Marc Okrand

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Marc Okrand after a talk in Leipzig

Marc Okrand (pronounced /mɑrk ˈoʊkrænd/) is the creator of the Klingon language. He was hired by Paramount Pictures to develop the language and coach the actors on Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His first work was dubbing in Vulcan language dialogue for The Wrath of Khan, since the actors had already been filmed talking in English.

Marc Okrand is most famous as the author of The Klingon Dictionary and all its addenda.

Okrand previously worked with Native American languages. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1972. His 1977 doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Berkeley, was on the grammar of Mutsun, a dialect of Ohlone (a.k.a. Southern Costanoan), which is an extinct Utian language formerly spoken in the north central Californian coastal areas from Northern Costanoan down to 30 miles south of Salinas. The tlh sound that he incorporated into Klingon, unusual to English speakers with the accents of North America and Oceania, is common in North and Central American indigenous languages, in which it is usually transcribed as tl, tł or ƛ (a voiceless alveolar affricate with lateral release); this is the sound at the end of Nahuatl. To English speakers of most other accents it is the final consonant sound in the word kettle.

Okrand taught undergraduate linguistics courses at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1975 to 1978.

More recently, Okrand created the Atlantean language for the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire.

Okrand currently serves as one of the directors for Live Captioning at the National Captioning Institute and as President of the board of directors of the Washington Shakespeare Company in Arlington, Virginia.