All the talk about Klingon requires the old Onion story http://www.theonion.com/onion3526/klingon_navajo.html
I know that that’s the Onion, but does anyone know the real numbers of speakers of the Klingon and Navajo languages? Is it really over seven to one?
Kinda makes one think…
Nope. The Onion has a graphic showing 7,500 speakers of Klingon and 1,000 speakers of Dine (Navaho).
Some guy named Stefan did a survey on speakers of Klingon and notes that there are 250,000 copies of The Klingon Dictionary in print, but “(t)hose of us that study Klingon know for a fact that it is not possible that there are 250.000 Klingon speakers.” 604 people responded to Stefan’s survey. As you’ve already guessed, 563 of the respondents were males. Stefan didn’t ask how many of them wore pocket protectors.
But there are a lot of Klingon clubs out there, and some of these people are pretty serious. I’ve just finished looking at more Klingon websites than I would have imagined existed, and I still haven’t found out how many speakers there are. I give up. There are probably more of them than you’d think.
However, according to the 1990 Census (sorry, I don’t have 2000 figures), there were 148,530 speakers of Dine, of whom 7,616 were monolinguals.
Whatever the number of Klingon speakers, I think we’re safe in saying it doesn’t approach 7x148,530.
Most Native languages are in trouble, though. Out of about 155 surviving natives languages, only about 20 are being taught to children. 
Hunter Blue wrote:
"Some guy named Stefan did a survey on speakers of Klingon and notes that there are 250,000 copies of The Klingon Dictionary in print, but “(t)hose of us that study Klingon know for a fact that it is not possible that there are 250.000 Klingon speakers.”
However, according to the 1990 Census (sorry, I don’t have 2000 figures), there were 148,530 speakers of Dine, of whom 7,616 were monolinguals.
Whatever the number of Klingon speakers, I think we’re safe in saying it doesn’t approach 7x148,530. "
Okay, then, maybe there are more people who actually KNOW how to speak Dine, but I’d conversely bet you that there are WAY more than 7 times as many people who know a few words of Klingon than there are who know a few genuine Navajo words. Same for Elvish (please, no puns) and maybe one or two other fictitious languages.
As for the warp drive, I’m surprised that no one here has mentioned that a pair of mathematicians about 7 years ago or so demonstrated a theoretical model - in a legitimate, major scientific journal, which discussed the possibility of faster-than-light travel by (in effect) creating a “wave” in space-time, and riding in its trough - essentially the exact same thing the warp drive is supposed to do.
This page discusses physicist Miguel Alcubierre’s 1994 paper “The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity,” which was published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, and includes a link to a PDF file of the original paper. I gather there are still a few minor little theoretical and engineering details to be ironed out, so I wouldn’t go and invest your life savings in that real estate on Tau Ceti II just yet.
OK, so Dine speakers outnumber Klingon speakers… on Earth. What about native Klingophones? Does anyone know the current population of Kling? I’ll bet it’s way higher than the terrestrial numbers.
I’ll take that bet. First of all, Star Trek mania is mostly a US phenomenon, so if you count all the Klingon speakers in the USA I’m pretty sure you would have 99% of them. Secondly, I can use myself as an example. I have seen every Star Trek movie and have seen many of the TV shows (all of TOS, more than half of TNG, some of DS9 and perhaps 1/3 of Voyager). But after reading your post I tried to think of a Klingon word and couldn’t recall a single one. Now if someone said “what does this Klingon word mean” and gave me a very common word from the show, I might recognize it, but then again the same would be true of Dine since I’ve read many of the Tony Hillerman detective stories.
Ker Plagh! (sp?) Kinda like Aloha - a greeting and parting message. Means something like “May you have an exciting life and a glorious death with much reveling.” Sort of like “Have a nice day.” That’s about the only one I know.
Don’t know any Dine (Navajo?).