Klingon as a First Language

In the "social experiment" to end all "social experiments", a Minnesota father claims he put his computational linguistics Ph.D. to good use by speaking Klingon--and only Klingon--to his baby. Yes, for the first three years of its life, this kid was subjected to in-real-life parental trolling. The story doesn't explain why the experiment was stopped, but apparently it ended too soon to produce any lasting effects. The child, now a teenager, does not speak a word of Klingon. Thanks to Julio Ojeda-Zapata.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

MORE: language • Weird

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

glory bee

The thing is that the English language is so rich and some of the blame must go to the educators who fail to see this and involve the childrens’ imagination as to the origin of an English word or phrase. It’s called etymology. Phrases like ‘Out of the blue’ or ‘they left the scene like all get out’.. as for the last example I had someone rolling laughing and asking ‘Where does that saying come from?’ and I couldn’t think of its origin.
yrogerg

Ah, yes, yet another story that straddles the line between “Quirky linguist is ridiculous” and “light child abuse”.
Jesse M.

Even if the father had taught the kid *only* klingon it wouldn’t have mattered, as soon as the kid started interacting with English-speaking kids he would have switched over to using that as his primary language. Read some Judith Rich Harris books–kids are basically wired to ignore their parents and pay attention to peers, in all cases where the parents speak a different language or even have a different accent than a kid’s peers, they will grow up speaking like their peers rather than their parents.
Itsumishi

and raise children in a household that only speaks spanish? absolutely not. is it a disadvantage to the child? absolutely yes.

Actually if the child speaks English at school or whatever I think it would most positively be an advantage. The child grows up bilingual.

I think it’d be the same with this child. True Klingon isn’t going to be a very useful language, however I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that if you grow up bilingual you are much more likely to pick up new languages later in life (which makes perfect sense as your brain isn’t nearly as locked into one pattern).
Anonymous

Actually we’ve known all of this for a while so I am surprised that a computational linguistics PhD didn’t plan this out better.

With languages that are either artificial, rudimentary, or improvised it takes until the second generation to form a fully fledged language. You can see this in the movement from pidgin languages to creoles. This is why the results of the Esperanto experiment do not surprise me. The children just corrected what didn’t match with UG and made the language more functional.

Also the language needs to be used frequently until after the language period in order to maintain use of the vocabulary. I am not sure you ever lose the underlying grammatical instinct but as a former native speaker of Tagalog (my first language mind you), I know that it is possible to no longer have utility of a language you learned during your language period.

Someone please create a community of Elvish speakers to test this out. We can create a village in the woods of New England.
ultraswank

Yeah, it does look like the kid was still learning English so no bad parenting, and considering the father was a computational linguistics Ph.D. I can see why he would be interested in trying this out. When most people hear about Klingon they assume someone just made up some words to replace English words and called it a language, but Klingon is a full language, complete with its own grammar, that was designed to be completely unlike anything spoken on earth. The father was probably just trying this out to see if the kid would pick any of the language up naturally, and that is one of the big questions about language today. Can anything, any type of sentence structure and word formation, become a language? Or is there something physical in our brains and therefor in our genes that causes human language to follow certain styles and structures. Are our language centers completely fluid when we’re born and able to accept anything, or do the various branches of human languages we see in the real world reflect on deep structures in the brain.
grffn

As an education student, I understand that being raised bi-lingual, regardless of the language, is actually beneficial as far as development of critical thinking skills is concerned. This is especially true if the languages are vastly different. The mom and the daycare spoke the dominant language, this child was not marginalized by Klingon. So, regardless of the motivations of the father, how can something that ultimately benefits the child be considered abuse?
- Gloria
  
  I’ve found it very useful. My family is Chinese and they raised me speaking Cantonese to me. I picked up English once I got into school, and never had a problem — in fact, I excelled at language problems: spelling, reading, etc.
  
  @47 is also spot on. Kids will be fine once they get into school and socialize; don’t forget that they spend 6+-7 hours a day there.
  
  To be honest, growing up bilingual just felt natural. I find it so weird when I realize a lot of people only speak English.
zandar

This would have proven nothing of interest, whether it succeeded or failed. The imprinting of language on progeny is hardly unknown.

