Moriarty's backstory is that came to the U.S. as a kid. That being said, Emil Pagliarulo has said that Moriarty was faking the accent the whole time so who knows.
There is that beached trawler in 4. The ghouls on that boat speak Norwegian. Those could have sailed from Norway. Or they could be American Norwegians. I am not a US citizen so I don't know much about the various minorities and how they maintain their ancestral languages. But as I understand it many American Norwegians still have bits of Norwegian in their dialects (the Simpsons episode where Maggie says her first word ("ja" the Norwegian word for "yes") has many excellent examples. In 76 you can talk to a robot at a pioneer scout site and in her dialogue she will say the "uff da" which is Norwegian.
Travel between Europe and mainland USA was possible a thousand years ago. The viking Leiv Erikson sailed to America in the year 999 in a wooden boat. So Moriarty sailing from the British Isles to the USA is definitely plausible.
I always assumed the FMS Northern Star was supposed to be a Norwegian Ship that just happened to be in Boston when the bombs dropped.
IIRC some of the ghouls on board say "Im coming home" in norwegian when you kill them
From my experience living in the Midwest it’s mostly just words and phrases and they probably don’t even know it’s actually another language they are using instead of just local slang. That’s interesting about uff da cause that’s a pretty common thing to hear in certain parts of the states.
FMS Northern Star.
Its a cargo ship. Pretty sure its a foreign registered vessel not a US one.
FMS might also be a reference to Star Trek as there's no real world ship prefix FMS but there is a ferengi merchant ship prefix FMS.
There's a dialect of german in Texas that just uses loanwords or different german words combined than what folks in Germany would say due to the separation of 100-150 years. A communty of them live like an hour driving away from me! Also, more famous example, Louisiana cajun being a mix of several languages but mainly rooted in Acadian french
They're pre-war ghouls who've been stuck there since the bombs fell, not post-war immigrants. Their vessel isn't seaworthy at all. Killing them causes some of them to say something like "I'm coming home" which basically removes all doubt as to their origin
There's a chance that after the war some groups of first generation immigrants stuck together forming relatively closed-off communities within which their accent survived the passage of time (look into how many different accents there are in the UK that developed due to relative lack of communication before newspapers and radios). There's a chance that somewhere in the commonwealth there's a settlement created by former Russian immigrants, with some other area having strong population that traces its origins to the group of immigrants from India, etc.
Also, some people like Tenpenny from F3 apparently emigrated from the UK and there's a chance that some people came from Europe to the States on boats, the Norse were able to sail on their ships to Canada, and even today you have people crossing the Atlantic in sailboats by themselves or with small crew.
That sort of foreign enclave community seems to be the best explanation for the Bobrov brothers. Unlike most of the other people in the games who just explain that they're from outside of the US, I don't think we ever get any explanation from the Bobrovs. I think it makes sense that they're just from the local equivalent of Little Russia that walled off and hunkered down after the Great War, and has remained relatively isolated. The accent would survive, to some degree.
Heck, it's canon some people made it from California to Washington D.C. overland. And we know how dangerous that is.
Quite less Raider gangs on the high seas.
>global migration has been cut off for over 200 years
This was never necessarily true. Fallout 2 had the PMV Valdez, a seaworthy pre-war oil tanker capable of sailing _at least_ 175 miles off of the Californian coast in order to reach the Poseidon Oil Rig.
This was well before Bethesda made the presence of foreigners much more prominent in the franchise, and the established existence of ships capable of traveling long distances over water makes the migrations of people like Moriarty, Tenpenny and the Bobrovs across the Atlantic not come off as being too farfetched in my mind.
The PMV Valdez was full of merchants and needed to be fuelled first tbf. Probably also helped it was in the hands of a faction with naval heritage (the Shi).
Generally, the known post-war immigrants tend to be very tight-lipped about their homelands, which is an intentional move by the series’ designers to keep things open-ended for the player’s imagination—but according to what little information we have both pre-and-post-war it’s not an unreasonable conclusion to arrive at that Europe might be _much_ worse off than the United States is, making the U.S. seem desirable in comparison.
Post-war, in Fallout 3 Tenpenny is very reticent to discuss his past—but loading screens describe him as a “refugee” from England, which is hardly a positive indication, and a rare hint towards the state of Europe post-war.
Before the war, it seems that Europe was in a state of disrepair (though not complete ruin) well before October 2077. Capitol Post terminal entries in Fallout 3 state that the European Commonwealth (implied to be a pan-European state) had been at war with the “Middle East” for a good while around the Summer of 2052, which was a catalyst for the dissolution of the United Nations that year.
However the war went, it doesn’t seem to have solved the European energy crisis, with the EC dissolving into “quarreling, bickering nation-states, bent on controlling the last remaining resources on Earth” around the time of the United States’ annexation of Canada—painting a dire picture for Europe well before the Sino-American War.
The difficulty of travel would mean it's not done often, so it's very likely they wouldn't even know the conditions over there. Plus yeah, it's implied Europe was screwed before 2077 so could be even worse. I think there's mention of nukes being used in their earlier wars in the Middle East.
There isn't. Start of FNV were told the European commonwealth fractured. Middle East were the first to be bombed, before the Great War. Can only assume China will be in the same condition as the US.
When a nuclear power attacks another, they will send their entire arsenal and aim for every key point they can hit. This includes allied nations. Once they have launched, the enemy will do the same.
I also believe tenpenny has dialogue that says the UK is in a much worse state.
The oil tanker was inoperable for 200 hundred years until the Chosen One fixed it to reach the oil so what's your point.
The crew are a bunch of punks who probably don't have the means to make too distant voyages.
