I love learning languages and find them interesting. With that in mind, I realized something in relation to the setting of "Across the Multiverse." I've already established that the humans in this fantastical future would speak some common language that would be a combination of most of today's spoken languages. I haven't gotten around to establishing that such a language, spread across space, wouldn't be homogeneous.
Soon after fleshing out some of the descriptions of some of the human-settled planets, I realized that varying environments would give rise to varying culinary traditions. This would partly due to the differences in biome variations; an oceanic, island-covered world would have something different to offer than a desert planet. It would also be due to the roles of artificial selection and genetic engineering in adapting life-forms to different terraformed worlds.
But I was thinking from the standpoint of a foodie. My inner linguist hadn't really kicked in much until recently. People who may have a similar base culture and language, separated by light-years, would of course have their own local slang and accents; such a separation would probably have more of an impact than just a separation of oceans or mountains in the real world. Yes, there is a vast computer network throughout the reaches of human-settled space, along with interstellar travel to span the gaps, but those sub-cultural differences would still be there; while we have an internet and airplanes now, English-speakers can still tell the difference between someone from England, Australian, Scot, New Englander, and Southern American.
It's a bit of a challenge, trying to flesh out the differences, but I will figure it out.
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