As a failure, it was a silly waste of time. If it had succeeded, and Klingon had trumped the local native tongue, it would be both child abuse and and a colossal setback for the kid, who would then have to go about assimilating the local dialect without the imprinting his parent should have provided.
- insert
  
  zandar, that’s not entirely true. While yes, we know kids learn any language spoken to them while they’re growing up, this only has happened for natural languages and a couple invented ones that are exceedingly similar grammatically to natural languages, like Esperanto.
  
  Raising kids in an environment where a constructed language is spoken would be a very interesting experiment: it could test whether some constructed languages are unlearnable by kids if they don’t fit into the UG paradigm. I doubt that Klingon doesn’t fit into UG (but, I’m not nerdy enough to know anything about its grammar), but another constructed language like lojban/loglan or a language constructed purposefully to violate UG would allow this type of (cruel) experiment.
  - jaytkay
    
    What is ‘the UG paradigm’?
SamSam

Um, I’d say it strays a little closer to the “child abuse” side of that line.

I’m also interested in the mother (assuming she was part of the family at the time). She went along with this?
- Snig
  
  Agreed. Though it is a great topper for anyone who complains about crazy parents. The kid will probably grow up speaking exclusively Vulcan just to spite him.
- Lobster
  
  Agreed. You’d think a linguist would know better.
the Other michael

Obviously this is a case of child abuse. BECAUSE WE ARE ALL DOMAIN EXPERTS, and thus qualified to render judgment.

Plus, we checked any sense of humor or inquiry at the door.

———

Isn’t this how Berlitz was raised — each parent, plus the nanny (and perhaps others) all speaking a separate language, consistently, throughout his language acquisition years?

quick wiki-search, et viola:

As a child, Charles [Berlitz] was raised in a household in which (by his father’s orders) every relative and servant spoke to Charles in a different language: he reached adolescence speaking eight languages fluently. In adulthood, he recalled having the childhood delusion that every human being spoke a different language, and wondering why he did not have his own language like everyone else in his household. (source)

QED
- Omir the Storyteller
  
  Actually I was thinking it sounded like L. L. Zamenhof, the developer of Esperanto. He grew up speaking four different languages in his native Bialystok, then part of the Russian Empire: Hebrew in the synagogue, Yiddish to family and friends, Polish in the streets and markets, and Russian when dealing with the government (his father was a minor functionary in the Imperial bureaucracy). The linguistic diversity of Bialystok and his observation of the linguistic hurdles people often had to clear led him to conclude that a common, neutral language would help people communicate. We can see what a success Esperanto has been in that regard. :-)
the Other michael

There’s an old joke:

Q: What do you call a person who speaks three languages?
A: Tri-lingual.

Q: What do you call a person who speaks two languages?
A: Bi-lingual.

Q: What do you call a person who speaks one language?
A: A native English-speaker.
- Omir the Storyteller
  
  Oh, I thought the punch line to that was “American.” :-)
Anonymous

If the mother spoke English to the kid, then I imagine it would be no different than raising a kid bilingual. They’ll be a little slower to start talking, but otherwise just fine.

But if it was ONLY Klingon, what a retarded thing to do to a kid. What he’d really prove is that a doctorate in anything just means you’re good at school, not actually smart.
Machineintheghost

Here’s an article from 1999 which says the father was trying “to teach his toddler Alec to be bilingual in English and Klingon,” which, in the context of the article seems half-baked and dumb but not so abusive. It sounds like the kid must have heard as least as much English as Klingon before dad finally gave up.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/7.08/mustread.html?pg=8
Obdurodon

Too bad Dad isn’t doing another “social experiment” in speaking Klingon to his cellmate. It’s not cute, it’s not funny, it’s at best a failure to do the things that he should have been doing as a parent. If he had been totally absent during all that time he was speaking Klingon it would have been no worse. We condemn absentee fathers, don’t we?
Anonymous

d’Armond’s wife spoke English to the child. It wasn’t like he was trying to make it monolingual in Klingon. He was trying to see if he could teach the child to be bilingual in both English and Klingon.

Saying it’s child abuse is like saying that teaching a child English and Japanese is child abuse (if the child lives in the US). Just because a language can’t be used in the current environment doesn’t make the experience any less valuable to the child’s mental development.
- Anonymous
  
  You are correct. And as a father of a three-year old son who is learning both Japanese and English, I agree with you. A bit eccentric and perhaps silly to teach his child a language that only the two of them could communicate in but not child abuse.
  
