Inhabitants of the Azure Wheel galaxy DO NOT actually speak English! I just write their dialogue and written language in English so that it can be understood. Instead, they speak Galactic Common, which is not English!
The native Ultimarian language, also known as ‘Galactic Common’ is an ancient language dating back to before the Ultimarians gained knowledge of space travel. When they were at the stage of evolution that we humans are at now there were multiple languages being spoken among them. This language was one of the most widely used among the species and was adopted as their official trade language. Think of it as being their version of our English language.
As they evolved, this language drowned out all the others used on the planet. All other Ultimarian languages are nor regarded as being ‘dead languages’.
Upon the founding of the Galactic Alliance, this Ultimarian language was chosen to become the official trade language of the alliance as Ultimarians were the most numerous out of the five elder races and their language was the easiest for non native speakers to learn and pronounce.
Because of the long standing status of this language as the Alliance’s trade language, most non-Ultimarians are fluent in it as well as their own native language though most of them speak their native language whenever possible. Most Ultimarians don’t bother learning other languages simply because they don’t feel the need to.
While they may not be completely fluent in other language, most Ultimarians do pick up smatterings of other languages just by interacting with other races. Usually picking up curse words the quickest. The words in other languages that an Ultimarian knows will often make it into their regular vocabulary. They are most commonly used as an expression of disbelief or anger (this will make more sense when issue 1 of Intrepid is out).
Ultimarian names tend to be a hodgepodge of different names and words from ‘dead’ Ultimarian languages. Ultimarian names tend to be slightly soft sounding and vowel-heavy. Names beginning with vowels are very common as well as names ending with “I” (Itumi, Nazari, Juneri, etc). These names are usually words taken from “Tridian”, which was a widely used Ultimarian language before the ages of technological advances.