Klingon in Academia

Below is a list of various academic papers written on the Klingon language and/or its community of Klingon speakers here on Earth.

This attempt to collect these articles in one place, is in no way complete, and there are probably many more articles to be found out there. If you’ve spotted paper in the wild that we’ve failed to include below, please send us a message.

• 1996 • 1999 • 2004 • 2009 • 2010 • 2011 • 2017

Date	Title/Info
1996-04	Klingon Questionnaire (HTML) • Survey by Stefan Annernäs (no known academic affiliation)      This is an early investigation into the Klingon speaking community, and though it is not tied to any university or other academic institution it has been included here because it has been cited in later works.
1996-04-19	Is Klingon an Ohlonean Language? – A Comparison of Mutsun and Klingon (PDF) •  Dick Grune (Vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands)      Marc Okrand’s 1977 PhD thesis was a grammar of the native Californian language Mutsun, and this paper sets out to compare Mutsun and Klingon and establish to what degree Marc Okrand took inspiration from Mutsun in his work on Klingon.
1999	Klingon and Its Users: A Sociolinguistic Profile (PDF) • Master’s thesis in Language and culture studies by Judith Hermans (Tilburg University, Netherlands)      An additional survey of the community of Klingon speakers, expanding on Annernäs.
2004	Klingon as Linguistic Capital: A Sociologic Study of Nineteen Advanced Klingonists (PDF) • Bachelor’s thesis in Sociology by Yens Wahlgren (Lund University, Sweden)      Klingon title: Hol Sup ’oH tlhI­ngan Hol­’e’: wa’­maH Hut tlhI­ngan Hol po’­wI’ nugh­QeD. This thesis is based on interviews with nineteen advanced speakers of Klingon (including Marc Okrand, inventor of the Klingon language, and Lawrence Schoen, founder of the Klingon Language Institute).
2009	Question Formation in Klingon (PDF) • Academic paper by Alex Dzurick (University of Missouri, USA)      A description of how to construct various types of questions in Klingon.
2010	Machine Translation of Klingon (PDF) • Academic paper by Tracy Canfield (Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA)      A qualifying paper written as a part of a PhD program. This paper presents a machine translation architecture for translating Klingon into English. The system itself was created using PC-PATR, ExpandLex and SyntacticTransfer, as well as custom code.
2011	Wild and Whirling Words: The Invention and Use of Klingon (PDF) • Book chapter in From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (ed. Michael Adams, 2011) by Marc Okrand, Michael Adams, Judith Hendriks-Hermans, and Sjaak Kroon      An overview of the development and use of the Klingon language.
2017	Can Unnatural Stress Patterns Be Learned: New Evidence from Klingon (PDF) • Academic paper by Joseph W. Windsor (University of Calgary, Canada) and Robyn Stewart (Klingon Language Institute)      This article investigates the to what degree advanced Klingon speakers apply the stress patterns described by The Klingon Dictionary. The article was published in Proceedings of the 2017 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association (ed. Andrew Monti)