People actually DO speak Klingon!

I don't know that much about Star Trek but I do recognize a Klingon when I see one. The first time I heard about them was on The Colbert Report a year and a half ago (don't try to skip over any of it, the clip is funny as hell):

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Well, today when I was surfing Slate.com, I ran across this article. Marc Okrand, a linguist whose dissertation was a grammar of a now-extinct Native American language, invented the Klingon language and has even sold 250,000 copies of his Klingon dictionary. Okrand was hired by the producer of Star Trek II to write dialogue in Vulcan (another species on the show, the one to which Spock belongs) between two characters. Two years later he was hired again for Star Trek III, this time to write some scenes in Klingon.

He needed to make the language sound tough and macho, matching the demeanor of the warrior race. So the linguist combined Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit, and Yiddish to make the Klingon language incorporate all of those back-of-the-throat noises. And the language structure works like a mix of Japanese, Turkish, and Mohawk, but way more complex. In Spanish, there are 5 or 6 (depending on the country) conjugations of a verb, which all use suffixes. In Klingon, there are 29 and they all use prefixes. They indicate the person and the number of the subject, and the object.

To confuse matters further, Klingon also has 36 verb suffixes and 29 noun suffixes that reveal everything from the desire of the speaker to do something, to possession, to negation, and to other meaningless things that will only stress you out if you want your structure to be 100% accurate. Here is the Klingon word (not a phrase) for They are apparently unable to cause us to prepare to resume honorable suicide (in progress).

nuHegh'eghrupqa'moHlaHbe'law'lI'neS

There are about 20 or 30 people who can speak this language in an unscripted and casual conversation, and perhaps a few hundred who can read and write Klingon. So instead of learning, say, Spanish, which is becoming almost a second must-know language in the U.S., they would much rather prefer a fake and damn near impossible-to-learn language that they will never use and will only get them made fun of. But as long as they stay in their parents' basements then it's OK.

Extra: There is no Klingon word for hello; the closest is a translation for What do you want? This is because the Klingon race is so manly and laden with testosterone that they can never display any sort of perceived softness, even in the case of saying hello.