Klingon: A fictional language that holds a world record 

Fiction writers often go beyond themselves in creating a whole new world for their characters. Sometimes, they end up creating an entire lingo or language system too! Klingon is one such fictional language that was created and popularised by the TV series, Star Trek. In fact, two Shakespearean plays—Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing—have been translated into Klingon too.  Let’s find out more about this language. 

What is Klingon? 
Klingon is an artificial language spoken by the Klingons, a fictional alien race in the Star Trek universe. Star Trek is an American science-fiction television series created in the 1960s by American television screenwriter and producer Gene Roddenberry.  

Klingon has a host of unusual features (no mention of ‘a’ sound; lack of adjectives; small vocabulary) as described by American linguist Marc Okrand in his 1985 book, The Klingon Dictionary, and is purposely supposed to sound ‘alien’. Although Klingons have never existed, the Klingon language is real. It has progressed from gibberish to a functional language with its own vocabulary, syntax, figures of speech, slang and regional accents. It is now spoken by people all around the world in a variety of circumstances. 

Klingon in popular culture 
Given the mass fan following of the Star Trek series, spoken Klingon has entered popular culture to the point where some of the popular plays by none other than William Shakespeare and portions of the holy scripture, Bible, have also been translated into it. The Klingon Hamlet is a translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet in the Klingon language. Authors Nick Nicholas and Andrew Strader of the Klingon Shakespeare Restoration Project translated the play over several years. The inspiration for the project came from what Chancellor Gorkon, a character in the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered, said: "You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.”  

However, Hamlet isn’t the first play to be performed in this fictional language. A Klingon Christmas Carol is said to be the first play to be entirely performed in Klingon!  It was a Klingon adaptation of the famous English author Charles Dickens' 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol which happens to be a classic tale of ghosts and redemption. The aim was to represent Klingon principles of heroism and honour.  

There is even a dictionary, a collection of sayings, and a cultural guide to the language! 

Bonus fact: Klingon is the world's most popular fictitious language in terms of the number of speakers, according to the Guinness World Records. 

The creation of Klingon language 
The basic sounds of the language, as well as a few words, were created by Canadian actor James Doohan and American producer Jon Povill for the 1979 American science fiction film Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In fact, the language was heard for the first time in this film itself. Linguist Marc Okrand went on to expand Klingon into a full-fledged language later on.  

In the 1984 film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, director Leonard Nimoy and writer-producer Harve Bennett wanted the Klingons to speak a structured language rather than a random gibberish one. Hence, they commissioned Okrand who had earlier crafted four lines of Vulcan dialogues for the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, to create a full-fledged language based on the phrases Doohan had written. Vulcan dialogues refer to dialogues spoken by Vulcans, a fictional extra-terrestrial humanoid species in the Star Trek media universe.