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5 Star Trek Episodes Every Conlanger Should Watch

Unlike Tolkien, Gene Roddenberry didn’t set out to write languages when he created the Star Trek universe. In fact, it was linguist Marc Okrand, not Roddenberry, who did most of the heavy lifting for the best-known Trek conlangs, Vulcan and Klingon, both of which made their on-screen debuts more than a decade after the original Star Trek series was already off the air (Vulcan in 1982’s Wrath of Khan and Klingon in 1984’s The Search For Spock).

While these are the only two official, fleshed-out conlangs in the Star Trek universe, it’s become a fertile breeding ground for linguistic experiments and creations. Snippets of Ferengi, Bajoran, Romulan, and some two dozen other languages have made appearances in Star Trek episodes in either spoken or written form, making the universe a great one for aspiring conlangers to study.

For those who aren’t well-versed in the vast and growing Star Trek universe—or those looking to undertake a more targeted re-watch for conlang research purposes—here are five must-watch episodes for anyone who’s interested in writing their own languages. 

1.  Darmok (The Next Generation season 5 episode 2)

The favorite Star Trek episode of linguistic nerds across generations, “Darmok” sees Captain Picard on a mission to establish communications with the Children of Tama, a people whose language is notoriously difficult to translate. The reason, as he learns in the episode, is that they speak entirely in metaphor and historical references; presumably the universal translators work to make the words sound like English but their meaning remains obscure for those who lack Tamarian cultural context. 

Language and culture are always inextricably linked, and “Darmok” is a thought experiment taking that to the extreme. Along with the joy of watching Picard unlock the Tamarian language, what I love about this episode is how it encourages you to think about language, and how words and phrases gain their meaning for the people who use them to communicate.

2. Rosetta and Species Ten-C (Discovery season 4 episodes 11 and 12)

The major plot device in season 4 of Discovery centers on what becomes known as the DMA, a bigger, more unpredictable version of the old gravitational anomaly that’s provided the inciting action for many a Star Trek plot. By the end of season 4, Discovery’s crew has tracked the origins of the DMA to a culture outside the galaxy, and that’s where the linguistic fun starts. In “Rosetta”, Burnham and company explore a dead planet once occupied by the extra-galactic Species Ten-C, gathering data they can use to communicate with them, a mission they accomplish in the following episode. 

Like “Darmok”, these episodes are fascinating because of the way they approach the idea of communication. Speech isn’t the only way to do it; for Species Ten-C, their language is based on sequences of light and pheromones that combine to create meanings, a communication style the species of the Federation need to build from scratch in a hurry to save Earth from the DMA. This is a great episode to open conlangers’ minds to other options for their creations, and other senses non-humanoid species might use to communicate.

3. Acquisition (Enterprise season 1 episode 19)

You won’t see Enterprise episodes on the majority of Star Trek best-of lists (and, admittedly, with good reason). But while the show overall earns its dubious reputation in the community, it does have its gems, and “Acquisition” is one that’s worth a watch. In it, the Enterprise NX-01 has humanity’s second encounter with the Ferengi (we’ll get to their first in a minute) when a raiding party boards the ship. Uncouth engineer Trip Tucker was in decontamination at the time, leaving him unaffected by the knock-out gas the Ferengi pumped through the ship and free to save the day in his skivvies through a series of hijinks. 

The most fun thing about “Acquisition” is the fact that, since the Ferengi are an unknown species, their language isn’t yet in Federation databases. This means no translation for their dialogue, a fun thing to watch for anyone interested in conlangs. 

4. Little Green Men (Deep Space Nine season 4 episode 8)

Who doesn’t love a good time travel episode? Every Star Trek crew takes at least one jaunt back to Earth’s past but DS9’s is arguably the best. It explains that the Roswell UFO was actually a Ferengi trading ship piloted by none other than Quark and Rom, sent back to 1940s Earth through a very Star Trek-ey series of events involving sabotage and warp plasma and an unstable macguffin of a material called kemocite. 

The linguistic fun starts once Quark and his crew are recovered by scientists. Their universal translators were damaged in the crash, leaving them unable to communicate with the humans, and giving the viewer both Ferengi language dialogue and some nice lost-in-translation-style jokes. It’s one of the best uses of a conlang in Star Trek, in my opinion, because it’s not only smooth and entertaining but also integral to the plot. That makes this episode a good example of the ways conlangs can be used for more than just worldbuilding color, in this case both as a source of humor and to drive the narrative. 

5. 11001001 (The Next Generation, season 1 episode 15)

This episode might seem like a bit of an outlier on the list. After all, nary a conlang is spoken, not even a throwaway qapla’. What this episode does have are the Bynars, cybernetically enhanced humanoids that share a computer brain on Bynaus, living and working in linked pairs. Because of their interconnection with technology, their thought patterns have taken on the attributes of binary code, and while they have a native language—spoken at a high frequency unintelligible to human ears—they often take the more efficient route of just transmitting information telepathically straight to their partner’s head. 

In the Bynar, Star Trek takes familiar elements—hive minds, human-machine hybrids, telepathic communication—and blends them in a new way. Like other species mentioned above, their means of communication is bizarre to humans, but fits logically with how they’ve developed as a species. The episode is a great study in how alien communication can build mystery and drive narrative action, as well as a fun thought experiment in how communication might evolve in a cybernetically-enhanced civilization.

 Star Trek is a goldmine of inspiration for a conlanger, and if these five are my personal favorites there are plenty others that play with language in fun ways. Here are some lists of episodes that may be of interest to fellow language nerds:

 

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