Should the Klingon language become universal?

No. I don't really want to eventually have to switch to 24-bit Unicode 2, thank you. The less languages, the better.

That would be "fewer languages", dragoon. And Unicode is not
language oriented. It is character oriented, to the chagrin of
those who use the unified Asian characters.

Why can't Klingons just learn to speak English?

This whole business amuses me more than I can say. Languages like Esperanto dying on the vine, but Klingon flourishing because it reflects an actual culture. Don't laugh at the word "actual" -- culture is in your head. More people speak Klingon than speak a number of endangered languages, I'll bet. How weird is that? What I wonder is how long this culture will last. Star Trek the Created Universe shows no signs of dying out.

As I write this, I realize that you, John, would make an excellent Klingon.

I wager John would make only an average Klingon. HE HAS NO HONOR!

The Harry Harrison "Stainless Steel Rat" series was my first introduction to Esperanto. I was geek enough to attempt learning it because of the stories. However, it became clear that it was a worthless endeavor much the same way a lone FAX machine has no purpose. If you go around talking to yourself in Esperanto then everything thinks that you really are crazy. And unlike the FAX, it never caught on.

I guess if I wanted to learn Kligon I'd start with swearing and insults.

And the first day went so well...

To deflate the hyperbole a bit, the klingon proposal was turned down.

All this will mean is that everyone will continue using the roman transliteration for the language. You can argue what constitutes a character vs a language-specific font, but we already have dingbats, braille patterns, dingbats and box drawing. It just removes a bit of color from the world, which is sad.

At least Tolkien's tengwar are still in the queue.

Edited by author 06-06-2003 09:37 AM
Good point about adding a bit of color to the world. Best of luck to Cirth, Tengwar, and Old Persian Cuneiform, then, and a toast to the Klingon character set. I didn't painstakingly letter notebooks full of Old Persian Cuneiform writing when I was a teenager, but I'm sure that someone somewhere is doing just that.

Edited by author 06-06-2003 10:44 AM
This amount of coughing and guttural noise you have to make speaking Klingon makes Arabic sound like Castilion Spanish.

Funny way to put it - Spanish evolved directly from Latin and Arabic!

The last survey I saw showed that the speakers of Klingon do not outnumber the speakers of Esperanto; not by a long shot. The latest figure I have seen for fluent speakers of Klingon is about twelve; the most conservative estimate of Esperanto speakers I've seen is 250,000. By fluent, I mean someone who can carry out a full conversation in the language without having to look things up, and by full conversation I mean they should be able to say more than "I have a red pencil box."

WilliamA, your comment sent me soaring through Google on a flying visit to many intriguing places. For example, until now I knew very little about the artificial language Lojban beyond its name. But now I know that several Lojban speakers are irked not just at Esperanto, which they find amusing but insufficiently useful as an artificial language, but at Klingon, for getting a shot at stardom just because of the popularity of a TV franchise.

However, based on this search I have to question your claims -- for one thing, the "latest figure" you mention dates from 1996. Klingon clearly has increased in popularity since then. How much, it's hard to say. The Klingon Language Institute's site is down, so we don't even have their version of the story to check. Everybody else appears to be too embarrassed to offer more current figures.

Going on the same Google search, I hasten to add that Esperanto is far from dead (my earlier comment was rhetorical flourish only), but it does seem to have hit a plateau. Klingon, though, still has heat, and continues to gather speakers.

I read an anecdote recently about a Klingon-speaking traveler who reported being lost in Japan one afternoon until he met a teenager wearing a T-shirt that read in, in Klingon script, "I speak Klingon." Using only Klingon, the two of them sussed out where the traveler needed to go. Anecdotal evidence, literally and figuratively, but I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of barely fluent Klingon speakers racketing around these days.

It's really hard to measure the number of speakers--there are both definitional problems (how well to you have to speak it before you're a speaker) and practical problems of tracking the people down and counting them.

One thing that's a bit easier to measure is number of publications. The catalog of the Universal Esperanto Association, for example, is 200 pages long with something like 4000 titles. The association also puts out a monthly magazine with a "recent publications" list that runs least a page--the issue I have closest to hand has 28 new books, videos, games, and CDs.

There are plenty of magazines in Esperanto, too. At various times I've subscribed to two different literary magazines, one on environmental topics, a monthly news magazine, and one that covered the Esperanto-language rock music scene.

Are there any Klingon-language magazines? Any about something other than the Klingon language? (I did a quick web search and couldn't find any, but I don't know the Klingon word for magazine, so maybe they're out there and I just don't know about it.)

There are a couple of publications, mostly Shakespeare of course, but some others. See for example this list. Mostly it's translation efforts at this point, rather than original literature.

So no, I don't think the suggestion that more people speak or read klingon than esperanto (worldwide anyway) is likely true. But certainly it's ahead of half the remaining living languages. :-/

Klingon is also about a century younger than Esperanto, for what that's worth. The languages were created with different intents as well; issues of preserving the extremely-limited canon vocabulary and Paramount's tendency to assert ownership make it harder to use as a real language.