Marc Okrand Marc Okrand is the creator of the Klingon language . He was hired by Paramount Pictures to develop 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 , Star Trek VI : The Undiscovered Country and Star Trek : The Next Generation . 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 Dictionary 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 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 . The tlh sound that he incorporated into Klingon , unusual to English speakers with the accents of North America and Oceania , is common in North and Central American indigenous languages , in which it is usually transcribed as tl or tł ( a voiceless alveolar affricate with lateral release ) ; this is the sound at the end of Nahua tl as the Aztecs pronounced it themselves . To English speakers of most other accents it is the final consonant sound in the word kettle . 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 . Categories : American linguists | Star Trek | University of California , Santa Cruz alumni | Living people In other languages : Deutsch | Español | Esperanto | Italiano | Polski | Svenska 