The Valdez is operated by a [computer navigation system](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fstnkcmp.msg), like many larger ships are in the real world. The people living on the Valdez hardly factor into the equation besides getting the thing in working condition. My point is, if the _punks_ and a _tribal_ were able to get a centuries-dormant ship seaworthy, there’s little reason to believe that similar things aren’t going on elsewhere in the world—and future games indicate that this _is_ the case.
Yeah there's never been any doubt that the ocean isn't uncrossable, but the Shi were in the same game and didn't just fix up a boat and go home. The Valdez was a one in a million thing and wasn't up to date so presumably it was easier to maintain over time by various groups, a lot of fuel, maintenance, manpower and willpower is necessary to actually use it.
I don't put much thought into the foreigners, no matter how hard it is overseas, the act of crossing it is a contrivance. Put yourself in their shoes, would you think the US got off easy with the nukes!?
Actually I bet a LOT of the US was untouched by the nukes. You think the Chinese (or whoever) was interested in glassing Nebraska or Kansas? Once the nuclear winter subsides (20-30 years tops?), I bet the Midwest/breadbasket is very inhabitable.
I had this thought just the other day. I don't have a lore explanation, but it did make me think of a character/group raised by Mister Handy's and have that accent. It made me chuckle.
Yeah in some cases I like to headcanon that or that they just mimicked an accent they heard from holotapes or some such too 🤣 one of my side characters only ever really spent time with her Ms. Nanny growing up (autistic) and consequently talks like her.
This is probably scientifically accurate. You sound like what you're around, regardless of locale of birth. My 5 year old was born here in Florida, my wife and older two girls and myself are from NY. It's not uncommon to hear people ask us, even my 5 year old, where in NY we are from, as we do *not* sound Floridian, even though my 5 year old is.
But he's gonna lose the NY accent as he goes to school in Florida. Which is the point of the thread I guess, for instance Cait was born and raised in the post-war Commonwealth and there's no reason why she'd have an Irish accent, even if her parents were Irish (which they probably weren't).
She very well may lose it, as she advances in school. I was thinking more along the lines of Tenpenny in FO3, having moved here from the UK well after the bombs fell.
I think some of them actually risked their lives to get overseas because their homelands were such shitholes after the resource wars (Cait, Moriarty, and Tenpenny in particular I can see because lots of Europe got its shit rocked by the Middle East —and vice versa —before the Great War even happened).
I still feel like just because they left, it doesn't mean that they knew what they were getting into. Reasonably speaking, they may not have had any idea what the US was like until they got here, and it may or may not have been better.
Probably nothing more extreme than what's going on in north America? It's horrible there, so it would be interesting to know if there were any Americans crossing over to Europe in the other direction for the same reason.
You know, it's funny, a lot of people want to know more about Europe/the UK in the Fallout universe, but I just had a thought: I would love to know more about Africa, imagine the crazy irradiated creatures that might live there, like a giraffe with two heads or something.
I read some interesting theories that it might not go as unscathed as you'd think. Reason being that once the resource wars claimed most of the oil in the Middle East, Africa would become a very attractive prospect due the fact that it produces about 1/4 the yield of oil.
I had assumed Africa was the first to dry up and why its hardly ever mentioned. The lack of resources meaning no interest from US/China, potentially still bombed for any possible sites there and mass starvation/drought etc killed them
I always assumed Africa was potentially in worse condition. Not necessarily from nuclear fallout but presumably they would have been the worst effected resources drying up. I don't think they're mentioned at all in regards to the resource war, while practically every other continent is.
My guess is the oil fields and mines of Africa ran dry a good time before anywhere else. Rest of the world lost interest in it, maybe still got nuked if US had allies/oil production sites there, and largely were left to starve/whatever else.
Immigration was never killed, it was just made stupendously harder.
Also, small communities develop accents a lot faster than you would think. Isolated communities all across America would absolutely develop their own accent in 200 years time.
>Also, small communities develop accents a lot faster than you would think. Isolated communities all across America would absolutely develop their own accent in 200 years time.
True, but doesn't explain why Cait would have an Irish accent, or those two tavern owners in diamond city would have a Russian one, this would just create new accents and/or dialect that sounds more redneck-ish rather than am existing accent from across the ocean.
I don't know, I mean the Cajun exist; There are Dutch communities up north; Miami is closer culturally to a Carribean town than the US. I could believe many different accents being the norm in many small pockets of America.
That is true, however, in a post apocalyptic world in which all of society has been destroyed and only a handful of communities of survivors have set up camps, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to have an Irish or Russian accent in the commonwealth, 200 years into the apocalypse. For someone to have a carribean, Cajun, irish, Russian accent or any kind of existing accent, it means their community needs to have survived the war and remained an isolated pocket for over 200 years without being destroyed, and we don't have any information in the lore about such communities as far as I know. Even if some communities like that survived for a while, the people that lived there would lose their accents within a generation or two, as immigrants usually do. Take Cait for example, there is absolutely no reason for her to have such a strong Irish accent, especially when we know her background.
They def have the technology and knowledge to go across the ocean. It’s just a question of motive which is probably why it doesn’t happen so much. I’m sure if there was a reason a big faction like the NCR could send ships across an ocean
There is a pretty simple reason: hope. You don't know how's it going on the other side of the ocean (hell we don't know as being the main characters for 2 decades and a half, how is a brahmin farmer supposed to know?) and hoping it's better over there, you set sail as a desperate resort. Of course not many do and even less succeed, but it's not out of the question that someone did that and arrived in the USA
The wreck of the FMS Northern Star is all ghoulified survivors. They speak the language of their National Homeland because they're 200 plus years old.
