%, VOS at 2.1%, OVS at 0.9% and OSV at 0.3%.
In order to create Klingon, Okrand decided to do the exact opposite of English pertaining to word order. He flipped English’s SVO word order to OVS, object-verb-subject, and the basis to the Klingon language was born. Okrand then created the language to stay true to the original guttural sounds portrayed earlier in the show. It may be surprising, but all of the sounds and aspects of Klingon exist in human speech. It is only in their unfamiliar combinations where the “alien” aspect becomes apparent. For instance, OVS languages exist, hence the 0.9%, but they occur rarely and in no relation to each other. It is unlikely that you would come across one in your everyday life. So, if you every decide to learn Klingon only to discover that it seems a little backwards, just know that it was intended to be that way.
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