Klingon is the (fake) language of the alien race of the same name in Star Trek. Many self-proclaimed geeks consider knowing the language an essential for those who want to earn the status of a true, full-fledged geek. It's used at conventions routinely, but rarely in every day life. It's strange, then, that one man, d'Armond Speers, decided to speak to his newborn son only in Klingon for the first three years of the son's life.
It was challenging for Speers to do this, as there are many things that the invented language simply doesn't have words for. Speaking to a baby without the use of words such as "diaper" and "bottle" is no easy task. Speers would use workarounds for this, using "thing which is flat" for table, for example.
His wife spoke English to the son as normal, and the son rarely spoke back in Klingon, though when he did his pronunciation was great, according to Speers.
A guy who spoke only Klingon to his son for three years must be a Star Trek fanatic, right? Not according to the man himself. "I don't go to 'Star Trek' conventions; I don't wear the fake forehead... I'm a linguist," he said in an interview with Wired.
He claims that the reason he did this was to better understand how children learn languages. "I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language."
So did it work? "He was definitely starting to learn it," says Speers, but he eventually had to stop. "[My son] stopped listening to me when I spoke in Klingon... it was clear that he didn't enjoy it, and I didn't want to make it into a problem."