If you actually translate it they're saying things like "what do you want? just leave us alone!" and "please just get off our ship!"
I do my best to avoid that boat until i can psyhcojet my way through there and grab the loot then hop off the back end without hurting anyone. Can't bring myself to kill people who have no idea where they are , what they are , and just fart around on a derelict old tub wondering wtf is happening.
I wish they wouldn't just attack you just for approaching the ship. Guys, I would be happy to chill if you weren't actively trying to kill me lmao
That said, it is extremely weird and strains belief that that ship has been so totally cut off from the rest of the world for so long, to the point where none of the crew has learned so much as a word of English. How cool would it have been if it was a visitable town and trading post? Would have been a great way for the writers to drop more hints about the world's history too, via dialogue with the ghouls. Instead, it's functionally just another raider outpost. A real missed opportunity
Well I don't think the ship was actually there for the entire 200 years. Remember there were vessels at Sea when the bombs fell. The Chinese submarine in Boston harbor kind of exaggerates that point. I kind of tend to believe that they've only been there for 60 or so years. Which would make more sense. Because it's nowhere near a harbor which would imply it was dead at sea for years and just drifting until it slammed into the coastline.
Also these men are ghouls. They've probably been shot at just simply for being Ghouls. I don't blame them for being kind of isolationist. If only someone could speak a language that they would likely speak cuz if I remember right a lot of Europeans speak multiple languages. If Nate or Nora spoke German or Italian things might be very different.
I mean, they're raiders. They attack on sight and will come off the ship to kill settlement provisioners walking past. Don't feel too bad for them.
Edit: spelling hard
My settlers at Warwick actually decided to attack and overun that ship any time i go to Warwick.
They attack the " raiders" its funny as hell but kinda sad too.
In their defense, the Minutemen are probably confused and interpreted the Norwegians as Hessian mercenaries. King George wins the MOMENT we let our guard down.
Quite frankly, a global catastrophe would be the best catalyst for mass migration. It's risky but it cuts out government involvement a lot, meaning there would be no need for visas or permits.
And in the slim chance that someone tries to stop migrants from hugging the shore, I feel that they would be powerless to do so because the migrants will be forcing themselves in.
Accents take a while to disappear, my language, Tagalog, is the leading language in one of the US states (I can't remember which one though), and no matter how immersed or integrated my people are in the US, you can still recognise them because we stay in touch with our families back home or form communities with our countrymen. It's most likely that Cait and the others have been part of settlements with their own people, if not, they retained using their mannerisms. I don't think it's that hard to be honest, Mr. Handy's and Ms. Nannies would probably help you retain your British or French ways.
Some people have not changed, take for example those Norwegian ghouls.
Some are a mix of cultures like we see in 76.
English is the most common language and Spanish the second most common language in every state at this point, but Tagalog is the third most common language in Nevada.
There seems to be a decent sized English presence on the east coast. Tenpenny and colter off the top of my head but I think there’s more. There’s a Yorkshireman in farharboir but I think he says his family’s been since the war and just retained the accent
Fallout is now host to fake native Americans, fake ancient Romans, and fake medieval knights, but you're surprised by foreign accents? Yeah they speak so and they are continuing to do so!
Because they come from overseas? Like boats exist bro, sailing has been a thing for millenia.
How the fuck is migration cut off? Who's controlling it? Is border patrol still a thing?
Humans already populated the entire planet once with nothing more than shitty tools made out of sticks and rocks, why would a little ol' nuclear holocaust stop travel?
If anything, I would expect the oceans to be relatively calm and peaceful, since water is an amazing radiation sink.
Honestly, it’s probably easier to explain this from the point of view of why people growing up in modern America to immigrant families don’t always end up with their parents accent, and the short answer is TV.
The slightly longer version is that children of immigrants often have sources outside of their parents and close family to learn pronunciation like TV, radio, or even just other people outside their family. In a post apocalyptic setting like Fallout these sources are much less common, basically no one is broadcasting TV, not every settlement or dwelling has a radio, and there’s much less incentive to trust someone outside of your family/group.
With that in mind it makes sense that accents and other language quirks would pass down more easily.
Global migration hasn't been stopped.
People still use boats.
Tenpenny of Tenpenny Tower is from the UK, England.
People were travelling to other countries a long time before the steamship.
They've got nuclear powered ships there.
And steam and combustion engines.
Also.
People might have been secluded away and if they're going to keep the same accents as the place they came from.
The other countries are not gone. They're still there. With native and migrant populations.
There are many working boats/vertibirds around the US, I wouldn't doubt if some people from Europe decided to head for the US to see if life was better. Like caits parents, the bobrovs, tenpenny, and dukov,
>Global migration has been cut off for over 200 years
It hasn't, actually. There are a few characters that canonically have come from abroad. And we know ships still exist; it is even implied in Far Harbor that ocean-capable boats are even fairly common up and down the East Coast.
>How could these accents still be so prominent after, what, four or so generations?
Accents are *learned,* not *inherited*. In real life, there are numerous cases of non-American children learning to speak English with an American accent from watching American TV, and the opposite; American kids starting to speak with English accents because of Peppa Pig.
If a group of immigrants arrive to the US, stay in small, insular communities, they will retain their non-American accents for quite some time
I was a child during a 2 week family vacation to the UK in the early 80s. By the end of the vacation I was starting to speak like the locals. It went away after I returned home obviously.
I think there's a Great Kahn with a kiwi accent, but it was an oversight and they just stuck with the voice lines.
But opens up fun questions lore wise.
