This episode originally aired on Imaginary Worlds.

Sci-fi and fantasy creators often use constructed languages (or conlangs) to help us believe that the characters come from ancient times or distant galaxies. But what happens when a fictional language jumps off the screen and into the real world? This story comes from the podcast Imaginary Worlds.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Aourourou by Azalai
Turning to You by Landsman Duets

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View Transcript ▶︎

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

[music in]

I just so happen to be a huge science fiction fan. I love sci-fi books, sci-fi movies, sci-fi TV shows…. I love it all. And the reason I love it so much is because it lets you experience a reality that is so different from our own. These writers and filmmakers create entire universes from scratch. And something that I’ve always found really fascinating is how they deal with the language.

When you’re writing about characters in another galaxy, or in the distant future, it doesn’t make sense for everyone to speak an existing, human language… especially if they’re not even human. Think about all the aliens sounds you hear in Star Wars [SFX: Jawa] [SFX: Greedo] [SFX: Watto] [SFX: Ewok] [SFX: Chewie].

Now, the alien vocalizations in Star Wars aren’t fully-developed languages. Still, they do an amazing job of conveying emotion. But sometimes, creators take things a step further, and build an actual, fully-constructed language, complete with grammatical rules, sentence structure, and carefully considered translations for every sound the characters make. *[music crossfade into Na'vi from Avatar]

This story comes from Imaginary Worlds. Here’s host Eric Molinski.

[music out]

Jen Uselies is a singer in Chicago. About eight years ago, a friend of hers told her about a show that was looking for performers. The show was A Klingon Christmas Carol. Now Jen had not watched a lot of Star Trek before.

Jen: But I have this like a hardcore love of really goofy niche theater and I was like, oh really? What do I have to do to get cast in that? And he goes well. Are you allergic to latex? I was like, uh no. So he goes we'll come out and audition.

And then she learned something else about the show. All of her lines would be in the Klingon language. And yes, Klingon is a fully functioning language that actors who play Klingons on Star Trek usually have to learn. In this case, at the Klingon Christmas Carol, there would be supertitles over the stage in English so the audience knew what was going on.

That might be intimidating for some performers, but Jen is also an opera singer. So, singing in a foreign language was not unusual for her.

Jen: I picked up on the language very quickly and the pronunciation and my fight skills were my choreography skills weren't so great.

But wait did you say that there's fighting involved in the in the show?

Jen: Oh absolutely. The Fessey wig party -- it turns into a giant bar brawl. Klingons aren't having a good time if there's not a little blood involved.

She did the show for two years. And then she found out that a podcast called Improvised Star Trek was looking for someone to sing “Kiss Me” by Six Pence None the Richer” in Klingon. And they were wondering if she was interested.

Jen: And I was like Oh heck yes!

[Music clip: Kiss Me]

Jen: Within 24 hours we were picked up by Team Coco dot com and the Mary Sue. And just a whole bunch of other big blogs and websites and we're like oh my gosh! What just happened? The response to it was overwhelmingly positive. It's kind of crazy because like the Internet I always say like the Internet hates everything. But for some reason the Internet really liked this!

And then Jen had an idea. What if she put out an album of pop songs in Klingon? She worked with translators on songs that she thought a Klingon would sing -- like “Love is a Battlefield.”

[Music clip: Love is a Battlefield]

And that album did so well, she started doing concerts in full costume and makeup. In fact, she created a whole new persona for herself, The Klingon Pop Warrior.

Is it hard to sing in Klingon?

Jen: Yes [laughs]. It’s not easy. There are some really awkward sounds. It's pretty grating on the vocal chords. It's a very harsh guttural sounds in the language [SFX: makes Klingon vocalizations]. And you just you get a lot of that kind of stuff and then trying to make it melodic and pretty. I usually don't do more than a 60-minute performance just because more than that and it just starts to feel really wrong.

To this day, she can’t believe there was an audience out there waiting for a Klingon rock star. But if you look at the history of constructed languages – or conlangs for short -- this was a long time coming.

I mean, people have been inventing languages on their own for centuries -- you know, just as a hobby. But those languages would usually die off because they’re usually just spoken among friends. The difference now is because with sci-fi fantasy we can see a whole imaginary culture attached to those invented languages.

Now the grand daddy of all constructed languages in fantasy worlds, at least in the modern era, is JRR Tolkien. I’ve talked before about how Tolkien was really groundbreaking in lot of ways, like having maps for Middle Earth. The same thing is true with the languages that Tolkien developed for the Elves in his stories.

Michael Drout is a Tolkien expert. And he says that Tolkien was one of the first fantasy writers to appreciate how much we can learn about a fictional culture by studying their language.

