When I arrived at the Klingon conference in Arizona, I didn’t know a thing about Star Trek. I hadn’t seen any of the movies. I couldn’t name one Klingon character from the show. But I knew one thing for sure: I wanted one of those pins.
What Are They Doing?
In 1999, the satirical paper the Onion ran a story under the headline “Klingon Speakers Now Outnumber Navajo Speakers.” This is absolutely not true, but it would have been true had they picked nearly any other Native American language. How many speakers are there? It depends on your definition of “speaker.” The Klingon Dictionary, written by Okrand and licensed by Paramount, has sold more than 300,000 copies of its two editions. But a dictionary buyer does not a speaker make. There are probably more than two thousand people who have learned to use Klingon in some way. Many of them have learned a word or two. Others have composed poems, stories, or wedding vows in Klingon without regard to the grammar, simply by popping dictionary words into English sentences. They haven’t done the work. They count only as dabblers, not speakers. At least a few hundred, however, have done the work and are pretty good at written Klingon.
But what about speakers in the sense of people who can carry on a spontaneous live conversation in Klingon? How many of them are there? I would say, oh, twenty or so. Maybe thirty.
This estimate doesn’t sound very exciting, but considering the difficulty of the grammar, and the relatively small vocabulary size, it’s amazing that spontaneous conversations happen at all. The annual qep’a' is one of the few places where such conversations occur.
On the first afternoon of the conference, I stepped timidly into the over-air-conditioned lobby of the hotel with Mark Shoulson. He and I had spent the long flight to Phoenix going over the finer points of Klingon colloquialisms, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to put them to use. I saw a small group gathered around a table, PalmPilots in hand. They were conversing in Klingon, haltingly, and with much use of their PalmPilot dictionaries, but nonetheless getting their points across. No one was in costume. Mark introduced me to the group, and I smiled and waved weakly, not sure what to say or how to say it. I sat and listened for a while. I was privately pleased when I understood my first spoken Klingon sentence: “Ha’DIbaH vISopbe'” (Animal I-it-eat-not)—“I’m a vegetarian.” Not a very Klingon sentiment.
I wasn’t impressed with the fluency level of the conversation. It seemed that nearly every sentence was repeated two or three times to the request of “nuq?” (What?). But because people were out of practice and the group was of mixed skill level, this particular conversation wasn’t the best display of Klingon-speaking potential. I saw that later, as we walked over radiating sidewalks to a Mexican restaurant for the opening banquet, when I witnessed Captain Krankor and his girlfriend holding hands and chatting in Klingon, sans PalmPilots.
Captain Krankor (also known as Qanqor) is a software engineer and musician from Massachusetts known as Rich when he’s in regular clothes. When he wears his Klingon costume, he is Krankor, and he only speaks Klingon. In both of his personas he is round and compact, with a large, appreciative laugh that shows off his dimples. His costume includes a travel guitar, on which he might strum a few bars of his translations of the Beatles or the Stones, or lead the group in the Klingon anthem “taHjaj wo'” (May the Empire Continue), a stirring and complex round of his own composition. He is known for being the first speaker of Klingon, and he speaks as smoothly as one could speak a language with so many glottal stops—especially when he speaks with his incredibly fluent girlfriend, Agnieszka, a delicate, shy linguist from Poland.
But no matter how well one speaks Klingon, he admits, it isn’t easy to “take the vow,” as the Klingonists call it when they make the commitment to speak only Klingon. None of the conference goers took a vow that lasted for the entire weekend. Some, like Krankor, attached the vow to the costume, and wore the costume only for certain events. Daniel, a newspaper deliveryman from Colorado, told me a little sheepishly that he was postponing putting on his costume, because then he couldn’t participate as much in the general socializing, which takes place in English. Others, like Scott, a magician from Florida who, before he discovered the language, “couldn’t give a shit about Star Trek” didn’t have a costume and simply declared they were taking the vow for a particular day.
Scott and I were the early risers of the group, and the first morning we chatted at breakfast (in English). He answered some questions I had about vocabulary, which he was well qualified to do as the current Beginner’s Grammarian, an official title at the KLI for the person who responds to newcomers' questions on the e-mail lists. Having such a title is a mark of distinction and an endorsement of language skill. He said he was having a great time so far, and he was really hoping Marc Okrand would make an appearance, as he sometimes does at the qep’a's. “I’m starstruck,” he said with a wide smile. “I brought a new copy of The Klingon Dictionary for him to sign.”
The second morning, when I greeted Scott by the coffee machine, he would only speak to me in Klingon, having taken the vow for that day. Luckily, someone had beamed me a PalmPilot dictionary at lunch the previous day, so I had the means to understand him in a painfully pause-filled kind of way. As the rest of the group came down from their rooms, he gained more game conversational partners and I gained some interpreters, the most skilled of whom was my guide, Mark, who through the rest of the weekend made it a point to keep me included with unobtrusive simultaneous translation in a low, gentle voice.
Mark’s translation was also for the benefit of Louise, another beginner who became my study partner. Louise, a French-Canadian ad copywriter in her late forties, had been to three previous qep’a's and had failed the first certification exam each time. She was going to try again. Unlike most of the other attendees, she didn’t seem to be into computers, games, science fiction, or even language. She went for a run every morning and then smoked a cigarette. She had short hair and tomboy clothes, but she traveled with a pile of stuffed animals, and when I saw them on the chair in her hotel room, all propped upright like a matinee audience, I asked her, a little embarrassed on her behalf, “Are they animals you’ve collected since your childhood?” “No,” she answered, not embarrassed in the least, “well, you might say my extended childhood.”
I still don’t fully understand why she wanted to learn Klingon, and I asked her more than a few times, trying to make sense of her response: “When I saw Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, I saw those boots, yeah? In the Klingon costume? And I said, ‘Wow! I want to make those boots.’ I thought maybe Japanese Klingon speakers would love to buy them. So I started to learn Klingon.” As far as I know, there are no Japanese Klingon speakers, but she didn’t seem worried about this. As for the boot-making part of her plan, she had apprenticed herself to a cobbler in Montreal.