Often, when science fiction writers or television producers create a futuristic world, little or no attention is paid to the language that the inhabitants of that world will speak. Usually the language is never mentioned, or the native languages ​​are translated into English through some form of external force, like the babel fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or C-3PO. The world of Joss Whedon's short-lived television series, Firefly, and subsequent film, Serenity, is created with such attention to detail and creativity that its cult status is easily understandable. The background story of this space western is that the United States and China were the two superpowers that expanded into space to colonize terraformed planets, their influence over hundreds of years forming a combined culture containing characteristics of both. For example, there is a dinner table scene during the pilot episode where the crew members eat with chopsticks and drink from Western-style tin cups, and the Alliance flag is depicted like the U.S. flags and China superimposed on each other. (1, 4) This combination of cultural and political artifacts is not the only result of this dual influence. One of the most pronounced aspects of the Chinese influence is in the near-universal bilingualism throughout the Firefly universe, referred to on the show and by fans simply as the "verse". The relationship between English and Chinese in the show demonstrates some aspects of the extended diglossia defined by Fishman as a single society uses two or more codes in which each performs "functions distinct from those considered appropriate for the other" and both are "non-conflicting " in a stable environment. (2, 85)Before looking more closely at the way the language is represented...... middle of paper ......both Chinese and English can be interpreted as a situation of diglossia with bilingualism, but as a situation in which The H variety is not necessarily used in positions of authority, but is used to write and index prestige. It is logical that this dichotomy, in which both English and Chinese are simultaneously of high and low prestige, exists in a situation where the concept of language and its execution have been brought forward by writers and creators who may not be trained in linguistic theory. , bu for which the mixing of English and Chinese was used to signal Sino-American hegemony and where the dialogue needed to be accessible to an English-speaking audience. But then again, perhaps a linguistic interaction similar to the one illustrated in Firefly could occur hundreds of years from now, and a new category of diglossia will be added to the academic discourse of the future..