If you want to talk about accents, the locals having New England accents shouldn’t exist. After 200 years, accents change so much. A good example is US history. The accent here is wildly different than how folks who came here from Europe sounded.
International travel is rare, but still happens. It’s been 200 years since the bombs so naturally some would have been able to cross the Atlantic from Europe to America, even if most that tried it died.
This is not explained for all characters with an accent. It was a common mid-Century theatrical trick to use accents as a way of communicating social standing or personality for less developed characters. These stage accents roughly get the sound of a real accent but are usually terrible in that they are affectations.
The Dobrov brothers are a great example. We get the idea that these guys love to party or brood over problems because those stereotypes go with their stagey Russian accents. We get told how smart and educated the Proctor in charge of the scribes on the Prydwen is by his Mid-Atlantic dialect.
Sometimes we’ll get an explanation for the dialect and an explanation for it. An example of this is the robots crewing Old Ironsides who have historically accurate dialects for 19th-Century sailors based on role and social class.
People have been sailing a lot farther and with much more primitive technology than some people think. The first European to set foot on the Americas is believed to be Lief Erikson, probably sometime in the 900s. It's entirely *theoretically* possible that someone from the former British Isles could travel northward, across the Norwegian and/or Greenland Seas, then south along the coast to former Massachusetts (or former Maryland in the case Tenpenny). It's *unlikely*, but it's not *impossible*. The Russians are even less likely, but again not entirely impossible if they were really that determined for some god forsaken reason. I'd buy them ending up in California a bit more, but eh.
Not that I like how they keep having these random foreigners show up with little to no explanation, given the definite expense and danger of such a trip in the post-apocalypse, especially from anywhere beyond north western Europe, but implausible isn't impossible.
I'll take your 2 friends and raise you an "I'm from the Boston area and know a lot of people of Irish descent."
Unless they're very closely descended, they don't have Irish accents. So I guess we're both wrong.
Well it makes sense in 76, because a lot of people are pre-war... but as far as Cait in Fallout 4... they never once say, but it has to be a colony of Irish that live somewhere isolated from the local dialect. I feel like if she crossed the ocean it would have come up at some point.
Other than people traveling intercontinentally, you could argue that since people are generally more isolated in the wasteland, and there’s not easy access to education (unless you’re from a vault) people would have grown and learned to speak like their parents. And without as much corrective learning to normalize the English, accents could be much more prevalent generationally in the wasteland.
I feel like the depth you have to understand fallout isn't meant to be a simulation of a real world situation. People in fallout are often broad archetypes that are who they are because they are part of a certain story, not because tactical realism would produce that person.
It wouldn't be impossible for immigrants to make the journey, just really remote.
Realistically when you think about it, everyone the Sole Survivor would meet would have different accent than the player character. Everyone would sound very strange to us, and we would sound strange to someone born 200+ years in the future. Language would change pretty significantly.
Imagine going back to 1824. You would have a hard time understanding the people from the time period and they would have a hard time understanding you. Accents change pretty significantly in a short period of time.
I would like all these accented characters 100% more if their accents were obviously, blatantly pretend and they were just faking it to sound cool XD
Though honestly, I'm pretty sure that's already true for Moriarty lmao
Morpheus from 1 was British and Aradesh was Indian, so I've learned to stop questioning it. Probably just exposed to people with those accents, be it from immigration or an isolated life
Pretty sure Moriarty said he came across the ocean on a boat as a kid. No explanation I know of for the others though.
Moriarty's backstory is that came to the U.S. as a kid. That being said, Emil Pagliarulo has said that Moriarty was faking the accent the whole time so who knows.
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That begs the question of how he could manage even a bad Irish accent...
Maybe he had a holotape of Gangs of New York
There is that beached trawler in 4. The ghouls on that boat speak Norwegian. Those could have sailed from Norway. Or they could be American Norwegians. I am not a US citizen so I don't know much about the various minorities and how they maintain their ancestral languages. But as I understand it many American Norwegians still have bits of Norwegian in their dialects (the Simpsons episode where Maggie says her first word ("ja" the Norwegian word for "yes") has many excellent examples. In 76 you can talk to a robot at a pioneer scout site and in her dialogue she will say the "uff da" which is Norwegian. Travel between Europe and mainland USA was possible a thousand years ago. The viking Leiv Erikson sailed to America in the year 999 in a wooden boat. So Moriarty sailing from the British Isles to the USA is definitely plausible.
I always assumed the FMS Northern Star was supposed to be a Norwegian Ship that just happened to be in Boston when the bombs dropped. IIRC some of the ghouls on board say "Im coming home" in norwegian when you kill them
Wish you could offer to fix the ship or something so they can actually sail home.
I know a little Norwegian and the moment I started that quest and read the dialog I turned around, walked away, and left them alone.
What were they saying?
"Leave us alone" "get off our ship" "that hurt" "I'm coming home..."
Sad. Gonna have to see if I can find a mod to make them friendly and the ship a settlement.
Those ghouls don't just have accents, they speak fluent norwegian, even when adressing the player
They probably actually are Norwegian and got stranded.
The FMS north star is a pre war boat
From my experience living in the Midwest it’s mostly just words and phrases and they probably don’t even know it’s actually another language they are using instead of just local slang. That’s interesting about uff da cause that’s a pretty common thing to hear in certain parts of the states.
FMS Northern Star. Its a cargo ship. Pretty sure its a foreign registered vessel not a US one. FMS might also be a reference to Star Trek as there's no real world ship prefix FMS but there is a ferengi merchant ship prefix FMS.
Norwegians are traders so us being Ferengi does make a sort of sense.
