Romulan (Rihannsu)

1. Introduction & History

Romulan is the language of the Romulan Star Empire in the Star Trek universe — the tongue of Romulus (in the language itself, ch'Rihan) and Remus (ch'Havran). Unlike Klingon, which Marc Okrand built into a complete, officially published language, Romulan was never given a canonical grammar by the franchise. What exists instead is a three-layer tradition: scattered words and phrases from the television series and films; a substantial linguistic sketch created by author Diane Duane for her Rihannsu novels (beginning with My Enemy, My Ally, 1984); and decades of fan expansion that grew Duane's sketch into a usable language, often called Rihan. This guide teaches all three layers and labels each one.

In Duane's telling — adopted by most fans as the language's founding myth — the Romulans are descendants of Vulcans who refused Surak's reformation of logic and left Vulcan in a great exodus. Determined not to remain what they had been, they deliberately re-engineered their speech: they went back to Old High Vulcan and 'aged' it in a different direction, creating a new tongue for a new people. They named the language Rihan and themselves Rihannsu, 'the Declared' — those who declared what they would be. Linguistically, then, Romulan is to Vulcan roughly as Romance languages are to Latin: a descendant by deliberate divergence. [Duane novels: licensed but non-canon; this origin story is the community's standard framework. Medium confidence as 'lore', High confidence as description of the novels.]

On screen, Romulan has been heard in fragments since the 1960s: the greeting jolan tru (used as both 'hello' and 'farewell' in The Next Generation's 'Unification' two-parter), institutional names like the Tal Shiar (the Empire's feared intelligence service), ship classes like D'deridex, and — in Star Trek: Picard — the northern-Romulan sisterhood Qowat Milat and its practice of 'absolute candor', plus the meditative discipline zhal makh. These canon fragments are the fixed points that every fan grammar must accommodate. [High confidence — directly from the shows.]

2. Romulan vs. Vulcan (and Klingon)

Learners coming from the LinguaCommons Vulcan guide should treat Romulan as a sibling language with a shared ancestor, not a dialect. The sound aesthetic differs sharply: Vulcan (especially the Marketa/Golic fan tradition) favors clipped, formal consonant clusters (t', s', kh-), while Rihan favors flowing polysyllables, doubled vowels and glottalized breaks written with apostrophes (mnhei'sahe, ael, hru'hfirh). Klingon is unrelated to either — a completely separate language family with its own official grammar — and mixing the three is the Star Trek equivalent of confusing Quenya with Khuzdul.

3. Pronunciation

No official phonology exists; the conventions below are the fan standard distilled from how Romulan is spoken on screen and spelled in the novels. [Medium confidence — community convention.]

4. Script & Typography

On screen, written Romulan appears as angular, vertically-stacked glyph columns — production designers' artwork rather than a worked-out orthography (much of the lettering seen in TNG-era episodes was designed for visual effect, and the same glyphs recur with different 'meanings'). Fans have reverse-engineered several usable scripts from this artwork; Omniglot documents a widely used fan standardization of the Romulan alphabet in which each glyph maps to a sound of the Rihan language. There is no Unicode encoding, so learner materials — including this guide — use Latin romanization with the apostrophe as a glottal-stop mark. Do not reuse Vulcan calligraphy or Klingon pIqaD for Romulan; all three scripts are distinct. [Screen glyphs: High confidence as production fact; fan alphabet details: Medium confidence.]

5. Grammar — the Duane/Fan Tradition

Diane Duane's novels established the skeleton that fan grammars have since filled in. The points below represent that combined tradition; where the novels themselves attest something directly it is noted. [Novels: High confidence as to what they say; fan extensions: Medium–Low, and different fan projects disagree in details.]

Core phrases (canon and novel-attested)

About mnhei'sahe: Duane devotes pages to this concept — a fusion of honor, courtesy, face and reciprocal obligation that governs Romulan behavior, sometimes demanding generosity and sometimes vengeance. It is the cultural key that makes Romulan dialogue make sense: characters are not being contradictory, they are serving mnhei'sahe. If you learn one content word before grammar, learn this one.

6. Cultural Context

Romulan is a language of concealment and register. In the fiction, Romulan society runs on Great Houses, layered loyalty and the ever-present Tal Shiar, and the language tradition reflects it: elaborate courtesy formulas, rank compounds, and a national virtue (mnhei'sahe) that is explicitly about managing face. Star Trek: Picard added a counter-tradition — the Qowat Milat's 'absolute candor' — which fans read as a deliberate linguistic-cultural rebellion inside the Empire: a sect that refuses the hedged, indirect speech the rest of the culture perfects.

Out-of-world, Romulan is the great 'almost' of Star Trek linguistics. Duane pitched a full Romulan dictionary to accompany Okrand's Klingon Dictionary in the 1980s, but it was never published — so the community built one instead. Fan projects (rihan.org's Romulan Language Institute tradition, role-play wikis like StarBase 118, and Omniglot's script documentation) merged Duane's material with screen canon into teachable form. The result is less standardized than Klingon: expect variant spellings and competing forms, and cite which dictionary you follow — the same layer-labelling ethic this site recommends for Neo-Khuzdul.

7. Learning Tips

• Anchor on the canon fragments first (jolan tru, Tal Shiar, Qowat Milat, zhal makh) — they are stable no matter which fan dictionary you later adopt.
• Read Duane's Rihannsu novels (collected as The Bloodwing Voyages) before diving into fan grammars; almost everything in the fan language points back to them, and the cultural chapters make the vocabulary memorable.
• Pick ONE fan dictionary as your standard and note variants rather than mixing spellings — Romulan's biggest learner trap is silently blending incompatible fan traditions.
• Practice the glottal stop and the mn-/hr- clusters early; they carry most of the language's distinctive sound.
• If you know the site's Vulcan guide, map cognates consciously ('aged Old High Vulcan' pairs are a fan favorite) — but never assume a Vulcan word works in Rihan unchanged.

8. Learning Resources

• Memory Alpha — Romulan language — The canon-only record: every Romulan word actually heard or seen on screen, with episode citations.
• Memory Beta — Romulan language — Covers the licensed novels, including Diane Duane's Rihannsu material — the bridge between canon and fan language.
• Star Trek Expanded Universe — Rihannsu (language) — Fan-continuity overview of the Rihannsu language tradition and its grammar (declensions, word order).
• Omniglot — Romulan alphabet and the Rihannsu language — Documentation of the fan-standardized Romulan script with sound values.
• StarBase 118 — Romulan Dictionary — A large, searchable fan dictionary in the Duane tradition, maintained by a long-running role-play community.

Related Guides

Vulcan — the ancestor tradition: Romulan lore derives Rihan from Old High Vulcan, and the two fan languages reward side-by-side study. Klingon — the fully official comparison case: see what Romulan might have become had Duane's dictionary been published. Both have LinguaCommons guides.