Twitter users can now tweet in Klingon

BEIJING, December 7 (Xinhuanet) -- Twitter users may now send messages in Klingon, a language invented for the science fiction franchise Star Trek.

A Klingon mask used as a prop from the television series "Star Trek" sits on display during a preview of the auction "40 Years  of Star Trek: The Collection" at Christie's auction house in New  York September 29, 2006.(Xinhua/Reuters File Photo)

Twitter has already rolled out services in French and Spanish, but now a third party application enables people so post a message in the fictional language of Klingon.

For Star Trek: The Motion Picture, James Doohan, the actor who portrayed Montgomery Scott, devised the initial language heard in the film. But Marc Okrand, who also created the Vulcan language used in a number of films, developed an expanded Klingon vocabulary based on Doohan's original made-up words.

Okrand later found someone to publish the The Klingon Dictionary in 1985, a book which has sold more than 250,000 copies. The book helped to inspire some enthusiasts to create the Klingon Language Institute, which publishes multiple magazines in the language. While Paramount initially tried to stop the Institute from using their copyrighted language, the company eventually relented.

The popularity of the language meant that in 1996 it was considered the fastest-growing constructed language, ahead of other languages such as Esperanto and Tolkien's Elvish which grew from the literary classic Lord of the Rings.

Even Google has created a search engine in the language which can be found at google.com/intl/xx-klingon.

The Twitter application has been created as part of a campaign to promote the Star Trek Online or massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) which was developed by Cryptic Studios and hits stores in February next year.

The tweetinklingon.com site was a collaboration between Cryptic Studios and Friend2Friend. The site offers English to Klingon translations and tweets are automatically hash-tagged and linked to an English-conversion URL.