Speaking Klingon: An Essay on the Utility of Language

One of the great things about anthropology is that its tools are widely applicable. Anthropologists have carved out niches for themselves in diverse areas ranging from multimillion dollar corporations to impoverished ghettos. Anywhere people interact, there is a potential for anthropological interpretation. While the anthropologist’s toolkit has equipment suitable for numerous jobs, one task it is particularly well-adapted for is interpreting bizarre behavior. Actions have meanings and purpose, and anthropology allows us to make sense of the world of social interactions around us by distilling underlying ideas from human behavior. In this essay, I intend to demonstrate this application of anthropology through an especially unusual case study.

D’Armond Speers is one of about 30 people on Earth capable of fluently speaking Klingon. This constructed language was invented for the Klingon race on the hit television series, Star Trek. In 1984, Marc Okrand published The Klingon Dictionary, a work that embodies the words and grammatical structure of the language. Considered canon today, Okrand’s text reveals that Klingon is designed to sound both alien and fierce. This is evidenced by the numerous terms in Klingon for acts like fighting and the many terms considered profane. Words for acts of aggression, war, and other similar concepts abound, an unsurprising fact considering these are topics of paramount interest for the strong, quick to act Klingons, but terms that reference actions and objects more germane to human life, like expressions for an open passageway, a spoon, or one’s aunt, have only recently been added. The emphasis of the Klingon lexicon on extraterrestrial life and battle (and lack of terms for common Earthly elements) can make the language cumbersome for human speakers. This did not sway Speers from learning, however. Both Star Trek fans and those interested in the study of language alike have been captivated by the Klingon language. While most people only dabble in the language briefly, the more devoted hobbyists are capable of forming sentences and expressing themselves like a Klingon warlord when they desire.

Shakespeare's Hamlet is one of the more popular works translated into Klingon. 

Speers, a Ph. D in linguistics, decided to put his interest in Klingon to task. For the first five years of his son Alec’s life, he spoke to him almost exclusively in Klingon. Humans adopt language much more easily as children than as adults. Children who learn a second language more readily adopt other languages when they are older. Speers wanted to know if learning Klingon as a second language would still provide this benefit, and also if the language would be retained in older life. While Alec and his father spoke to each other in Klingon, the rest of the family and society spoke to Alec in English, so he was not limited in this regard. While Alec learned many phrases and expressions as a child, occasionally preferring them to their English equivalents, he stopped speaking Klingon entirely when he was about five years old. At this point, D’Armond recognized his son was no longer interested in speaking to him in Klingon, so he ended his experiment. Alec did not continue speaking Klingon, and seems to have not retained his abilities in later life.

Amusing Rosetta Stone commercial about learning to speak Alien languages

While it is easy to spitball ideas about why Alec did not retain his Klingon language abilities, we can perhaps come to more nuanced conclusions using anthropological theory. For starters, this example fails to lend credence to the so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” a term that infuriates anthropologists across the board. Named for two pioneers in American linguistics, the term references the idea that culture is determined by language (not the other way around) and asserts that language shapes and limits how people interpret the world. Among other problems, this idea is quite a stretch beyond what Sapir and Whorf ever argued in their works. As an extreme example, it seems that this hypothesis would suggest Alec would have warlike tendencies and view other cultures as conquerable entities since he grew up speaking Klingon. Alec’s perception of reality would be literally shaped by the patterns he unconsciously absorbed from Klingon. This is of course very silly, yet it is what this term appears to imply. A more accurate notion derived from Sapir and Whorf’s works is that language and culture have similar structures, and that the two reinforce each other.

 

Sapir describes in his works how both human social behavior and language are learned unconsciously. Compare how we learn language as children to how we learn language as adults. If we had to learn our second language the same way we learned our first, then no one would speak anything! Fortunately, we are able to naturalize patterns very easily when we are young. Whorf expanded on this idea by theorizing that grammatical patterns can be connected to cultural patterns. Whorf and Sapir believed that these patterns give structure to our thought, even though the rules governing such structures were distilled unconsciously and not explicitly taught to us when we were young. Consequently, these structures led to logic and gave meaning to the world around us. With this in mind, we can return to our problem of Alec’s disinterest in speaking Klingon. What would Sapir and Whorf have to say about Klingon and the conclusion of D’Armond’s project? I hypothesize that they would find Klingon amusing and interesting, yet very different from other languages for one key reason. While the languages spoken widely around the world are mirrored and grounded in cultural meaning, Klingon’s cultural meaning is mostly limited to the world of Star Trek. From Sapir and Whorf’s perspective, Alec’s choice to speak English resulted from the reinforcement of the patterns unconsciously learned from the language in society around him, not just from the fact that everyone other than his father spoke English to him. Since Alec never watched Star Trek (D’Armond once dressed as a Klingon for his son, but it frightened him so much he never did it again) and certainly did not spend time with Klingons, there was no cultural reinforcement of the patterns he unconsciously learned from Klingon. The patterns in English, however, were reflected in the societal structure where his life took place. Klingon was so distinct from all the other structures forming in Alec’s mind that it eventually lost its utility because it lacked parallels in society. With the only bridge between the two distinct language structures being Alec’s interactions with his father, Klingon was discarded because English was such a superior means of interpreting the world around him.

While from the beginning it is clear why learning to speak Klingon may be objectionable, anthropological theory allows us to reach more nuanced conclusions than we could reach without an interpretive framework. Instead of saying that learning Klingon is pointless simply because no one speaks it, we can comment on how it is not reflected in the unconscious mental structures we use to interpret the world around us and thus lacks utility. While this hypothesis is not necessarily more correct than saying Klingon is useless because no one speaks the language, it generates more proactive discussion and can be defended with examples drawn from anthropological research, leading to better hypotheses and more defensible arguments. To reiterate, it seems Sapir and Whorf would find Klingon an interesting plaything and a fun exercise in studying language. But since Klingons do not exist on Earth, it fails to provide humans with suitable means to interpret the world around them.

-Phillip

Further Reading:

Klingon as a Second Language: D'Armond Speers Teaches His Son an Alien Tongue

The Klingon Language Institute