Why does everyone in Calima talk like that?

Let's address the elephant in the room: the language in Calima is a tough sell. The first pages of Descent throw lines at you like "I impression that citizens have not recorded well enough its content", and you could easily think something went wrong in the editing. Nothing did. It was designed like this, on purpose, and this post is about why.

The usual tricks

Science fiction and fantasy have a few comfortable habits when it comes to speech. In the future, everyone speaks English, or a "common" language that is English with another name. People either talk exactly like we do today (with luck, sprinkled with a few flavour terms that sound cool enough), or in some costume version of an old English: Victorian, piratey, military jargon...

And it always surprises me how well everyone speaks. Sharp, smart, fast-paced verbal sparring, like a Hollywood movie. Then you go back to your daily life and most of what you hear is "bro", "cringe" and the most basic exchanges.

Let's not kid ourselves about where we are heading, either. We rely less and less on written language and its variety, surrounded by an ever-growing flood of images and videos. I'm not saying that is necessarily a bad thing, only that communication evolves in its own ways, and pure formal language is not where it is going. Now add to the mix a new way to experience and share concepts: in Calima, they are called impressions. It is easy to see how the finesse of spoken language would suffer.

So I tried to imagine how people would really speak in that world. Three ideas shaped it.

Language follows its use

Aboard the ship, most people only speak during the vigil: a short stretch of real life between long periods in the virtual world, where impressions are a far more powerful way to communicate than words. So speech is used for very little: talking about the recreations, and about the tasks people carry out during that brief time awake. Many words have been simplified and sunk into a handful of topical terms, borrowed from the games and machines everyone lives with. You scan a problem, you record an idea, you register something when you finally understand it.

Descent shows the cost of this in its first chapters: at the start of every vigil there are people babbling when they speak, or stuck waiting for machines to respond to impressions that obviously don't work out here.

Language follows how we really communicate

The idea that everyone will end up speaking English has been around for at least fifty years. English has indeed become the world's most common second language, but nobody is giving up their native one any time soon, and plenty of native English speakers are learning other languages for everything that brings with it.

Calima pushes this further in its own lore: the ship's society assigns every crew member a culture at conception, their cultural grade, to keep humanity diverse. So the language is full of words taken from the different cultures the crew are (lightly) immersed in: a [jefe] here, a [lagom] there, a [sumimasen] when someone needs one.

Language keeps moving

The cultures of human civilisation go hand in hand with their languages. I believe the future of humanity is to keep that vast pool of creations, not to shrink it into whatever cultural snapshot an agenda wants to impose. And every culture keeps evolving on its own, drifting away from its past forms quite quickly.

On Calima this happens more slowly, because communication technology went backwards after the crash, but it still happens. Some words fade into oblivion while others appear, or come back. If you play Slave Pits after reading Descent, you will notice it: some of the old terms are still there, some are gone, and new ones have taken their place. In future games, these changes will grow.

So yes, it is a tough sell. But I'd rather ask you for a bit of patience during the first pages than give you one more future where everybody talks like us.

Om