Michael: And I think that that interaction between culture and language in history is just much easier to see in something like a constructed language.

And he thinks studying the language of a fantasy culture, can give us a new perspective on our own language and how it reflects our culture in ways we often take for granted.

Michael: And to be able to see it right there in you know a manageable amount in Middle Earth I think gives us great insight into how this is happening in the sort of distributed intelligence of the millions of people who are making the culture we live in in full big earth.

But Tolkien didn’t think that people in full big Earth would try to actually speak Elvish. And we know that because he didn’t create a lot of verbs for the Elves.

Michael: So when they came time they wanted to write dialogue in Elvish for the Peter Jackson films they just had no verbs. And finally David Salo who is a linguist at the University of Wisconsin who was their consultant they said you got to make something up, you know use the same sound system use the same rules, use the same words, but we don't have enough verbs to have a conversation.

[SFX clip: Elvish scene]

Michael: But really the films gave it such an impetus and you had people wanting to expand the language and people wanting to write poetry in Elvish and write stories and dialogue doing what had happened in Klingon.

But when the Klingon language was created, nobody thought that would take off either — least of all the guy who invented the language, Marc Okrand.

Marc was hired by Paramount in the mid 1980s to invent a Klingon language for the Klingons in Star Trek III. But he didn’t invent the language completely from scratch. We did hear Klingons speaking their own language in the first Star Trek movie in 1979, but turns out they were speaking gibberish.

[SFX Clip: Star Trek the Motion Picture]

Marc: So I listened to that and wrote down you know phonetically what I was hearing, wrote down what the subtitles meant and imposed a structure on it.

Now, even though the audience wouldn’t really know this just by reading the subtitles or by hearing the sounds of Klingon, Marc wanted the Klingon language to feel alien in its syntax. So he decided to apply the least common rules for languages on Earth. For instance:

Marc: In any language there's sort of three basic parts of speech in a sentence which is the subject the verb and the object. You have to put them in some order or other English it happens to be that word or the subject and then the verb and then the object the least common by far are the ones where the object comes first. So that's what I chose for Klingon for Klingon and I chose object and then verb and then subject.

[SFX clip: Klingons talking]

Marc says the actors playing Klingons were model students in learning this new he created because it was a creative challenge they didn’t expect to get. But then Marc himself actually faced a challenge when he was brought back years later to work on Star Trek VI.

In one scene, the Klingons reveal that they can quote Shakespeare, in English. But the director had a last minute addition; he wanted Christopher Plummer’s Klingon character to quote Shakespeare in Klingon – In fact we wanted him to say, “to be or not to be.”

Marc: And I thought “oh no.” And the reason I thought “oh no” is because one of the decisions I made and when I was making up the grammar of Klingon was that there's no verb to be.

So Marc decided that the closest translation to that would be “to live or not to live,” which feels kind of Klingon-ish.

Marc: So I go over to Christopher Plummer and he says I understand you have a new phrase to teach me. I said yes he says what is it. Well to say to live or not to live there's a number of different ways I've could have done that but I kind of did it a very simple way. So it means live or live not which is [speaks in Klingon]. So he says Yin? Yin? I said yeah he says that's too wimpy that's too wimpy. He didn't say that he said something else but that's what he meant he said think of something else that's more Klingon like. I said oh now what am I going to do. So I said what if what if what if we say top ta bet he goes ta ta is good let's do that. Well up until that moment tach was a suffix that meant to continue doing whatever the verb is so you say eat plus tach means to keep on eating to continue eating something like that. So I kind of promoted tach to be a verb in its own right that means to continue to go on to endure.

[SFX Clip: Star Trek VI]

So Christopher Plummer changed the Klingon Dictionary. And yes — Marc had written a Klingon dictionary, which was published in the mid 1980s.

Marc: But what I thought honestly and truly thought would happen is people would buy it some thumb say “oh look there's the Klingon word for shoe. Ha ha ha.” You know, and put on their coffee table. But that's not what happened. What happened is people bought it and read it very thoroughly and studied it and a language speaking community started to get going.

[music in]

In the decades since Marc developed Klingon, we’ve seen an explosion of other constructed languages, AKA conlangs. There’s Valyrian and Dothraki in Game of Thrones, there’s Na’vi in Avatar, and there’s Trigedasleng in The 100. Some of these languages now have a whole community built around them, just like Klingon. But other constructed languages just haven’t gotten the same kind of traction. That’s coming up, after the break.