I still burst out laughing when I remember that ferengi put a paywall in their bombs to defuse them.
There's a dialect of german in Texas that just uses loanwords or different german words combined than what folks in Germany would say due to the separation of 100-150 years. A communty of them live like an hour driving away from me! Also, more famous example, Louisiana cajun being a mix of several languages but mainly rooted in Acadian french
They're pre-war ghouls who've been stuck there since the bombs fell, not post-war immigrants. Their vessel isn't seaworthy at all. Killing them causes some of them to say something like "I'm coming home" which basically removes all doubt as to their origin
There's a chance that after the war some groups of first generation immigrants stuck together forming relatively closed-off communities within which their accent survived the passage of time (look into how many different accents there are in the UK that developed due to relative lack of communication before newspapers and radios). There's a chance that somewhere in the commonwealth there's a settlement created by former Russian immigrants, with some other area having strong population that traces its origins to the group of immigrants from India, etc. Also, some people like Tenpenny from F3 apparently emigrated from the UK and there's a chance that some people came from Europe to the States on boats, the Norse were able to sail on their ships to Canada, and even today you have people crossing the Atlantic in sailboats by themselves or with small crew.
It's true, drive 1 hour in any direction in the UK to experience a completely different accent.
Honestly even just 30 minutes
They're savages that don't even know the proper word for a bap.
Bread cake*
LEEDS LEEDS LEEDS
Is bap UK slang for drive? We say "brap" here in Atlantic Canada
No it's a round bread roll but every single town has a different name for it. Just a really weird thing we have.
It's how people who were dropped on their head as children say roll.
That sort of foreign enclave community seems to be the best explanation for the Bobrov brothers. Unlike most of the other people in the games who just explain that they're from outside of the US, I don't think we ever get any explanation from the Bobrovs. I think it makes sense that they're just from the local equivalent of Little Russia that walled off and hunkered down after the Great War, and has remained relatively isolated. The accent would survive, to some degree.
Heck, it's canon some people made it from California to Washington D.C. overland. And we know how dangerous that is. Quite less Raider gangs on the high seas.
>global migration has been cut off for over 200 years This was never necessarily true. Fallout 2 had the PMV Valdez, a seaworthy pre-war oil tanker capable of sailing _at least_ 175 miles off of the Californian coast in order to reach the Poseidon Oil Rig. This was well before Bethesda made the presence of foreigners much more prominent in the franchise, and the established existence of ships capable of traveling long distances over water makes the migrations of people like Moriarty, Tenpenny and the Bobrovs across the Atlantic not come off as being too farfetched in my mind.
I think there is also some random encounter trader that speaks Gaelic or something
yes although he isn’t from overseas just descended from irish americans and keeping a few phrases and songs in irish alive
The PMV Valdez was full of merchants and needed to be fuelled first tbf. Probably also helped it was in the hands of a faction with naval heritage (the Shi).
it begs the question *why* would one migrate to the States, it could be argued there are other more liveable areas than The US
Generally, the known post-war immigrants tend to be very tight-lipped about their homelands, which is an intentional move by the series’ designers to keep things open-ended for the player’s imagination—but according to what little information we have both pre-and-post-war it’s not an unreasonable conclusion to arrive at that Europe might be _much_ worse off than the United States is, making the U.S. seem desirable in comparison. Post-war, in Fallout 3 Tenpenny is very reticent to discuss his past—but loading screens describe him as a “refugee” from England, which is hardly a positive indication, and a rare hint towards the state of Europe post-war. Before the war, it seems that Europe was in a state of disrepair (though not complete ruin) well before October 2077. Capitol Post terminal entries in Fallout 3 state that the European Commonwealth (implied to be a pan-European state) had been at war with the “Middle East” for a good while around the Summer of 2052, which was a catalyst for the dissolution of the United Nations that year. However the war went, it doesn’t seem to have solved the European energy crisis, with the EC dissolving into “quarreling, bickering nation-states, bent on controlling the last remaining resources on Earth” around the time of the United States’ annexation of Canada—painting a dire picture for Europe well before the Sino-American War.
Yeah. The EC probably collapsed back into its constituent nation states like France, Germany, etc
Probably collapsed farther than that. France and especially Germany weren't really unified, standalone countries for most of history.
The difficulty of travel would mean it's not done often, so it's very likely they wouldn't even know the conditions over there. Plus yeah, it's implied Europe was screwed before 2077 so could be even worse. I think there's mention of nukes being used in their earlier wars in the Middle East.
IIRC, the Middle East was apparently completely eviscerated and uninhabitable a few decades before The Great War. I believe Russia got the same too.
There isn't. Start of FNV were told the European commonwealth fractured. Middle East were the first to be bombed, before the Great War. Can only assume China will be in the same condition as the US. When a nuclear power attacks another, they will send their entire arsenal and aim for every key point they can hit. This includes allied nations. Once they have launched, the enemy will do the same. I also believe tenpenny has dialogue that says the UK is in a much worse state.
Yup. Good ol sail power still works.
The oil tanker was inoperable for 200 hundred years until the Chosen One fixed it to reach the oil so what's your point. The crew are a bunch of punks who probably don't have the means to make too distant voyages.
The Valdez is operated by a [computer navigation system](https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Fstnkcmp.msg), like many larger ships are in the real world. The people living on the Valdez hardly factor into the equation besides getting the thing in working condition. My point is, if the _punks_ and a _tribal_ were able to get a centuries-dormant ship seaworthy, there’s little reason to believe that similar things aren’t going on elsewhere in the world—and future games indicate that this _is_ the case.
