Many people in the warehouse were speaking languages other than English, and relying on translation AIs to communicate with the rest. At any given moment there were conversations in a dozen different languages, and AI translators were heavily used. Art still found them a little distracting. He wished it were possible to know all these languages, even though the latest generations of AI translators were really pretty good: voices well modulated, vocabularies large and accurate, grammar excellent, phrasing almost free of the errors that had made earlier translation programs such a great party game. The new ones had gotten so good that it seemed possible that the English-language dominance that had created an almost monoglot Martian culture might begin to recede. The issei had of course brought all languages with them, but English had been their lingua franca; the nisei had therefore used English to communicate among themselves, while their “primary” languages were used only to speak to their parents; and so, for a while, English had become the natives’ native tongue. But now with the new AIs, and a continuing stream of new immigrants speaking the full array of Terran languages, it looked like things might broaden back out again, as new nisei stayed with their primary languages and used AIs as their lingua franca instead of English.