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MIDROLL

[music in]

When Marc Okrand published the Klingon Dictionary in 1985, he thought people would treat it like a novelty gift, but Marc completely underestimated how devoted Trekkies are. Today, the number of people who speak at least some Klingon is estimated to be in the thousands. Even the language-learning app Duolingo offers a Klingon course.

[music out]

Now, Marc had no idea that Klingon had taken off like this until he was invited to a conference of Klingon speakers.

Marc: That was odd and I wasn't prepared for it frankly because I'd go I'll admit I'm not a very good speaker of Klingon because when I was doing all this there was no particular reason to be one. So when it started happening I was kind of taken aback that people were doing it but it was also fascinating to read what people were saying about the language and I realized it was more complicated and interesting than I thought it was when I was going along making it up.

Lawrence: I like to describe every Klingon sentence as a murder mystery. The first thing you find out is who’s lying dead on the floor? Then you find out how they died. Were they shot? Were they stabbed? Were they poisoned? And lastly, you find out who did it to them. Object, verb, subject.

That is Lawrence Schoen -- one of the founders of the Klingon Language Institute, or the KLI for short. And the KLI has a rule that only Marc Okrand can add new words to the dictionary. But every year they can petition him to invent new words. And the KLI has been using that limited vocabulary to translate all sorts of stuff -- including Shakespeare.

But I asked Lawrence why did the Klingon language catch on in the early 1990s? I mean, was it just in the because of Star Trek VI, and the character of Warf on The Next Generation? He said yeah, but there’s one other really important factor.

Lawrence: We came about as the Internet exploded and suddenly you could do real time conversations in this made up language with people all over the world. So in the very early days of the KLI, I would get these letters that would begin with some variation of, “I thought I was the only one.” And maybe they were, in their town, in their city. But suddenly, that didn’t matter.

Now as I mentioned earlier, language creation is nothing new, people have been doing it for years.

In fact David Peterson is a member of the Language Creation Society. Which creates conlangs for their own sake.

David: There's also an element of writing to it because when you're creating a lexicon you're essentially creating the entire history of a people through their words. And you don't have to learn a language or use it to appreciate it. It's just the type of thing that you should be able to look at a description or look at a grammar or even just look at a lexicon and see the treasures that language creators have buried therein, you know?

David has been hired to create languages for sci-fi fantasy worlds. In fact, he won a competition to create Dothraki – the language of the warrior clans in Game of Thrones.

David: It was incredibly grueling because I just spent every hour working on my proposal. I made it through the first round, which was judged by other language creators that I beefed up my proposal again. I had over 300 pages of material by this point in time. We sent the final four proposals off to the producers and they chose mine.

[SFX clip: Game of Thrones, Dothraki conversation]

David thought he had created the next big conlang that would take on a life of its, you now, essentially the next Klingon.

David: We were super excited about the Dothraki job. Two months later Avatar comes out [SFX clip: Na’vi conversation]. So if you're if you're looking at something that you know took off – the Na’vi language, it did take off. It's still very successful. So then by the times you know Game of Thrones comes along it's like well it's another created language -- it never had a chance.

He has a few theories why Dothraki did not take off in the way that Na’vi did. But his main theory is that Avatar appealed to a younger audience that has the time and energy to learn a constructed language from a fantasy world.

After that, he was hired to create a few more conlags, but they didn’t take off, either. And then he got a job inventing a language for The CW show The 100, which is about the young descendants of people who survived a nuclear war. This language, which he called Trigedasleng, was supposed to be an evolution of English in the future.

[SFX clip: The 100]

Now the show The 100 doesn’t have a big audience, but the audience is young, very loyal – and they love these characters called The Grounders that speak Trigedasleng. So the fans really took to the language. In fact, they ask David questions about it all the time.

David: It's just it's really wonderful it kind of took me by surprise. This is the reaction I thought I was going to be getting to Dothraki and that just never happened at all.

David has now become an advocate for constructed languages being part of any fantasy culture. Because he’s seen how a conlang can really help bond a community of fans together, and it can really effective in world building.

David: And I think if you are talking about worlds that are not our own, language is a detail that matters. It's not expensive to get somebody like there are people that already are just spending almost every single free hour of their day working out a created language that would be over the moon to have created for example a language for the Martians in Supergirl. And so since it's not going to be super expensive why not? I mean God it just kills me to hear when you know shows and movies are skating by on gibberish. There's no point to it right now.

But David also thinks there is a correlation between how often characters are featured on a show and how popular the language is. Another reason why he thinks Dothraki didn’t take off is because the Dothrakis were not on Game of Thrones very much after season one. And even though Klingon may be the envy of the conlang world even the popularity Klingon started to wane when Star Trek didn’t feature the Klingons for many years. That’s why a lot of Klingonists have been excited about the new show Star Trek, Discovery. The first season featured the Klingons very heavily.

