Dad Spoke Only Klingon to Child for Three Years

Minnesota linguist d’Armond Speers has a doctorate in computational linguistics. He says he isn’t much of a Star Trek fan. But he spent the first three years of his son’s life speaking to him only in Klingon!

“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”

So when Ultralingua, a dictionary, translation and grammar software company in Dinkytown, honored requests from customers to create applications for a Klingon dictionary, they turned to Speers, a self-employed software consultant.

Speers helped develop a digital dictionary in Klingon for Mac, Windows, and iPhone for the software company Ultralingua. Speer’s son is now 15 years old and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon. If he had stuck with it, we’d have at least one bona-fide code talker for the CIA!

[via Digg]