Teaching Baby to Speak Klingon: nuqjatlh?

A scribe in Dinkytown unearthed this unearthly parenting technique: speaking to your child only in Klingon. For the first three years of life.

Some might see this as some kind of child abuse. At best, it’s sucking up valuable brain space for a language that you can only actually use to communicate during ComiCon. But as someone trying to raise my kid bilingual too (with the rather more commonplace Spanish), let me offer a few points of defense.

1. It’s only fair. The little ones are constantly bombarding us with gibberish. Why can’t adults serve up some of their own? Nico spent all week demanding “gooskh” from me, getting angrier each time I offered him something that clearly wasn’t whatever he thinks “gooskh” is. A synthetic, guttural nerd-tongue may actually be the only appropriate response.
2. You don’t need lots of words. According to the  interwebs, there are only 2,000 words in the Klingon language. A pittance by natural language standards, but way more than you need to communicate with a small child. I don’t know if diaper is among the 2,000 words, but “be’joy'” is, and it means “ritualized torture by women.” So succinct!
3. You don’t need many speakers. I once spent a summer in a tiny land far away where people said things like “sveiki” and “paldies” as if those words actually meant something. Yes, it was Latvia, and even though Latvian is an obscure language with few linguistic relatives and not that many speakers, it never occurred to anyone (besides me) that it might be a bad idea to teach it to children.
4. Raising bilingual kids doesn’t work anyway. Unless, that is, both parents are totally fluent. That’s my opinion, anyhow, after having quizzed Dalia gently on her spoken Spanish last weekend. We are both non-native speakers (hell, I’m a non-ethnic speaker), but we’ve been somewhat diligent, just like this Dinkytown dad, in trying to teach her Spanish over the last 3.5 years. She is part-Mexican, after all. But what did we get for our trouble? Over the course of five minutes, she answered every question in Spanish by repeating “boca! boca!” as if deranged. Or — as may very well be the case — as if she actually doesn’t speak Spanish.