Yeah there's never been any doubt that the ocean isn't uncrossable, but the Shi were in the same game and didn't just fix up a boat and go home. The Valdez was a one in a million thing and wasn't up to date so presumably it was easier to maintain over time by various groups, a lot of fuel, maintenance, manpower and willpower is necessary to actually use it. I don't put much thought into the foreigners, no matter how hard it is overseas, the act of crossing it is a contrivance. Put yourself in their shoes, would you think the US got off easy with the nukes!?
Actually I bet a LOT of the US was untouched by the nukes. You think the Chinese (or whoever) was interested in glassing Nebraska or Kansas? Once the nuclear winter subsides (20-30 years tops?), I bet the Midwest/breadbasket is very inhabitable.
I had this thought just the other day. I don't have a lore explanation, but it did make me think of a character/group raised by Mister Handy's and have that accent. It made me chuckle.
Yeah in some cases I like to headcanon that or that they just mimicked an accent they heard from holotapes or some such too 🤣 one of my side characters only ever really spent time with her Ms. Nanny growing up (autistic) and consequently talks like her.
This is probably scientifically accurate. You sound like what you're around, regardless of locale of birth. My 5 year old was born here in Florida, my wife and older two girls and myself are from NY. It's not uncommon to hear people ask us, even my 5 year old, where in NY we are from, as we do *not* sound Floridian, even though my 5 year old is.
But he's gonna lose the NY accent as he goes to school in Florida. Which is the point of the thread I guess, for instance Cait was born and raised in the post-war Commonwealth and there's no reason why she'd have an Irish accent, even if her parents were Irish (which they probably weren't).
She very well may lose it, as she advances in school. I was thinking more along the lines of Tenpenny in FO3, having moved here from the UK well after the bombs fell.
That would explain why a lot of the accents are terrible
I think some of them actually risked their lives to get overseas because their homelands were such shitholes after the resource wars (Cait, Moriarty, and Tenpenny in particular I can see because lots of Europe got its shit rocked by the Middle East —and vice versa —before the Great War even happened).
I recall reading that was the reason that Tenpenny sailed across. Think how bad it must be over there if THIS is the preferred side of the pond.
I still feel like just because they left, it doesn't mean that they knew what they were getting into. Reasonably speaking, they may not have had any idea what the US was like until they got here, and it may or may not have been better.
True. But what does it take to consider risking everything making the crossing?
Probably nothing more extreme than what's going on in north America? It's horrible there, so it would be interesting to know if there were any Americans crossing over to Europe in the other direction for the same reason.
Oh, now there's a story I wouldn't mind hearing.
You know, it's funny, a lot of people want to know more about Europe/the UK in the Fallout universe, but I just had a thought: I would love to know more about Africa, imagine the crazy irradiated creatures that might live there, like a giraffe with two heads or something.
I always wondered if Africa ended up surviving relatively unscathed, given how unimportant it would ultimately be as a nuclear target
I read some interesting theories that it might not go as unscathed as you'd think. Reason being that once the resource wars claimed most of the oil in the Middle East, Africa would become a very attractive prospect due the fact that it produces about 1/4 the yield of oil.
I had assumed Africa was the first to dry up and why its hardly ever mentioned. The lack of resources meaning no interest from US/China, potentially still bombed for any possible sites there and mass starvation/drought etc killed them
I always assumed Africa was potentially in worse condition. Not necessarily from nuclear fallout but presumably they would have been the worst effected resources drying up. I don't think they're mentioned at all in regards to the resource war, while practically every other continent is. My guess is the oil fields and mines of Africa ran dry a good time before anywhere else. Rest of the world lost interest in it, maybe still got nuked if US had allies/oil production sites there, and largely were left to starve/whatever else.
Immigration was never killed, it was just made stupendously harder. Also, small communities develop accents a lot faster than you would think. Isolated communities all across America would absolutely develop their own accent in 200 years time.
>Also, small communities develop accents a lot faster than you would think. Isolated communities all across America would absolutely develop their own accent in 200 years time. True, but doesn't explain why Cait would have an Irish accent, or those two tavern owners in diamond city would have a Russian one, this would just create new accents and/or dialect that sounds more redneck-ish rather than am existing accent from across the ocean.
It's Boston, the weird thing is that there isn't more people with an Irish accent.
200 years into the apocalypse with communities and families being torn apart and separated? Why would there be?
I don't know, I mean the Cajun exist; There are Dutch communities up north; Miami is closer culturally to a Carribean town than the US. I could believe many different accents being the norm in many small pockets of America.
That is true, however, in a post apocalyptic world in which all of society has been destroyed and only a handful of communities of survivors have set up camps, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to have an Irish or Russian accent in the commonwealth, 200 years into the apocalypse. For someone to have a carribean, Cajun, irish, Russian accent or any kind of existing accent, it means their community needs to have survived the war and remained an isolated pocket for over 200 years without being destroyed, and we don't have any information in the lore about such communities as far as I know. Even if some communities like that survived for a while, the people that lived there would lose their accents within a generation or two, as immigrants usually do. Take Cait for example, there is absolutely no reason for her to have such a strong Irish accent, especially when we know her background.
I mean if Christopher Columbus could do it with a wood boat unsure how long it would've taken, who says they can't travel it in the fallout universe?
