Klingon phonology

Klingon has been developed with a phonology that, while based on human natural languages, is intended to sound alien to human ears. 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 $\langleangle brackets\rangle$, and the phonemic transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet is written between /slashes/.

Consonants
The inventory of consonants in Klingon is spread over a number of places of articulation. In spite of this, the inventory has many gaps: Klingon has no velar plosives, and only one sibilant fricative. Deliberately, this arrangement is quite bizarre by the standards of human languages. The combination of an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive and a voiced retroflex plosive  is particularly unusual.

There are a few dialectal pronunciation differences (it is not known if the aforementioned non-canon Kumburan or Rumaiy dialects of   hinted at in the third Trek movie might differ):

In the Krotmag dialect In the Tak'ev dialect: In the Morskan dialect
 * /b/ is replaced by /m/
 * /ɖ/ is replaced by /ɳ/
 * /b/ becomes /mb/
 * /ɖ/ becomes /ɳɖ/
 * is replaced by
 * /x/ is replaced by /h/ at the beginning of syllables, or is dropped at the end of syllables
 * is replaced by /x/.

Vowels
In contrast to its consonants, Klingon's inventory of vowels is simple, and similar to those of many human languages, such as Spanish. There are five vowels spaced more or less evenly around the vowel space, with two back rounded vowels, one back unrounded vowel, and two front or near-front unrounded vowels. The vowel inventory is asymmetrical in that the back rounded vowels are tense and the front vowels are lax.

The two front vowels, $\langle \rangle$ and $\langle \rangle$, represent sounds that are found in English, but are more open and lax than a typical English speaker might assume when reading Klingon text written in the Latin alphabet, thus causing the consonants of a word to be more prominent. This enhances the sense that Klingon is a clipped and harsh-sounding language.


 * Vowels
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – open back unrounded vowel (in English spa)
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – open back rounded vowel
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – near-open front unrounded vowel
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – open front unrounded vowel
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – open-mid front unrounded vowel (in English bed)
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – close-mid front unrounded vowel
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – near-close near-front unrounded vowel (in English bit)
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – close-mid back rounded vowel (in French eau)
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – open-mid back unrounded vowel (in French eau)
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – close back rounded vowel (in Spanish tu)
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – near-close near-back rounded vowel
 * $\langle \rangle$ – – close front unrounded vowel

Diphthongs can be analyzed phonetically as the combination of the five vowels plus one of the two semivowels and  (represented by $\langle \rangle$ and $\langle \rangle$, respectively). Thus, the combinations $\langle \rangle$, $\langle \rangle$, $\langle \rangle$, $\langle \rangle$, $\langle \rangle$, $\langle \rangle$, $\langle \rangle$ and $\langle \rangle$ are possible. There are no words in the Klingon language that contain *$\langle \rangle$ or *$\langle \rangle$.

Syllable structure
Klingon follows a strict syllable structure. A syllable must start with a consonant (which includes the glottal stop) followed by one vowel. In prefixes and other rare syllables, this is enough. More commonly, this consonant-vowel pair is followed by one consonant or one of three biconsonantal codas: /-  -  - /. Thus,   "record",   "poison" and   "targ" (a type of animal) are all legal syllable forms, but *  and *  are not. Despite this, one suffix takes the shape vowel+consonant: the endearment suffix.

Stress
In verbs, the stressed syllable is usually the verbal stem itself, as opposed to a prefix or any suffixes, except when a suffix ending with  is separated from the verb by at least one other suffix, in which case the suffix ending in   is also stressed. In addition, stress may shift to a suffix that is meant to be emphasized.

In nouns, the final syllable of the stem (the noun itself, excluding any affixes) is stressed. If any syllables ending in  are present, the stress shifts to those syllables.

The stress in other words seems to be variable, but this is not a serious issue because most of these words are only one syllable in length. There are some words which should fall under the rules above, but do not, although using the standard rules would still be acceptable.