English: the common tongue of terran humanity

English was a West Germanic language of Earth, born from the Anglo-Frisian dialects carried to Britain by Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops drawn from the regions that were once northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. Across the long history of the homeworld it established itself as one of humanity's most prominent languages, spoken by billions, and when the United Powers League came to power in the twenty-third century it was designated the common language of the planet while other languages were banned. The exiles whose descendants became the terrans of the Koprulu sector spoke it among the stars, where it was sometimes referred to simply as "Terran" and where it absorbed a body of slang, shorthand, and new measures that set the speech of the sector apart from the speech of Earth.

Origins on Old Earth#

English originated among the Anglo-Frisian dialects that Germanic settlers and Roman auxiliary troops brought to Britain from various parts of what later generations knew as northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. From that island foothold it spread with the movements of its speakers until, over the course of Earth's history, it stood among the most prominent languages humanity had produced. By the closing centuries of the homeworld's independence it was spoken by billions of people across the planet, a reach that made it the natural instrument for any government with ambitions of ruling the whole species.

The common tongue of the United Powers League#

That government arrived in the twenty-third century. The United Powers League, founded on 22 November 2229 upon the basis of enlightened socialism, accomplished the unification that the defunct United Nations never could, encompassing close to 93 percent of Earth's population. The UPL set out to fuse the various cultures of humanity into one, going to great lengths to eradicate the last vestiges of racial separatism, and language policy was one of its bluntest tools. English was designated the common language of Earth, and many ancient languages were banned in their own native countries.

The suppression was never total. The use of other languages survived the UPL's decrees, persisting both on Earth itself and among the colonists of the Koprulu sector, and as of 2500 English shared the mouths of humanity with the tongues the League had tried to bury. What the mandate did accomplish was permanence at the center: English remained the default speech of terran government, commerce, and war on both sides of the gulf between Earth and the sector.

Terran, the language of the Koprulu sector#

In the Koprulu sector the English language was sometimes referred to as "Terran," a name that treated the speech of the colonists as the speech of the species. The core of the language remained what it had been in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and a speaker of those eras would have understood most of what passed between colonists on the fringe worlds or officers on a Dominion bridge. But the sector's isolation, its wars, and its underworlds pushed a few words and phrases into common use that had no origin in those centuries at all. Frontier hardship, psionic talent, alien enemies, and the politics of the Terran Confederacy and the Terran Dominion each left a layer of vocabulary on the old language, and much of the new slang came up from the bottom, out of the Gutter, the underworld where the fugitive Nova Terra once hid among hoodlums and crime lords.

Slang of the Gutter and the barracks#

The Gutter's contribution began with profanity. "Fekk" served as a general curse, spawning "fekkhead" as an all-purpose insult and "fekklehead" for someone judged crazy or stupid. "Flick" stood in for an older word for fornication and was considered just as offensive, "boscrap" carried the sense of bullshit, and "slike" circulated as a common term of abuse. "Snap" was a crude term for the female anatomy, and "curve" was a derogatory word for a woman, the sector's equivalent of "broad."

Social contempt had its own dictionary. A poor farming colonist was a "clodhopper," a settler of the fringe worlds a "fringe-squib," and a poor community a "swill," its residents "swill rats." A young person was an "acnoid," a confused one "brain-buzzed" or "fogged," an addict of the drug hab a "habhead," and a jealous man was accused of "greening." Politics sharpened the edge further: "Confed" and "Confederal" marked the members of the Confederacy's government and military, "korhole" was flung at natives of Korhal and members of the Sons of Korhal, and under the Dominion a "pidge" or "pidgeon" was a high ranking official who crapped on everyone below him.

The military bred its own shorthand. A marine was a "jarbrain," and within the Dominion Marine Corps "rats" meant rations, "hot shot" named a Uranium-238 round, "X-factor" was marine shorthand for a skilled sniper, and a "rocket jockey" flew or maintained aerospace craft. Neural resocialization, the Confederacy's answer to criminality, produced "resoc" for the process and its subjects, while "panbrain" and "panbrained" described the resocialized and the merely stupid alike. The wars against the zerg clipped the enemy's names down to fighting length: "hydra" for the hydralisk, "muta" for the mutalisk, and "speedling" for a zergling that had undergone metabolic enhancements.

Psionic humanity carried a vocabulary of its own. A "psych" was any individual with psionic powers, a "teep" a telepath, a "teek" a telekinetic, and a "pyrokeet" a wielder of pyrokinesis, while psionic humans called those without the gift "hard-shells." Spacefaring life supplied the rest: a "grounder" was someone slow and unused to space, a "vac head" had spent too long aboard ship, a "warp-rat" tended warp engines, and a "gopher" worked the mines. Everyday idiom shifted with the technology around it, so that "scan me" asked whether a listener understood, "solid" signaled agreement, and a "rat" could mean nothing more than a small amount.

Time, measure, and memory#

The sector's English also carried new units. Alongside the old terms, which never fell out of use, terrans of the Koprulu sector kept time in "cycles" for years, "intervals" for days, "ticks" for minutes, and "microticks" for seconds. Beneath that spacefarer's clock the old calendar endured unchanged: the sector's terrans still used a seven-day week, and the days bore the same names their ancestors had given them in the twenty-first century.

Data storage acquired its own measure in the "kilomeme," a unit whose exact capacity went unrecorded. What survived was a note on its limits: fifty kilomemes proved insufficient for the needs of the Southwest District department of the Tarsonis Police Force, a detail that fixed the unit somewhere below the appetites of even a single precinct's records. In such small coinages, as much as in its curses and its clipped names for alien horrors, the language showed what had happened to it: English left Earth as the mandated tongue of a unified species and became, in the mouths of the colonists, the working speech of a frontier at war.