Real-life human languages spoken in Star Trek

[alpha_leonis]

I was watching Star Trek 3 with a friend last night, and we discussed how the Klingon language was a "real" functional language with a workable grammatical structure that had been specially created for the movie.

My friend's response: why go to the trouble of creating a new language when there's so much linguistic diversity already in place on earth? George Lucas borrowed from Quechua to create his Greedo/Jabba language, after all.

That got me to thinking, what examples of real human languages, aside from English, have ever been featured on Star Trek? I can think of the following off the top of my head:

• Uhura spoke Swahili a couple of times on TOS
• Chekov (finally) had a line in Russian in ST3
• Picard spoke French a couple of times: once with holo-Minuet, and a couple of times with Q.
• The whaler crew in ST4 spoke a dialect of Finnish

Am I missing some?

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

In The Squire of Gothos, Trelane had a couple of lines in French and in German...

 

[Tosk]

Enrique spoke in Spanish in DS9's The Ship.
Admiral Ross speaks Latin (sort of) in Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges.
Da Vinci spoke in Italian in several episodes of VOY.
American Sign Language was seen in Loud as a Whisper.

 

[Green Shirt]

Picard spoke French a couple of times: once with holo-Minuet, and a couple of times with Q.

And the classic, "merde" in an episode which name escapes me.

 

[EnriqueH]

Holy crap, there's a Star Trek character named Enrique?

Cool! I need to get through DS9.

 

[MacLeod]

Picard spoke French a couple of times: once with holo-Minuet, and a couple of times with Q.

And the classic, "merde" in an episode which name escapes me.

"The Last Outpost"?

 

[Melakon]

Holy crap, there's a Star Trek character named Enrique?

Enrique Muniz (played by F.J. Rio) appears in DS9's "Starship Down", "Hard Time", and "The Ship". His biggest appearance is in "Starship Down".

And for actors, there's Enrique Murciano, who appears in ENT: Fusion.

 

[KSoldier]

I got to work on the DS9 episode, "Little Green Men" where they are actually speaking English which was made unintelligible due to a defective universal translator.

It was neat because when we filmed it, the actors were actually speaking their dialogue in English.

Technically, this is not a foreign language, but the English language, made to be foreign.

 

[iguana_tonante]

Da Vinci spoke in Italian in several episodes of VOY.

Well, more or less. The accent was atrocious.

Still, the time he commented "E che cazzo!!!" about something happening, I got a great good laugh.

 

[LMFAOschwarz]

Holy crap, there's a Star Trek character named Enrique?

Cool! I need to get through DS9.

Lucky you. All I need to do is find a character named LMFAO...

 

[Tim Walker]

As I recall, Chief O'Brien seemed to be mentoring Muniz in "The Ship."

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

It was neat because when we filmed it, the actors were actually speaking their dialogue in English.

Any particular reason why it was done that way? Were you trying to convey a sense of "lip synching" - something that certainly would happen with a real UT? (i.e. a real UT would let you hear English but it wouldn't let you SEE it being spoken)

 

[Drone]

Italian, spoken by the Doctor's dival of an operatic cohort in The Swarm. I would be interested, Professore, if the accent we heard here was any more authentic than Rhys-Davies managed.

 

[Tosk]

It was neat because when we filmed it, the actors were actually speaking their dialogue in English.

Any particular reason why it was done that way? Were you trying to convey a sense of "lip synching" - something that certainly would happen with a real UT? (i.e. a real UT would let you hear English but it wouldn't let you SEE it being spoken)

It's probably done so that the lines can be learned and performed normally instead of the actors having to memorize gobbledegook...then the alien syntax can be made to fit the mouths of the actors, and they have more time in the looping session to perfect the alien speech. The TOS movies used this approach several times, like the ritual in TMP, or Spock and Saavik conversing in TWOK.

 

[HIjol]

Holy crap, there's a Star Trek character named Enrique?

Cool! I need to get through DS9.

Lucky you. All I need to do is find a character named LMFAO...

Pretty sure if you convert the one Binar's names into hex, LMFAO was it's middle name!

or not

 

[Etoile]

American Sign Language was seen in Loud as a Whisper.

This raises an interesting canon question for me. Although Howie Seago is a Deaf actor, and all the signs he uses are ASL, is Riva using ASL?

Picard, Chekov, and Uhura are all from Earth. So of course they are speaking French, Russian, and Swahili when they speak it. But Riva is from Ramatis III. Data is shown studying "Gestural Language M-9," and says he has learned five signed languages. When Howie Seago signs ASL, Brent Spiner voices exactly what he is saying. But is the character, Riva, signing ASL?

This ties into the discussion about lip-sync - perhaps the UT let us see Riva's signs as ASL, just as it lets us see the mouth movements as English...!

 

[KSoldier]

It was neat because when we filmed it, the actors were actually speaking their dialogue in English.

Any particular reason why it was done that way? Were you trying to convey a sense of "lip synching" - something that certainly would happen with a real UT? (i.e. a real UT would let you hear English but it wouldn't let you SEE it being spoken)

I was actually surprised when they chose not to use subtitles. It was mostly just to emulate dialogue. No relevant information from it. Quark pretty much ad-libbed the Ferengi language.