Klingon Language - Phonology

Phonology

Klingon has been developed with a phonology that, while based on human natural languages, is intended to sound alien to human language. When initially developed, Paramount Pictures (owners of the Star Trek franchise) wanted the Klingon language to be guttural and harsh and Okrand wanted it to be unusual, so he selected sounds that combined in ways not generally found in other languages. The effect is mainly achieved by the use of a number of retroflex and uvular consonants in the language's inventory. Klingon has twenty-one consonants and five vowels. Klingon is normally written in a variant of the Latin alphabet (see below). In this orthography, upper and lower case letters are not interchangeable (uppercase letters mostly represent sounds different from those expected by English speakers). In the discussion below, standard Klingon orthography appears in , and the phonemic transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet is written between /slashes/.