  As I understand, the best time for a child to retain language is in their preteens. 9, 10, 11, 12. The time to teach basics is from birth, so they get an “ear” for it. But retention-wise, pre-teen ages are the best.
  
  A Japanese lady friend lived with her son in the US at that time and he doesn’t need to bother with English classes now that he is back in Japan at the high school level even though no one speaks English to him on a regular basis.
  
  And also a male friend of mine lived in the US for five years during high school. After he returned to Japan, he rarely spoke English. 20 years on, his English is still great.
  
  That’s not to say everyone has such experiences, but these are mine and my friends’. Take from them what you will.
Machineintheghost

Here’s another old article, which says “Alec knows the English word for [shoe] as well, because Speersâ€™ wife talks to Alec exclusively in English, which the boy also gets in earfuls at the day-care center.”
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=10873
jrhd

How do you say, “douchebag” in Klingon?
Omir the Storyteller

I once learned a little bit of Klingon and it doesn’t seem to me like it would be much more difficult than learning, say, Xhosa or Navajo. The syntax was chosen to be unlike that of most Indo-European languages, the spelling looks strange, and there are sounds that don’t appear in English (like a voiced version of the gutteral “ch”-as-in-”loch”), but it’s not like it completely does away with verbs or can only be spoken in four-part harmony or something.
arkizzle / Moderator

Surely there can’t really be “no lasting effects”. Do we not imprint and learn our fundamental lessons in the first three years?

Even if the kid can’t now speak Klingon or remember those years, there has to be some place in the brain that architected itself to the Klingon input, among the other stimuli he assimilated.
infinity

if i remember this “experiment” correctly, the idea was to test whether developmental linguists’ theories about competing languages are correct.

the theory goes that children, when they are acquiring language, will strongly favor communicating in the “language of most utility.” in other words, if dad speaks klingon and mom and all your friends and all your day care providers speak english, guess what? you’ll speak english.

i tried a related “experiment” by speaking nederlands (dutch) to my son when he was 0 to about two years old, but spoke english to my ex. our day care provider spoke spanish to our son, but english to my ex. and my ex only spoke english to us and to our child.

when our son started speaking, it was predominantly english, despite the fact that he spent the majority of his waking hours with dutch and spanish speakers.
Anonymous

As a native English speaker I would prefer Esperanto rather than Klingon, or imperialist English, as the future global language :)

Communciation should be for everyone, not just for an educational or political elite; that is how English is used at the moment.

Your readers may be interested in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LPVcsL2k0 Dr Kvasnak teaches English at Florida Atlantic University.

A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Alan

If he had been teaching his son only Klingon, then yeah, that’s a problem. However, he was learning English and Klingon, which is just plain silly. Lots of kids learn two languages at once from the very beginning; this isn’t unusual nor harmful. The problems he ran into were a) limited vocabulary and b) a lack other speakers. The child will not maintain interest if no one else speaks the second language, no matter what it is, and especially if that child knows the parent is also bilingual.

I also don’t understand why he felt he needed to do this experiment to see if Klingon would stick. I’ve known a dozen people who have either tried to teach their kids a second language or were kids who had parents try; only one was successful, and that dad was particularly tenacious. Usually, the kid will only speak the society’s dominate language and the parent gives up before the kid’s fifth birthday.
- jackie31337
  
  I’ve known a dozen people who have either tried to teach their kids a second language or were kids who had parents try; only one was successful, and that dad was particularly tenacious. Usually, the kid will only speak the society’s dominate language and the parent gives up before the kid’s fifth birthday.
  
  I think it works better when each parent speaks their native language to the child. I’m a native English speaker living in Finland. When my daughter was younger, I spoke only English to her, and her father (and other caregivers) spoke only Finnish. She is now 6 years old and fully bilingual in English and Finnish. I’ve noticed some subtle effects, like applying Finnish grammar to English, but otherwise she’s right on target for her age in both languages.
  
  One of her friends speaks Spanish, Finnish, and English equally well. She learned Spanish from her mother, Finnish from her father, and English from the parents speaking to each other. They never tried to teach her English, she just learned it through immersion from their conversations. Children (up to a certain stage of development) have an amazing capacity to learn languages.
peterbruells

The article does in now way imply that the kid was only spoken to in Klingoneese.

