Sort of a adjunct to this...
One thing I was contemplating is randomly generating a language for a race with some common words. Until your race gets full communications, the messages would basically be gibberish. I'd probably limit the wordset to start. Words like spaceship, laser, die foul human. The usual.
Generating a word list is fairly simple. I'm doing that for alien names and race names as it is. Extending that to words is easy.
Hmmm Maybe what I need to do is come up with a dozen different sets of rules. Then mix and match between them I.E. conjugating uses set 2, plural uses set 6, sentence structure is set 3. That might be random enough to simulate what I want.
Mindless rambling follows:
As the player increases their understanding of the alien language (it runs 0-100%) I'd like to substitute out English words for the alien. Of course that means more tables in the database.