#seeminglydeathlessredshirt

@seeminglydeathlessredshirt also asked this! Yesss

These headcanons are part of a larger imagined framework for how the political organization of the TMBD world works. It also takes as an assumption that TMBD takes place 1000 years into our future, and as such things have changed about as much from now to then as they have since the height of Chaco Canyon or the Norman Conquest of 1066 to now. So: a Lot, but the world isn't wholly unrecognizeable, either.

In terms of language, I do think language change gets slowed by mass literacy. Slang comes and goes of course but the structure changes more slowly. The spacefuture languages the Murderbot Diaries characters speak are recognizeably descendant from the ones we know today, but barely intelligible with their modern forms due to 1000 years of human political fragmentation and reorganization among the stars.

The Corporation Rim is not a single political entitiy; rather, it's kind of like saying "the Western World." It's a loose economic coalition of several EU-like groups of corporate-controlled polities that are on varying levels of good terms with each other. The CR political coalition Murderbot comes from, the one that the company and GrayCris and such operate in, is the General Economic Consortium (the GEC, or rather probably the CEG because…) The primary language of the GEC is Nev Ispangi. This is a spacefuture evolution of Spanish, with some Arabic influences. Nev Ispangi is Murderbot's native language, so to speak. (Individual planets, corporate polities, and ethnic groups within the GEC may have their own languages, but Nev Ispangi is the unquestioned dominant language. Other CR economic consortia have other languages in this role; Bi Hua is another one.)

Preservation speaks a language called Bahasa 'rabiyy, a creole of spacefuture!North-African-Arabic-with-Spanish-influences and spacefuture!Indonesian-that's-been-partially-Sanskritized. This comes from the fact that the colonists on the Pressy were actually two populations: Consuela Makeba's original group of 5,000 hopeful settlers (sf!Arabic-speakers), and the 30,000 abandoned planetary colonists she picked up and saved along the way (sf!Indonesian-speakers). Nobody else speaks Preservation's language because it's really specific outcome of their origin as a planet. (When Murderbot couldn't read the original labels on the Pressy in Fugitive Telemetry, it wasn't a result of language drift over time; rather, it's because they were written in Arabic script while modern Preservation uses a Latin-based one!)

Bahasa 'rabiyy doesn't use gendered pronouns. Rather, the two third-person pronoun sets (i and dhi, pronounced "ee" and "thee") are based on formality and can change with context; i is more formal, dhi is more informal. Everyone is i in Steering Committee meetings, just about everyone is dhi to family. Some people have preferences in their everyday lives; Mensah, Pin-Lee, Bharadwaj, and Gurathin are use-i-unless-we-are-very-close, while Ratthi, Arada, Overse, and Thiago are we're-cool-everyone-can-refer-to-me-as-dhi. If you're not sure, defaulting to "i" is never incorrect. (Volescu is an immigrant who prefers to use the weird gendered neopronoun "he." Or rather, "el." He's Divarti not Corporate but they speak a dialect of Nev Ispangi there anyway.) They also have a second person T/V distinction that works the same way. They also have nonperson third-person pronouns, akin to "it." Hilariously, because it came from the Indonesian itu… the word literally is "it." Murderbot remains it/its in Bahasa 'rabiyy.

Most Preservationers also learn Nev Ispangi. If they're interacting with basically anyone outside the Preservation Alliance, this is the language of the GEC next door and thus the language most people will be using.

The other Preservation Alliance planets, Prathasha and Gartok Grah, speak Banla, a spacefuture evolution of Bengali. It's pretty common for Preservationers to learn Banla, and for Prathashans and Gartokans to learn Bahasa 'rabiyy. Bahasa 'rabiyy also adopted a large number of Banla loanwords for technology that was invented over the course of the 200 years they were travelling the stars and not up to date on the outside world. (When the Pressy arrived in what would become the Preservation system, it was people from Prathasha and Gartok Grah there to meet them and go uhhh who are you and also jeez are you guys okay? Who even does cryo-statis slowship travel anymore??)

In Mihira and New Tideland, meanwhile, they speak Naichi, a spacefuture evolution of Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin. The two planets were settled by the same orignal group but at this point have different dialects (New Tideland's draws more from English, Mihira's draws more from Yoruba and Igbo, but they're generally mutually intelligible). It's still considered necessary to know Nev Ispangi in the professional and academic worlds, but the Pansystem University requires outsystem students to learn enough Naichi to take at least some classes in it.

Real-time translation via translation modules in your feed interface and/or augment is par for the course, and once you get used to the double-focus required, it makes interaction across language lines easy - as long as the translation module is decent. The standard translation modules for Bahasa 'rabiyy are not fantastic because as a language it's only about 90 years old and spoken on one planet. That's one of the things Murderbot was monitoring the PresAux survey team for btw: language datamining for translation module improvements (that the company can sell back to PReservation, of course). Also, because it's so common to interact via translation module, this is why it's more common to list your gender rather than your pronouns in your feed profile. Let other people figure out how to interpret that into their own language's gender system.