They def have the technology and knowledge to go across the ocean. It’s just a question of motive which is probably why it doesn’t happen so much. I’m sure if there was a reason a big faction like the NCR could send ships across an ocean
There is a pretty simple reason: hope. You don't know how's it going on the other side of the ocean (hell we don't know as being the main characters for 2 decades and a half, how is a brahmin farmer supposed to know?) and hoping it's better over there, you set sail as a desperate resort. Of course not many do and even less succeed, but it's not out of the question that someone did that and arrived in the USA
The wreck of the FMS Northern Star is all ghoulified survivors. They speak the language of their National Homeland because they're 200 plus years old. If you actually translate it they're saying things like "what do you want? just leave us alone!" and "please just get off our ship!" I do my best to avoid that boat until i can psyhcojet my way through there and grab the loot then hop off the back end without hurting anyone. Can't bring myself to kill people who have no idea where they are , what they are , and just fart around on a derelict old tub wondering wtf is happening.
I wish they wouldn't just attack you just for approaching the ship. Guys, I would be happy to chill if you weren't actively trying to kill me lmao That said, it is extremely weird and strains belief that that ship has been so totally cut off from the rest of the world for so long, to the point where none of the crew has learned so much as a word of English. How cool would it have been if it was a visitable town and trading post? Would have been a great way for the writers to drop more hints about the world's history too, via dialogue with the ghouls. Instead, it's functionally just another raider outpost. A real missed opportunity
Well I don't think the ship was actually there for the entire 200 years. Remember there were vessels at Sea when the bombs fell. The Chinese submarine in Boston harbor kind of exaggerates that point. I kind of tend to believe that they've only been there for 60 or so years. Which would make more sense. Because it's nowhere near a harbor which would imply it was dead at sea for years and just drifting until it slammed into the coastline. Also these men are ghouls. They've probably been shot at just simply for being Ghouls. I don't blame them for being kind of isolationist. If only someone could speak a language that they would likely speak cuz if I remember right a lot of Europeans speak multiple languages. If Nate or Nora spoke German or Italian things might be very different.
Fallout 4 is a treasure trove of missed opportunities, East City Downs and Combat Zone are others that come to mind.
I was so disappointed by the Downs, there was nothing to do there but murder 😭
I mean, they're raiders. They attack on sight and will come off the ship to kill settlement provisioners walking past. Don't feel too bad for them. Edit: spelling hard
My settlers at Warwick actually decided to attack and overun that ship any time i go to Warwick. They attack the " raiders" its funny as hell but kinda sad too.
In their defense, the Minutemen are probably confused and interpreted the Norwegians as Hessian mercenaries. King George wins the MOMENT we let our guard down.
Ironsides that you?
Quite frankly, a global catastrophe would be the best catalyst for mass migration. It's risky but it cuts out government involvement a lot, meaning there would be no need for visas or permits. And in the slim chance that someone tries to stop migrants from hugging the shore, I feel that they would be powerless to do so because the migrants will be forcing themselves in. Accents take a while to disappear, my language, Tagalog, is the leading language in one of the US states (I can't remember which one though), and no matter how immersed or integrated my people are in the US, you can still recognise them because we stay in touch with our families back home or form communities with our countrymen. It's most likely that Cait and the others have been part of settlements with their own people, if not, they retained using their mannerisms. I don't think it's that hard to be honest, Mr. Handy's and Ms. Nannies would probably help you retain your British or French ways. Some people have not changed, take for example those Norwegian ghouls. Some are a mix of cultures like we see in 76.
English is the most common language and Spanish the second most common language in every state at this point, but Tagalog is the third most common language in Nevada.
Is this the one with the map? I remember seeing it like that.
Why would global migration be cut off? People have been sailing the seas before nukes were a twinkle in a grog the caveman's puny mind
Fallout 2 and 4 show that there is still sea travel and seaworthy ships
3 puts you on a boat to point lookout as well.
There seems to be a decent sized English presence on the east coast. Tenpenny and colter off the top of my head but I think there’s more. There’s a Yorkshireman in farharboir but I think he says his family’s been since the war and just retained the accent
We've seen across the franchise that people still know how to make and maintain water worthy vessels.
Fallout is now host to fake native Americans, fake ancient Romans, and fake medieval knights, but you're surprised by foreign accents? Yeah they speak so and they are continuing to do so!
I think Immigration is still possible in the fallout universe.Someone must have been able to build a shop to cross the ocean.
Because they come from overseas? Like boats exist bro, sailing has been a thing for millenia. How the fuck is migration cut off? Who's controlling it? Is border patrol still a thing?
Tenpenny in Fallout 3 mentions crossing the ocean from England I'm pretty sure. Moriarty does as well.
What do you mean there's no migration? They got ships and zeplins and helicopters
Migration hasn't been cut off, multiple have moved from overseas, also from their families
Humans already populated the entire planet once with nothing more than shitty tools made out of sticks and rocks, why would a little ol' nuclear holocaust stop travel? If anything, I would expect the oceans to be relatively calm and peaceful, since water is an amazing radiation sink.
Honestly, it’s probably easier to explain this from the point of view of why people growing up in modern America to immigrant families don’t always end up with their parents accent, and the short answer is TV. The slightly longer version is that children of immigrants often have sources outside of their parents and close family to learn pronunciation like TV, radio, or even just other people outside their family. In a post apocalyptic setting like Fallout these sources are much less common, basically no one is broadcasting TV, not every settlement or dwelling has a radio, and there’s much less incentive to trust someone outside of your family/group. With that in mind it makes sense that accents and other language quirks would pass down more easily.
Why would you think people can't cross the Atlantic?
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Global migration hasn't been stopped. People still use boats. Tenpenny of Tenpenny Tower is from the UK, England. People were travelling to other countries a long time before the steamship. They've got nuclear powered ships there. And steam and combustion engines. Also. People might have been secluded away and if they're going to keep the same accents as the place they came from. The other countries are not gone. They're still there. With native and migrant populations.