It’s quite common for parents who have different languages to speak their child in their language – the children are able to divide this mentally into “father language” and “mother language”, as far asI know, and later lose the language they don’t use.
Pantograph

I can forsee a troubled future for the boy, at least he won’t be the first klingon petty criminal.

http://boingboing.net/2009/02/04/masked-man-sticks-up.html
Alan

@jaytkay – “UG” is Universal Grammar, theoretically sort of the innate underlying language grammar all humans have programmed in their brains.

@insert – I believe the Klingon language structure is indeed modeled on certain Native American languages, so probably fits into UG just fine.
Brainspore

The nation’s Navajo speakers are disappointed.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29426
Repurposed

Being raised bilingual (English/Cantonese), I eventually settled on a primary language which quickly became the language in which I thought in. So yeah, I’d be highly resentful if the language that shaped my early thoughts was from a fictional culture. It may not be strictly abuse, but it’s a huge betrayal of trust and ‘for science’ wouldn’t really cut it as a rationale.
Anonymous

Weird, quirky and odd? yes… but child abuse? No. Long lasting affects?? huh?

If your parents only spoke Spanish or another language, is that child abuse? How about America Indian tribes who teach their lost language to their kids? Is that abuse?

You folks seem think so. Perhaps if you removed the words “social experiment” from the description, and named it, “father teaches son klingon” you all wouldn’t have a problem with it…
Anonymous

I’ve met a few native speakers of Esperanto, and all seemed well-bsalanced individuals. In all cases one parent spoke Esperanto while the other spoke the local language.

But Klingon?
ameta4

Good way to toughen him up.
Similar to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1BJfDvSITY
Gloria

Hm. I’d say that most parents are conducting social experiments when they’re teaching their children; many parents I know try to what they perceive as best for their children, which sometimes means contradicting their own beliefs.

What about parents who reside in Anglo-speaking countries but refuse to speak English to their children? The article only mentions the father; I’m betting the mother, if there’s one, was probably speaking regular ol’ English.

What about parents who make their children attend language schools from a young age? A huge number of people I talk to who went to French immersion school in Toronto *hated* it because they felt isolated if they couldn’t pick up the language quickly enough. And at young ages, isolation is really hard. That’s more like abuse.
VagabondAstronomer

I was raised speaking Appalachian, and near as I can tell, it hain’t ‘fected me none.
Seriously, given the power of language over mental imagery, I’d be interested to see how this affects the child developmentally.
nutbastard

holy jesus christ on a stick, boingers – is there anything outside of PC parenting that you all don’t immediately label as “abuse”???

i’ve said it before – calling things abuse that really aren’t is a huge disservice to those who suffer ACTUAL abuse.

what this guy did was strange, quirky, uncommon – a whole litany of words could be used to describe such an endeavor. but ‘abuse’ is not one of those words.

is it child abuse when mexican families come over to california, and raise children in a household that only speaks spanish? absolutely not. is it a disadvantage to the child? absolutely yes.

funny how all the preachy tolerance-talk becomes inverted when the culture at hand is a fictional one, as if that makes it any less ‘valid’ – different is different is different. you’re either cool with diversity or you aren’t.
- arkizzle / Moderator
  
  Klingon =/= Spanish
  
  Klingon (if it was actually the kid’s initial language, it sounds less like it now) is far beyond a “disadvantage”. Repurposed (above you) makes a pretty good point.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  There is no honor in using a child as a science experiment. Particularly since the child will inherit his father’s dishonor.
Anonymous

@Omir – there are a lot of “phlegm”-type “ch” sounds in Hebrew, and I think in Yiddish too.
- Omir the Storyteller
  
  What I meant wasn’t the “kh” sound itself, like in “l’chaim” or “chutzpah,” but a voiced version of that sound that has the same relation to “kh” as “z”
  has to “s.” I’m sure there are natural languages that include that sound, but it seems like the only language that references it that I can remember at the moment is the Black Speech from Lord Of The Rings.
the Other michael

@Omir — well, possibly. But I first heard it as “An Englishman!”

I figured “native English-speaker” probably covered both countries, and cast aspersions on the Aussies, as well.
Anonymous

I met Mr. Speers about a month ago and it seems that he didn’t give up after his first experiment didn’t pan out. He now has a cloned dog (http://www.mydogkahless.net/Kahless/Clone.html) that responds to commands only in Klingon. He’s a bizarre guy but hardly an abusive father.
Anonymous

Assuming that everybody in this comment thread who did not explicitly state they were raised at least bilingually is actually monolingual, an astonishing number of people knows an astonishing amount of stuff about how kids turn out who learn languages that are of little utility.

