A Minnesota dad has one-upped all the parents who swear by the “My Baby Can Read” tapes — his son can speak Klingon.
Linguist d’Armond Speers said that during the first 3½ years of his son Alexander’s life, he spoke only the fictional “Star Trek” tongue to the boy to see if he would pick it up as a normal language.
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language-acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers told the Minnesota Daily this week. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”
“Before he was born, I was speaking to him in Klingon,” Speers said in an earlier interview.
Speers had his biggest success when he once asked the boy, in Klingon, “Where is the bottle?” and the boy started to crawl toward it.
“It was a proud moment for me,” he said in an interview in 2003.
Speers eventually stopped the out-of-this-world experiment when it was clear that the boy wanted him to just speak English to him. The boy is 15 now, and Speers says he’s not a “Trek” fan.