Speakers
A small number of people are capable of conversing in Klingon. Arika Okrent guessed in her book "In the Land of Invented Languages" that there might be 20–30 fluent speakers. Its vocabulary, heavily centered on Star Trek-Klingon concepts such as spacecraft or warfare, can sometimes make it cumbersome for everyday use. For instance, while words for transporter ionizer unit (jolvoy') or bridge (of a ship) (meH) have been known since close to the language's inception, the word for bridge in the sense of a crossing over water (QI) was unknown until August 2012. Nonetheless, mundane conversations are common among skilled speakers.
One Klingon speaker, d'Armond Speers raised his son Alec to speak Klingon as a first language, whilst the boy's mother communicated with him in English. Alec rarely responded to his father in Klingon, although when he did his pronunciation was "excellent". After Alec's fifth birthday Speers reported that his son eventually stopped responding to him when spoken to in Klingon as he clearly did not enjoy it, so Speers switched to English.
In May 2009, Simon & Schuster, in collaboration with Ultralingua Inc., a developer of electronic dictionary applications, announced the release of a suite of electronic Klingon language software for most computer platforms including a dictionary, a phrasebook, and an audio learning tool.
In September 2011, Eurotalk released the "Learn Klingon" course in its Talk Now! range of over 130 languages and includes a choice of more than 120 languages to learn from just by changing the help language. The course is broken down into topics and made up of practice and learning games as well as the ability to test your skills with the speech recognition software. The language is displayed in both Latin and pIqaD fonts making this the first language course written in pIqaD and approved by CBS and Marc Okrand. It was translated by Jonathan Brown and Okrand and uses the Hol-pIqaD TrueType font.
Read more about this topic: Klingon Language
Famous quotes containing the word speakers:
“The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
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You write so of the poets and not laugh?
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Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,—
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From just a shadow on a charnel-wall.”
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“The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.”
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