'Star Trek' Klingon Language Expert to Give Lecture

Submitted news release:

You are cordially invited to the next event in NML’s Amelia C. Murdoch Speaker Series:

What is Klingon?
With Marc Okrand

Directions: City of College Park City Hall Council Chambers 4500 Knox Rd, College Park, MD 20740

Saturday, March 14, 3-5 pm. Free parking is available. Admission is free. Parking passes available on first floor of City Hall

The Klingon language, which began as a few lines of dialogue in the first Star Trek movie, has grown to be what the Guinness Book of World Records once dubbed the world’s “largest fictional language.” This talk will review the origins of the language, why its grammar and vocabulary developed the way they did, and then focus on how it fares in the “real world.”

Marc Okrand devised the dialogue and coached the actors speaking the Klingon language heard in Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and Star Trek Into Darkness. He also created the Atlantean language heard in the Walt Disney animated feature Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

The Klingon language he developed has been used in a number of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise. He is the author of The Klingon Dictionary (Pocket Books, 1985; revised edition, 1992), an introduction to the grammar and vocabulary of the language; The Klingon Way: A Warrior’s Guide (Pocket Books, 1996), an annotated compilation of Klingon proverbs; and Klingon For the Galactic Traveler (Pocket Books, 1997), a guide to the finer points of the Klingon language, including specialized terminology, slang, idioms, dialects. He has degrees in linguistics from the Santa Cruz and Berkeley campuses of the University of California and has conducted linguistic research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

In addition to his published work on Klingon, he has written articles on both linguistics and closed captioning for several journals and anthologies. Please help us to plan for the event by registering your attendance in the form here. (GO WWW.LANGUAGEMUSEUM.ORG TO REGISTER)