A Man Once Tried to Raise His Son as a Native Speaker in Klingon
The man is computational linguist Dr. d’Armond Speers.
Speers is actually not a huge Start Trek fan himself.
Indeed many Klingon language enthusiasts aren’t, contrary to popular belief.
They tend to be language lovers fascinated by constructed languages, of which Klingon
is a relatively thriving one, hence why they gravitate towards it.
Speers became fascinated with the Klingon language after reading a flyer on a bulletin
board at Georgetown where Speers was studying linguistics.
The flyer was advertising the Klingon Language Institute (KLI), founded by Dr. Larence M.
Schoen.
“I thought to myself, ‘A new language.’
The fact that it was a constructed language really appealed to me.
It sounded like fun,” said Speers.
He soon became one of the more famous members of KLI when he decided to experiment with
trying to teach a child to be a native speaker of Klingon, his own son, Alec.
Specifically, he stated, “I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through
his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language.”
So as not to cause his Alec to have potential learning disabilities and to make sure his
son could fully integrate into society without language problems, Speers’ wife, who was
fully behind Speers’ experiment, always spoke English to the child.
(The reason for concern was that lack of an adequate language for your brain to use before
the age of around 5 can severely stunt a person’s mental capacity and causes extremely detrimental
learning disabilities in later life, which through history is largely why deaf people
were once considered mentally handicapped, even though with an adequate language taught
to them at an early age, like a sign language, they are just as smart as anyone else.
For more on this, checkout our article on TodayIFoundOut.com: How Deaf People Think.)
In any event, unlike his wife, Speers almost exclusively spoke to Alec in Klingon.
He even would sing the Klingon Imperial Anthem, May the Empire Endure, as a bedtime lullaby
to Alec, which his son soon picked up and would also sing.
This experiment went on for about three years, during which time, as you might imagine, Speers
was given a lot of funny looks in public as he’d converse with Alec in Klingon.
At first when people would ask what language he was speaking, Speers would respond, “speaking
Klingon”, but after getting a lot of dirty looks and comments for this, he switched to
just saying, “speaking a constructed language”, which generally would forestall potential
negative comments.
Despite certain people being aghast that a father would do this, thinking it perhaps
detrimental to a child, Speers, being a language expert had a different view on it.
“My feeling is that it’s good for people in general to know more than one language.
You get different viewpoints and perspectives on things, and there is evidence to suggest
that kids who are bilingual do better academically, whether their second language is a constructed
language or not.”
Despite the limitation of the language, Speers claimed, “I’ve been able to say almost
everything I’ve needed to say to Alec in Klingon…
One of the reasons I find the Klingon language so interesting is that because the vocabulary
and grammar is so limited, you really have to think to figure out how you’re going
to say something.”
For instance, “When I ask him to turn out the lights, I say the Klingon for ‘make
it dark’.”
This joy found in the difficulty in saying things in Klingon over English didn’t rub
off on his son, and Alec more and more resisted speaking in Klingon, as Speers anticipated
in the beginning.
“There’s going to come a time when he’s going to stop making the effort to speak Klingon
because it’ll be easier for him to speak English.”
Further, Speers was the only person who would speak this language to Alec and the boy never
saw Star Trek during this experiment, so didn’t ever see anyone but his father speaking it.
As everyone else spoke English, Alec gradually stopped responding to his father if he spoke
Klingon and, around three years old, Speers states, “He stopped listening to me when
I spoke in Klingon.
It was clear that he didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t want to make it into a problem,
so I switched to English…”
Today the teenage Alec no longer is fluent in Klingon and reportedly can’t even pick
out the meaning of individual words of the language, which probably is a fact that helps
him out with the ladies in High School.
Bonus Facts: • The Klingon language continues to grow,
despite the lack of new Star Trek shows or movies featuring it, with new words added
each year, generally thought up by Marc Okrand, the person who often mistakenly is said to
have first created the Klingon Language (in fact, the actor who played “Scotty”, James
Doohan, did that at a very rudimentary level, coming up with the style and the first few
words.
Okrand took James Doohan’s work and made it into a full language, which is why he’s
generally given the credit for first coming up with it, doing the vast majority of the
work to make it into a real language.)
• It is estimated that approximately 20-30 people in the world, including Speers, are
fluent speakers of Klingon, with another few thousand that are familiar enough that they
can pick out words when they hear it spoken.