[log in to unmask] wrote:
> I wonder if Klingon is defined as a living language and how many people
> speak it.

Living?  No, sorry.  First, its speaker base is too small and diffuse.
 More importantly, the skilled Klingonists have a "gentleman's
agreement" not to create new words or usages.  The fantasy is that
Klingon is a real language with real native speakers, and those who
study it here are just *learning* it, not making it.

Depending on how generously you define "speak Klingon", you could
probably come up with numbers anywhere from a dozen to tens of
thousands.  I'd have to say that there are more people than I can
count on my fingers who I consider reasonably fluent in Klingon, but I
could probably account for them all if I took off my socks.  There are
almost certainly several hundred people who can take well-written
Klingon and produce an accurate English translation without too much
effort, and probably a thousand or more who could at least get the
gist of what it said.

"Wayne R. Boyer" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I'm still wondering if it has a character set defined in Unicode.  Just about
> everything else that purports to be (or have been) a language does.

Klingon was among the first "Constructed Scripts" to be assigned a
block in the Unicode Private Use Area.  See
http://www.evertype.com/standards/csur/index.html for details.

Ken Hirsch <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> It was proposed
> http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n1643/n1643.htm
> but it was rejected
> http://www.unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html

The rejection was not because it was a constructed or fantasy script,
by the way.  It was because nobody who might use the Klingon "pIqaD"
script actually did, so it failed a basic test of Unicode
reasonableness.

This is arguably a chicken-and-egg situation, in that it would be a
whole lot easier to use it if it were actually available for use, but
that argument was not made to the relevant committees.

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