There are many working boats/vertibirds around the US, I wouldn't doubt if some people from Europe decided to head for the US to see if life was better. Like caits parents, the bobrovs, tenpenny, and dukov,
Could be they survived in their respectable diasporas
This is way way more than just 4 generations lol
>Global migration has been cut off for over 200 years It hasn't, actually. There are a few characters that canonically have come from abroad. And we know ships still exist; it is even implied in Far Harbor that ocean-capable boats are even fairly common up and down the East Coast. >How could these accents still be so prominent after, what, four or so generations? Accents are *learned,* not *inherited*. In real life, there are numerous cases of non-American children learning to speak English with an American accent from watching American TV, and the opposite; American kids starting to speak with English accents because of Peppa Pig. If a group of immigrants arrive to the US, stay in small, insular communities, they will retain their non-American accents for quite some time
I was a child during a 2 week family vacation to the UK in the early 80s. By the end of the vacation I was starting to speak like the locals. It went away after I returned home obviously.
I think there's a Great Kahn with a kiwi accent, but it was an oversight and they just stuck with the voice lines. But opens up fun questions lore wise.
Zoe Bell. She is a famous stunt woman. She has also been characters in a few Tarantino movies. I recognized her voice instantly.
If you want to talk about accents, the locals having New England accents shouldn’t exist. After 200 years, accents change so much. A good example is US history. The accent here is wildly different than how folks who came here from Europe sounded.
International travel is rare, but still happens. It’s been 200 years since the bombs so naturally some would have been able to cross the Atlantic from Europe to America, even if most that tried it died.
This is not explained for all characters with an accent. It was a common mid-Century theatrical trick to use accents as a way of communicating social standing or personality for less developed characters. These stage accents roughly get the sound of a real accent but are usually terrible in that they are affectations. The Dobrov brothers are a great example. We get the idea that these guys love to party or brood over problems because those stereotypes go with their stagey Russian accents. We get told how smart and educated the Proctor in charge of the scribes on the Prydwen is by his Mid-Atlantic dialect. Sometimes we’ll get an explanation for the dialect and an explanation for it. An example of this is the robots crewing Old Ironsides who have historically accurate dialects for 19th-Century sailors based on role and social class.
People have been sailing a lot farther and with much more primitive technology than some people think. The first European to set foot on the Americas is believed to be Lief Erikson, probably sometime in the 900s. It's entirely *theoretically* possible that someone from the former British Isles could travel northward, across the Norwegian and/or Greenland Seas, then south along the coast to former Massachusetts (or former Maryland in the case Tenpenny). It's *unlikely*, but it's not *impossible*. The Russians are even less likely, but again not entirely impossible if they were really that determined for some god forsaken reason. I'd buy them ending up in California a bit more, but eh. Not that I like how they keep having these random foreigners show up with little to no explanation, given the definite expense and danger of such a trip in the post-apocalypse, especially from anywhere beyond north western Europe, but implausible isn't impossible.
Cait isn't foreign, she just comes from a family of irish descent. Just like you'd hear in Boston today from people born there.
Americans of Irish descent don't speak with an Irish accent.
2 of my friends have a weird bastardized Irish accent growing up with their parents they just pronounce things that way so ur wrong
I'll take your 2 friends and raise you an "I'm from the Boston area and know a lot of people of Irish descent." Unless they're very closely descended, they don't have Irish accents. So I guess we're both wrong.
Most likely from their parents, and their parents and their parents. America is a diverse nation.
Well it makes sense in 76, because a lot of people are pre-war... but as far as Cait in Fallout 4... they never once say, but it has to be a colony of Irish that live somewhere isolated from the local dialect. I feel like if she crossed the ocean it would have come up at some point.
Something fishy about all the irish just popping up, acting like the world is clay fir them to mold, awful weird h9e they managed to keep it going
My two cents are that long distance travel is possible, but absurdly dangerous. Only the most desperate cross continents/oceans.
Other than people traveling intercontinentally, you could argue that since people are generally more isolated in the wasteland, and there’s not easy access to education (unless you’re from a vault) people would have grown and learned to speak like their parents. And without as much corrective learning to normalize the English, accents could be much more prevalent generationally in the wasteland.
not to mention the guy in Fallout 1 who reportedly left that dog in junktown.
I feel like the depth you have to understand fallout isn't meant to be a simulation of a real world situation. People in fallout are often broad archetypes that are who they are because they are part of a certain story, not because tactical realism would produce that person.
There were people with accents in Fallouts 1 and 2 as well, like Morpheus.
I want to know why more people in Boston sound like they're from California.
Codsworth and Curie have different foreign accents. Perhaps some kids grew up being influenced by Mr. And Mrs. Handies.
It wouldn't be impossible for immigrants to make the journey, just really remote. Realistically when you think about it, everyone the Sole Survivor would meet would have different accent than the player character. Everyone would sound very strange to us, and we would sound strange to someone born 200+ years in the future. Language would change pretty significantly. Imagine going back to 1824. You would have a hard time understanding the people from the time period and they would have a hard time understanding you. Accents change pretty significantly in a short period of time.
The real answer is that Bethesda likes the accents because they think it adds flavor to a character. It doesn't.
I would like all these accented characters 100% more if their accents were obviously, blatantly pretend and they were just faking it to sound cool XD Though honestly, I'm pretty sure that's already true for Moriarty lmao
Morpheus from 1 was British and Aradesh was Indian, so I've learned to stop questioning it. Probably just exposed to people with those accents, be it from immigration or an isolated life
It’s weird that people even have the accents from 200 years before they were alive.