There's No Klingon Word for HelloA history of the gruff but surprisingly sophisticated invented language and the people who speak it.

There's something missing from J.J. Abrams' reboot of the moribund Star Trek franchise, and that something is Klingon. I mean Klingon the language. If that sounds like a minor omission, consider this: The very first lines of the first Star Trek movie in 1979 were in Klingon: wIy cha'! HaSta! cha yIghuS! And those few words—which were subtitled as "Tactical … Visual … Tactical, stand by on torpedoes!"—have since blossomed into, if not a full-fledged language, one at least fledged enough to have a dictionary, a translation of Hamlet, and a small but dedicated community of (nonfictional) speakers, who'll feel miffed by Abrams' oversight.

They know that Klingon is a sophisticated, extremely complex language that very few can master. I first came to Klingon as a linguist doing research for a book on artificial languages.