Nick has talked about how there is no “slang” per se in Belter. Languages like French are spoken both on the street and in high society, so there are multiple registers. It’s an introductory language for many people.

Slang is often used to exclude; if you’re not “one of us” but you still Speak the language, you still are on the outside because you can’t quite follow what’s being said.

A language like Quechua in South America (according to Nick) doesn’t develop slang because speaking it is already a marker for being low-status socially (vs Spanish speakers). Speaking Quechua already excludes those on the other end of the linguistic divide.

Belter is similar. Nobody but Belters speak it (maybe some inner intelligence officers do, the way UK troops would learn Irish during the troubles. Speaking Belter is a mark of low social status.

Nick has said that he would imagine belters “fluidly speaking belt Lish. One can code shift on the fly between the two languages quite easily. If there amongst a bunch a rock hopper’s, they’ll probably all speak pure LB. When they’re on the docks, when there are more inners around, probably shift more towards English.

Belters have to speak English to deal with the UN/MCRN tax Collectors. When they get boarded by Mickie Marines, you BETTER speak English. When they deal with the any government office, it’ll be in English.

In Haiti, the majority of the population are monolingual Kreyol speakers. But the language of Education and government forms is French. That leads to some fucked-up outcomes. I imagine Belter would be treated like Creole languages usually are; something broken & degenerate, not a real language.

The correspondence courses Naomi took were almost certainly in English. Nobody is translating engineering textbooks into a “degenerate” language like a Creole, and nobody is teaching this classs in LB. Hinikirii Brown’s tablet on Anderson Station was in English, although he father spoke to her mostly in LB.

Miller is a perfect example of code shifting. Watch his hands throughout the seasons; for a “welwala”, he is the most hand-gesturing Belter on Ceres. When interviewing Gia (who has just had a client murdered in her room), he interviews her in LB to set her at ease. But when talking to the Governor’s agent about the water thieves, he speaks perfect English.

Prax is an educated Belter. You don’t do botany classes in LB. and when he wakes up on the refugee ship, he first asks for Mei in English. When he realizes the crewman he’s speaking to is a Belter, Prax switches to LB. Prax spends so much time speaking English, shifting back into LB is something that takes a moment.

So yeah, my feeling is the code shift mainly comes from “am I speaking to a Belter, or an Inner?” The inner/Belter dichotomy is cooked into LB down to the level of pronouns the way social hierarchy is cooked into Japanese.

“Beltalowda” is the plural pronoun for “Belters” with the connotation of both “all Belters” as well as “us Belters” ( becaus again, almost nobody outside Belters speaks LB). “Inyalowda” is both “all inners” [No distinction between Earther or Martian], and “You inners”.