For those of you who have managed to live blissfully unaware of the cultural enigma spawned by Star Trek, Klingon is the language spoken by the rib-headed species on the television show, as well as at least a few trekkies themselves, and, apparently, d’Armond Speers—though he insists he is neither.
“I don’t go to ‘Star Trek’ conventions, I don’t wear the fake forehead,” the father told the Minnesota Daily. “I’m a linguist.”
So what, as a linguist, was he expecting to get out of the experiment?
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language…He was definitely starting to learn it.”
Still, there was trouble with the enterprise.
"I had a tremendously hard time talking to him about everyday things," Speers told Wired magazine in 1999. Apparently, at just 2,000 words, Klingon skipped some pretty vital ones for a toddler—bottle, diaper—you get the idea.Fortunately, Speers’ wife continued to talk to the kid in English, presumably so he could speak to other humans.
In terms of language long-term acquisition, the experiment was a failure. Now 15-years-old and in high school, Speers' son does not speak a word of Klingon.
Now, as parents, we all know we've run our own "experiments" on our kids--perhaps not as elaborate as communicating only in Klingon for three years, but sometimes just as misguided. I'm thinking of the friend of mine who thought he could peak his daughter's competitive drive in sports by repeatedly keeping the ball she wanted just out of reach (she was two), or another friend that insisted her son's palate would be forever sophisticated due to an early exposure to snails, caviar and sriracha (he was five at the time and eats only white food now that he's seven). What's the silliest thing you've ever tried to get your kid interested in?