Marc Okrand (; born July 3, 1948) is an American linguist. His professional work is in Native American languages, and he is well known as the creator of the Klingon language in the Star Trek science fiction franchise.

Career

As a linguist, Okrand worked with Native American languages. He earned a bachelor's degree in linguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1970. His 1977 doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Berkeley, was on the grammar of Mutsun, an extinct Ohlone language formerly spoken in the coastal areas of north-central California. His dissertation was supervised by pioneering linguist Mary Haas. From 1975 to 1978, he taught undergraduate linguistics courses at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before taking a post-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., in 1978.

After that, Okrand took a job at the National Captioning Institute, where he worked on the first closed-captioning system for hearing-impaired television viewers. Until his retirement in 2013, Okrand served as one of the directors for Live Captioning at the National Captioning Institute and as President of the board of directors of WSC Avant Bard (formerly the Washington Shakespeare Company) in Arlington County, Virginia, which planned to stage "an evening of Shakespeare in Klingon" in 2010.

Star Trek

While coordinating closed captioning for the Oscars award show in 1982, Okrand met the producer for the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He was also involved in Star Trek Into Darkness, but only during post-production.

In 2018 he developed several sentences for the language of the Kelpien race in the second season of Star Trek: Discovery (first appearing in the third Short Treks episode "The Brightest Star").

Atlantis: The Lost Empire

In 2001, Okrand created the Atlantean language for the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire. He was also used as an early facial model for the protagonist's character design.

Notes

References

  • Interview with Marc Okrand in the Wall Street Journal