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Fantastic and fictive languages
"You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon."
From "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country"
Take a few talented Trekkies with too much time on their hands and what do you get? Klingonian translations of the Bible, the "Book of Mormon," "Hamlet," "Much Ado About Nothing," "Harry Potter" and the "Cat in the Hat"—not to mention the lyrics to "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," "Kum Ba Yah," and the theme song to "Gilligan's Island." The bumpy-headed aliens from Star Trek even have their own language institute (http://www.kli.org/). The Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language) provides a lengthy entry on the Klingon language, and the Klingon Imperial Diplomatic Corps (http://www.klingon.org/menu.html) is dedicated to the fostering and promotion of Klingon culture and society here on Earth.
While Klingon may be the most well-known imaginary language, it is only one of more than 200 such languages listed in the "Encyclopedia of Fictional & Fantastic Languages" (Lockwood, Call #: Ref P120 I53 C66). One of the more familiar constructed languages is the elfish/dwarfish tongues created by J.R.R. Tolkien for "The Lord of the Rings" (http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/guides/tolkien.html). Anthony Burgess created a language for the droogs in his "A Clockwork Orange" (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Academy/1974/nadsat.html) and characters in J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series spout charms and spells in a fictional naming language (http://www.langmaker.com/db/Harry_Potter_Magic_Language).
Dinosaurs appear to have been more intelligent beings than scientists have led us to believe. The dinosaurs of "Dinotopia" (http://www.dinotopia.com/) have their own languages, and the language spoken by humans in this utopian world is a kind of fictional Esperanto. In Harry Harrison's "West of Eden" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden," dinosaurs speak the sophisticated languages of Marbak and Yilane, and the dinosaurs that inhabit Robert J. Sawyer's novel "Foreigner" converse in the Quintaglio dialect.
Richard Adams in "Watership Down" has his rabbits speaking Lapine (http://www.langmaker.com/featured/lapine.htm); the various breeds of canine in Lewis Carroll's "Sylvie and Bruno" (http://manybooks.net/titles/carrollletext96sbrun10.html) bark in Doggee; "The Princess Hoppy" by the French mathematician Jacques Roubaud contains talking camels, dogs and hedgehogs, as well as a silent language know as Posterior Duck; and Gulliver in Jonathan Swift's satire (http://www.jaffebros.com/lee/gulliver/index.html) is taught Lilliputian and is exposed as well to the languages of Brobdingnagian, Houyhnhnm and Luggnagg.
If you want to make your own fictional language, check out the Language Construction Kit (http://www.zompist.com/kit.html). Mark Rosenfelder, the site's creator, states that his set of Web pages "is intended for anyone who wants to create artificial languages—for a fantasy or an alien world, as a hobby, as an interlanguage. It presents linguistically sound methods for creating naturalistic languages that can be reversed to create non-naturalistic languages. It suggests further reading for those who want to know more and shortcuts for those who want to know less."
Now all this talk of imaginary languages may seem harmless enough, but remember, if you ever find yourself face-to-face with a Klingon, make sure you never utter the phrase "Hab SoSlI' Quch" (your mother has a smooth forehead). If you do, it may cost you your life.
—Don Hartman, University Libraries