Much of the 'verse is English-speaking, with some areas written in Chinese. Will we find places where other languages and cultures are more prominent? Also, what's up with the bad Chinese?
TL;DRThey are gradually replacing real-world foreign text, like Chinese, with in-universe alien languages in places such as Area18, treating remaining Earth languages as nostalgic flavor rather than actively spoken ones.
Well, a lot of that stuff we're actually trying to replace with some of the languages that we are developing, using Banu and Xi'an and stuff like that, and hopefully Tevarin once we get to that, incorporating that stuff into it, so that kind of exotic flavor is more bound to our universe.
Yeah, because the artists like that exotic feel of when you walk into an area and you see this multitude of languages. And now that we have this awesome work from Britton, our linguist, coming online, we're trying to really switch it. You can see some of that already in Area18, with some of the food stalls that have Xi'an on the takeout boxes and Banu on the lanterns, which used to be Chinese characters. And so we're slowly swapping that out and focusing more on it being a combination of common for the UEE and then the xeno languages. So when you do see foreign languages, it's definitely less that there are active speaking groups, or that this is going to be a town where everyone speaks French. It's more harking back to the old days. It's more reminiscing, like how we use Latin now to evoke a certain sense of nostalgia. And I think that's how in the empire some of these old Earth languages are used.