Marc Okrand (/ˈmɑːrk ˈoʊkrænd/; born July 3, 1948) is an American linguist, well known as the creator of the Klingon language.

Biography

Linguistics

Okrand worked with Native American languages. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1970. 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 (his dissertation was supervised by pioneering linguist Mary Haas). He taught undergraduate linguistics courses at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1975 to 1978, before taking a post doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., in 1978.

After that, Okrand took a job at the National Captioning Institute, where he worked on the first closed-captioning system for hearing impaired television viewers. Until his retirement in 2013, Okrand served as one of the directors for Live Captioning at the National Captioning Institute and as President of the board of directors of WSC Avant Bard (formerly the Washington Shakespeare Company) in Arlington, Virginia. The WSC planned to stage "an evening of Shakespeare in Klingon" in 2010.