Suggestion: OA in spanish. Is this possible?

[Drashner1]

The Orion's Arm canon is that all earth languages aside from English, Mandarin and a couple others died out, and the many languages in the setting today are heavily derived versions of English. With that in mind, it seems ironically appropriate that no other language other than English is available.

Actually, that's not entirely correct.

Per this page HERE

Prior to the Technocalypse a lot of languages on Earth had either died out or been reduced to something just spoken out of cultural pride or the like although there were quite a number of exceptions for major languages. From the article:

Such widely spoken languages as Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese, Arabic, Bengali, and Japanese managed to survive and even thrive as first languages, but many others had become secondary, used very locally or learned in school as a matter of ethnic pride if they were not entirely extinct.

Anglish (a derivative/descendent of English) was a sort of common tongue in many cases, either learned as a first language or as a second language (similar to English in RL) for trade, education, global interactions, etc. Note that 500 years is a long time and that the 'Anglish' in use prior to the Technocalypse probably:

a) Would sound VERY strange, verging on not understandable to English speakers in RL just due to language drift - although recording technology might tend to combat that to a good degree.

b) Incorporated a lot of words from other languages, or derived from other languages - Spanish and Chinese seeming to be the obvious ones from our perspective, but also some Arabic, Indian words and phrases and more than a few words pulled from the various African languages, since we describe the African continent rising to be a major power before the T.

Regardless, all of this got totally blown out of the water by the Technocalypse and the spread of Terragens across the stars. The consolidation of language that was going on prior to the T got totally reversed and languages diverged all over the place and in some cases languages simply arose or were created.

By Y11k, there are likely thousands of different languages at least and possibly millions. In particular, note that lots of provolved sophonts, neogens, and inhabitants of the cybercosm are going to have languages much better suited to their physiology and circumstances and which might be totally beyond our ability to understand without translation tech - which might itself involve installing a temporary mental overlay so you can 'walk in the shoes' of who you are speaking to to some degree so you can understand what they're talking about.

The languages that are listed on the EG article cited above should be seen as representative examples, not the sum total of all the languages in the setting (there are actually some languages mentioned in passing in various articles that aren't listed here - we should update this article just to fix that). That's generally a good rule of thumb for almost anything described in the setting actually, unless we've gone out of our way to explicitly state that at thing or list of things are the only examples of their kind in the setting. Even then, it's probably a good idea to ask the forum about articles that say that, especially if the article is older, just to make sure that the article doesn't need an update. Any article more than 10 years old (with no updates listed in that time) is probably worth asking about.

Hope this helps,

Todd