He wondered if the boy would acquire the created Klingon language as easily as any normal one.
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language.”
Don’t worry too much, Speers is a computational linguist.
Speers was hoping his son’s first word would be ‘vav’, Klingon for dad, but it ended up being the Klingon word for vessel. Back then the language lacked many words and the closest thing for bottle was ‘vessel’ so that is what he used.
He would also sing the Klingon Imperial Anthem to Alec as a lullaby, a song that Alec picked up later and sang himself.
taHjaj wo’ ’ej taHjaj voDLeHma’ (May the empire endure, and may our emperor endure.)
wItoy’mo’ vaj nuquvmoHjaj ta’ (We serve him, so that he may honor us.)
Dun wo’maj ’ej Qochchugh vay’ (Our empire is wonderful, and if anyone disagrees,)
vaj DaSmeymaj bIngDaq chaH DIbeQmoHchu’ jay’! (We will crush them beneath our boots!)
Eventually when Alec was around three years old he stopped speaking Klingon because, d’Armond believed, he only spoke it with his father and Alec saw his mom and dad converse in English so it wasn’t worth the effort.
Alec soon forgot all about the language and couldn’t understand a word by the time this story was revealed in 2009. Alec suffered no harm from this language experiment and is now 20 years old.
Some people seemed outraged that he did this to his son. So he explained:
“Just because I spoke Klingon does not mean that I was teaching him to wield a bat'leth or drink black ale. It was a language, and we did normal things that other parents do.”
d’Armond maintains that he is no ‘Trekkie’ and only used Klingon because it is the most common created spoken language.