Marc Okrand (b. 3 July 1948, Los Angeles, California) is an American linguist and language designer, best known for creating "Klingon," a fictional language spoken by the eponymous alien race in the Star Trek sci-fi franchise. With robust, comprehensive grammar and linguistic structure, Klingon developed a strong cult following over the years, with several thousand active speakers worldwide. Arguably, it's the best-known fictional language after J.R.R. Tolkien's "Sindarin" and other elvish and dwarvish dialects in The Lord of the Rings. Okrand speaks conversational Klingon, even though he admitted that many others achieved far greater fluency. He worked on a few more constructed languages, such as "Atlanthean" in the Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) film, and "Kelpien" in the second season of Star Trek: Discovery in 2019.
Okrand earned his Bachelor's (1972) from the University Of California Santa Cruz and PhD (1977) from the University of California, Berkeley; his thesis on the grammar of "Mutsun," an extinct indigenous language spoken by the Ohlone people, was supervised by pioneering historical linguist Mary R. Haas (1910—1996). Marc Okrand taught undergraduate courses at The University Of California At Santa Barbara, from 1975 to 1978, before relocating to Washington, D.C., for his Smithsonian Institution postdoctoral fellowship. In early 1979, he joined a newly established National Captioning Institute (NCI) in Virginia, where Marc served as Live Captioning supervisor until his retirement in 2013.
In the early 1980s, Paramount Pictures hired Marc Okrand to overdub English dialogues into a fictional "Vulcan" language for Nicholas Meyer's upcoming Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) film. Shortly after, Okrand began to develop "Klingon" fictional language, subsequently working with screenwriters and coaching the cast of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984), Star Trek: The Next Generation 1988 TV spin-off, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (89), and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). Throughout the 1990s, he wrote and published an official Klingon dictionary and other books and audio courses on the language. Okrand co-authored the libretto for the first Klingon opera, ʼuʼ, staged in September 2010 by Dutch composer Eef van Breen in collaboration with Xavier Van Wersch and Floris Schönfeld.
Other notable examples of constructed languages in contemporary film and TV, with proper grammar and functional vocabulary, include work of Paul R. Frommer, who designed "Na'vi" in James Cameron's Avatar (2009) blockbuster and "Barsoomian," language spoken by the Martians in Andrew Stanton's John Carter (2012), and David J. Peterson, who invented "Valyrian" and "Dothraki" languages for HBO's critically-acclaimed Game of Thrones (2011–2019) series.
United States· Los Angeles