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Marc Okrand is the inventor of the Klingon language. He was hired by Paramount Pictures to invent 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 and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. 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 dictionary of the Klingon language and all its addenda.
Okrand previously worked with Native American languages. His 1977 doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Berkeley, was on the grammar of Mutsun, a language of the central Californian coastal area. The unusual tlh sound that he incorporated into Klingon is common in North and Central American indigenous languages, in which it is usually transcribed as tl; this is the sound at the end of Nahuatl as the Aztecs pronounced it themselves.
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 the Director for Live Captioning at the National Captioning Institute.
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