Klingon as a First Language

For those of you in the audience that aren’t totally rad, allow me to explain to you what the Klingon language is. The Klingons are an alien race from the Star Trek universe, and, yes, they speak Klingon. This fictional language ranks right up there with Tolkin’s Elvish as one of the most commonly used languages that only fiction characters, and the fans of said fictional characters, speak.

Klingon can be heard anywhere within a 5 block radius of any Star Trek convention. There are bands that only sing in Klingon, and their lyrics are only about the hardships of Klingon life. There are standup comedians that spit out their Trek-centric humor in nothing but Klingon. There was even an all Klingon translation of Hamlet.

It’s safe to say that those that speak Klingon are either dangerously obsessed, or their just crazy, or maybe some kind of unsafe combination of the two. But it’s rare that you get someone that chooses to teach someone else nothing but the Klingon language, as if it were something they would actually need in life.

That’s what a man by the name of d’Armond Speers did to his son for the first three years of his son’s life. For three years, Speers never once spoke to his son in English – only Klingon. The crazy part is his baby son actually started to learn the language before he ever knew that there was such a thing as English.

Even stranger is that this little bit of info was actually wedged in to a larger article that focused on a language software application that Speers is working on. The article is 797 words long, yet only 165 of those words are dedicated to the part of it that involves Speers raising his son to speak a fictional language from a Sci-Fi TV show.

How, if you’re the interviewer, do you not interrupt Speers whenever he tries to talk about his software?

“Every student has stories about looking something up online, putting it in your paper and getting it wrong,”

“Yeah, that’s just wonderful. But let’s back-track a minuet here. What’s this shit about teaching your son nothing but Klingon for three-years?”

“Oh, that. We’ll it’s nothing really. I mean, I’m a professional linguist. That’s what I do.”

“Fuck off. Linguists don’t do that shit. You’re lying.”

“Well, I did. But it’s fine. My son is all grown up and he doesn’t remember a word of Klingon.”

“There’s nothing fine about any of that.”

“Yeah, but my software…”

“Are you breeding a race of Klingon warriors that will one day enslave the human race, Mr. Speers?”

“Wha—what?”

That’s how that interview would have gone down if I were conducting it. From that final point on, the rest of it would have just been phase battle between Speers and I while at the command deck of the U.S.S Enterprise.