In the Xi'an Empire, are there multiple languages, similar to humanity, or is it more just the unified one? We've talked about two, the service dialect and whatnot. So is there more than one language?

Yes. I mean, I cannot tell you what the names of all the rest of them are yet. There's still a lot of world building going on. There could be a Xi'an world in which they could very, very fluently pronounce Dave. That is possible. At this point, the Dave language is not fully invented or fleshed out, but it is theoretically possible. They have a gigantic history, which we have thanks in large part to who is sitting right there on the other side of the screen. So they have a very long history. They've inhabited multiple worlds. So yes, I imagine there would be lots and lots of languages, but at this point, we're focusing on scope, and first we're focusing on getting the proper language fully fleshed out. And while we're doing that, we're throwing in some spice here and there from the service dialect.

Yeah, it's a very common occurrence in Star Citizen. It's human nature, really. You start work on one thing, and then people are like, oh, what about this other thing? What about this other thing? It's like, let us finish this one.

Well, yeah, but it's a practical thing, too. Inventing a language, especially the process of fleshing out the lexicon, that is all the words that are in the dictionary, that is a really long, involved process. I mean, there are people who invent languages who just write a little algorithm or they create their own custom app on their iPad to generate. They'll generate 10,000 words. They'll take a list of English vocabulary and then they will just go, okay, computer, make up all the words. And that works great if all you're doing is trying to prove a concept for a language that's kind of grammatically weird, for example. I mean, you could do that. But when you're deciding that, oh, it doesn't really matter culturally who your father is, all of a sudden, all those words that you would generate for father and grandfather and uncle and all these other things, they wouldn't make a lot of sense for this alien culture. So we can't do that. We need to look at how the Xi'an culture actually works and be very careful about building. So we don't do any kind of automated process like that. I don't use any automated process like that, other than I often take an Excel spreadsheet or some other kind of spreadsheet and I build out all the legal sounds that you can have in the language. Somebody asked earlier about B's and D's being missing. There is no language on earth, anyway, that has all the sounds of all the languages in it. That doesn't exist. Part of what defines a language is what's missing. But there are languages that have lots and lots of sounds. English has a lot of sounds compared to Japanese. Almost every language has a lot of sounds compared to Hawaiian, for example. Hawaiian has a very, very constrained phonological palette, but that makes it seem very Hawaiian. Everything is just consonant vowel, consonant vowel, consonant vowel, consonant vowel, and that gives it its character. And we did put some tricky THL and a KR and a KL in Xi'an that you might not necessarily expect to occur in a language that has the rest of the phonology that it has. So we are doing a few kind of tricky, possibly linguistically implausible things. But again, this is fictional and it should be fun and we should be allowed to have fun with it. So we cannot put every sound in. You're not going to get all of the clicks from South Africa in there, for example. That's not going to happen in the Xi'an language. Sorry. That's not to say that there might not be some other culture that exists in the 'verse that has them, but it's better, I think, experientially, and it's more realistic if Xi'an doesn't have all the possible sounds that might happen.