(Somebody who learned a comparatively little-used language first, and now speaks more or less six, and whose most interesting friends all grew up in places that do not use their respective mother tongues)
gluther

MIT Linguist and polyglot Ken Hale spoke Walpiri, which probably has fewer speakers in the US than Klingon, to his kids while they were growing up. They turned out fine (with one son delivering Hale’s eulogy in Walpiri).

Kids are smart, they figure out which parent speaks which language and learn the languages they’re exposed to from their community and schools, etc.. (usually the dominant one of their community, case in point with AAVE/Ebonics or Hispanic dialects of American English). They’re aren’t confused or damaged in any way if they’re exposed to multiple languages growing up.
thnidu

The description of the “Esperanto experiment” is inaccurate — or at least incomplete. I don’t know of any actual experiment, but I do know of this real-life pattern:

1. A number of couples have met through the Esperanto movement, where the two are from different countries and neither speaks the other’s language, and Esperanto is their only or major common language. Not too unlike, say, a Tamil-speaker and a Bengali-speaker who speak together in Hindi or English.

2. Typically one moves to the other’s country, or they move to a third country, but they continue to speak Esperanto together because they communicate best in it. This is not artificial or experimental, it is natural. Think of that Indian couple moving to France or Germany, or settling in Bengal or Tamil Nadu.

3. The child always learns the language of the region where the family lives, which is often one parent’s language. Likewise natural.

4. The child is also exposed to the parents’ common language (in this case Esperanto) because they speak it to each other and quite possibly to the child as well. If one parent doesn’t learn the other’s language or the local language well enough soon enough, the common language is the ONLY way they can all converse as a family.

The result is a bi- or multilingual child, natively fluent in the local language, the parents’ common language, and possibly one or both parents’ native languages as well. This process must be nearly as old as human language.

Anonymous at #43 wrote

Some people in the 60′s tried to teach their kids esperanto as their native language. Its a pretty keystone piece of modern linguistics to note that the children did not learn esperanto. They learned a language similar, but not identical to esperanto.
Since esperanto is an artificial language (like klingon), its thought that this shows that there is an innate grammar we are not consciously aware of, but that babies brains use to learn new languages. This grammar is universal across all natural languages, but not present in artificial ones.

Citations, please? You’re talking about creolization here; it’s no news that first-generation native speakers of ANY language have a better and more “natural” mental model of it than their parents who learned it as adults. And I think you massively misunderstand the concept of a mental “universal grammar”.
Anonymous

It actually wouldn’t really work. Some people in the 60′s tried to teach their kids esperanto as their native language. Its a pretty keystone piece of modern linguistics to note that the children did not learn esperanto. They learned a language similar, but not identical to esperanto.

Since esperanto is an artificial language (like klingon), its thought that this shows that there is an innate grammar we are not consciously aware of, but that babies brains use to learn new languages. This grammar is universal across all natural languages, but not present in artificial ones.
kyderdog

>How do you say, “douchebag” in Klingon?
Kirk
Anonymous

There is a lasting effect of enlarged Broca’s region from having two cradle tongues. This is generally considered beneficial, except in the USA. The Herzl experiment was in the end fabulously successful, and as noted for esperanto, resulted in a slightly different language from the seed training. This leads to the theory that only the second generation gets the “real” benefit.
octopod

hmm, guess he had to drop the kid-in-the-balloon plan to get attention.
Anonymous

I seem to be coming to this thread late, but I seem to recall reading (sorry, I’ve long since forgotten where) that there were two problems that effectively aborted the experiment:

1. Klingon, being an artificial language created for the fictional Star Trek universe, has lots of words for concepts like “disruptor” and “warp drive”, but not so many for more mundane things like “shoe” or “toy”.

2. The kid eventually refused to continue any further,
because he could only speak Klingon with his father.
Anonymous

So the child is now a teenager but doesn’t speak a word of Klingon, which isn’t a bad thing.. However, I am curious to know if the teenager speaks any other languages, or is now a musician.

I read somewhere once that children who become bi-lingual in early stages of life find it much easier to learn more languages & generally show more musical talent (ie/ able to read music & are better able to identify scales).