So, before you all jump on me for going down this rabbit hole, I want to state that this is just a mental exercise and should be taken lightly and as a humorous logical argument.
In Star Trek, every time the Federation crew meet a new species (with a new an exotic set of forehead ridges or funny looking ears) that species speaks English. Maybe they speak British English or with a strange accent, but they still speak English. Why is that? According to the show’s creators’ the Federation has universal translators that translate on the fly. Let’s go ahead and assume that such a thing is possible and proceed from there.
First, why do the universal translators translate to English and if so, why the funny accents? Well, you can see how you can poke holes in this all day and have a lot of fun with that mental exercise, but let’s assume that the programmers wanted to throw some flair in their translator and wrote the code to do funny accents and dialects.
The bigger question is: since the translators work both ways, what do the Federation crewmembers speak? You would think English, but let’s think about that. Even if the whole world were to start speaking English, after a while, everyone would just use the universal translators, so the words would be lost and only the most basic sounds required to convey ideas would remain.
If you follow that train of thought through and apply what we see with modern language evolution (think texting and how some people can read it as if it was plain English), then you realize that in reality the Federation must speak in formalized grunts. So if the power ever fails, then they would be stuck grunting to one another.
That would make for some terrible television, but it does make logical sense and I dare you to watch Star Trek after reading this and not smiling about Picard and Riker grunting at each other about the meaning of life and command.
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