"Clearly. It would probably be rude for us outsiders to just try and pick a completely new name for your language anyway."

"If it sounded nice, I'd use it!"

"Alas that we have yet to meet your standards! I'll keep thinking about it."

"In the meantime you really can just call it Aluvai when you're in Aluvanna and Ceirene when you're in Ceir."

"Yeah, that seems reasonable."

"I thought so! It's still silly but it's not all that inconvenient."

"It might be less convenient if we can figure out how to get home, especially if we can also get back here and there's the opportunity for interplanetary contact."

"I guess."

She shrugs. "I guess that's the kind of thing I'd bring up with someone more governmental if it looks like it's going to happen."

"'By the way, their language has two names depending which country you're speaking it in!' Yeah."

"I actually meant your government, mine does not have the best track record for handling this kind of thing, but yeah."

"Oh?"

"So my country is actually a former colony, and the former colonists and their ethnic ilk are in a position of considerable systematic power over the original inhabitants, and the biggest cultural group of original inhabitants in the area where I lived called themselves the Haudenosaunee, but almost everyone knows them as the Iroquois, which is a French word derived from the Basque for 'killer people,' which was what another group that lived nearbyish called them. For example."

"...wow."

"Almost no one knows that Iroquois means that. And my country--has a deeply shitty history. But is getting better."

"Ceir and Aluvanna used to be at war with each other on and off, before the Enemy showed up and everyone had much bigger problems. We still have nasty names for each other but we don't actually call each other's entire countries by them."

"I mean, presumably you remember that they were nasty names."

"Yes, everyone is very clear on that."

"Basque is--not an obscure language, exactly, I'm pretty sure it's common knowledge that it exists, but it has a very small speaking population. The vast majority of people who call the Haudenosaunee the Iroquois have no clue that they're technically perpetuating Algonquian slurs."

"It's sort of fascinating how things work when not everyone has a single language in common..."

"English sort of seems to be heading that way. But not for good reasons, which was why I asked about the history of yours."

"Hmm?"

"Britain, the the language country originated from, has a long and rich tradition of usually-abusive colonialism. Allll over the world. And countries descended from its colonies, like mine, are pretty powerful--the United States is by some reckonings the most powerful country in the world--so."

"Aha. Yeah. If anything like that happened in Suranse, it's lost to history."

"Probably not worth worrying about at this point, then."