A constructed language created by linguist Marc Okrand for the Star Trek franchise — the most fully developed and widely spoken of all fictional languages.
Where it’s spoken
Klingon (tlhIngan Hol) was first developed for the 1984 film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Marc Okrand, a linguist working at the time on Indigenous American language documentation, gave it deliberately unusual sounds and grammar to make it feel non-human. A small but committed Klingon Language Institute has produced dictionaries, a Bible translation, and operas in the language.
What it sounds like
Object-Verb-Subject word order — typologically rare. Phonology features alveolar and uvular consonants alongside English-like sounds, intentionally clashing with European norms. Suffixes mark person, number, mood, and aspect with strict ordering.
How it’s written
Romanised Klingon uses unusual capital-letter conventions to distinguish similar sounds (q vs Q, S vs s). A native-style logographic script called pIqaD exists but is little used.
Find more languages by letter
Klingon starts with K and ends with N. Browse other languages along the same letter.
Languages that contain a letter from "Klingon":