I wasn’t yet a Klingon speaker, and I wasn’t really planning on becoming one. I was a linguist who had developed a side interest in the subject of artificial languages, and I wanted to talk to Mark for research purposes. People really spoke Klingon—so claimed the Klingon Language Institute materials anyway—and I wasn’t sure what that meant. When people “spoke” Klingon, was it playacting? Spitting out little words and phrases and putting on a show? A charades-like guessing game where someone sort of cobbled together a message and someone else sort of understood it? Or was it actual language use?
If it was the latter, then this was something I needed to see for myself, because that would make Klingon something so remarkable as to be almost unheard of—a consciously invented language that had been brought to life.
Although we like to call language mankind’s greatest invention, it wasn’t invented at all. The languages we speak were not created according to any plan or design. Who invented French? Who invented Portuguese? No one. They just happened. They arose. Someone said something a certain way, someone else picked up on it, and someone else embellished. A tendency turned into a habit, and somewhere along the way a system came to be. This is how pidgins, slangs, and dialects are born; this is the way English, Russian, and Japanese were born. This is the way all natural languages are born—organically, spontaneously.