[SFX Clip: Star Trek Discovery]

And in the Konlang community, there’s a lot of buzz around the language consultant on that show, Robyn Stewart, who in many ways represents the next generation (no pun intended) of Klingons speakers.

In fact, beyond being a Klingon expert, Robyn is also a pilot. And if you hear the wind whipping behind her because Robyn was calling me near a military base in Canada.

Robyn: You know I have the army life, I have the flying life and the Klingon life. Probably more lives than that.

By the way, your Klingon name is spelled Qov, how do you pronounce that?

Robyn: It’s going to sound like a wind noise again, “Qov”. I say it's rhymes with stove except the first sound is like you’re choking on spinach.

Qov.

Robyn: Oh yeah I need some more “kah” in there. Have you ever choked on spinach like you're eating it and then you realize something's going down your throat and it's too much and you have to go “Kah” to get it back again.

Probably, I mean I don’t know if it’s spinach, but certainly I've had that experience. Qo, Qov.

Robyn: I actually think that speaking Klingon and having the ability to say that “kah” that will may have saved my life. I was actually choking once and did that, and food came right out.

I said to Robyn, the one thing that has always baffled me about the success of Klingon is that it’s such a harsh language to speak and listen to. I mean it makes sense for the Klingons. They’re this fierce alien warrior culture. They’re often the antagonists in the story, or maybe anti-heroes.

But she says that’s the point. Klingons are rowdy, and boisterous. They’re also very blunt, which she finds freeing.

Robyn: It's actually easier to discuss really hot button topics because the same conversation hasn't been said over and over again. The same trite words are coming out. I have a good friend whose father was murdered and he, you know told his Klingon friends that, in Klingon. There's no euphemisms in Klingon, you just say the things. Another Klingonist came out to me as trans. I haven't had that conversation very often in English, but for her it was kind of freeing to have it in Klingon because the trite words aren't there. It’s so strange to have like learned these new words and have them go like you know right to your soul.

In fact, she says Klingon has become a part of who she is, in the real world.

Robyn: We were talking once about body modification. There was somebody that came to one of the Kabamba of the Klingon conferences and they had not just tattoos but had done for me no actual interesting body modifications and you know this kind of, whoa, like you made this huge step thing. And I said and in Klingon, you know by speaking Klingon we are re-mapping the insides of our head in ways you know we're far more altering than this surgery.

That’s funny because it totally ties into Arrival. You know the short story it was based on in the movie the idea that the way you speak the language begins to change the way you think.

<span data-preserve-html-node="true" style=“color:rgb(203,59,109)">Robyn: Yeah that concept that way someone speaks entirely is you know changes the way that they can look at the world. No sadly they have found very little evidence for it. It's so appealing.

Jen Useleis, the Klingon Pop Warrior, agrees with Robyn. Taking on the attitude of a Klingon can be really liberating.

Jen: Because everything about Klingons is hard they work hard and they fight hard. But they also love really hard and everything is very immediate. For them it's very much about living in the present because you know [speaks Klingon], today is a good day to die.

If I could start each day by saying, “today is a good day to die,” instead of “Oh my god first I need coffee, and then, oh I have a so much work to do” -- I might have a better attitude as well!

But to keep evolving, Klingon does need to keep branching out, so it’s not dependent on Star Trek. I think that’s why Jen’s music also represents a next phase of Klingon culture evolving in the real world.

As I mentioned before, she tries to pick songs that feel Klingon-like. But she’s also pushing the boundaries of what a Klingon would say or sing.

[music clip: My Heart Will Go On]

Jen: Even when I'm doing silly love ballads like my heart will go on like there's something really powerful about a Klingon singing that song.

Is there when you sing that. Is there a more literal translation to my heart will go on. Like “my heart will not explode” or something like that?

Jen: It actually, you hear “tach” a lot in that song and “tach” means to continue.

And we know that Tach means to continue because of a change that Christopher Plummer added to the Klingon language. Although, there is another reason why My Heart Will Go On takes on a different meaning in Klingon:

Jen: Klingons have fully redundant organ systems so it kind of makes sense on a literal level that if something happened the heart would go on!

[music clip: My Heart Will Go On continues and fades out]

[music clip: Imaginary Worlds credits music]

This story was from Imaginary Worlds, a sci-fi and fantasy podcast hosted by Eric Molinski. Subscribe to Imaginary Worlds right here in your podcast player.

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Thanks for listening.

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