Sociological thoughts on the Fallout universe

[Silberio]

So, I've since long thought about this regarding the Fallout series/franchise.

I'm pretty much a huge history nerd (I might not be GOOD at remembering everything, but I love history) and in that, also sociology and the whole more psychological aspects, because they're all connected; societies makes history and history makes society.

Now, many find this pretty much an useless practice because we're talking about a fictional realm, but I find joy in making in-depth observations of games/movies. Mainly games, because I get to parttake in the reality of the game.

Fallout interests me mostly, because it's the only game franchise I've been completely submerged into and I haven't had the need to explore the lore from outside sources, everything is kinda seamlessly inserted in the game world. You don't have to have much background info on the game to be able to get a good understanding of the game universe. (DISCLAIMER: this is my personal opinion, feel free to leave hate mail and DDOS attacks, I don't give a frak)

What I find really interesting, is to think about the whole background of the post nuclear apocalypse world. The way people act, how people have evolved, adapted, etc. How has the language adapted? How did religion evolute and add itself into the society of it's day? What about music and arts?

I think everyone that played FO:NV can remember the never-ending gripe about the wheather, and the everlasting wish for a nuclear winter. What is the nuclear winter? It's not something we know about, but people in the wasteland know it very well, because it's their everyay life. Born into it; we're just tourists.

One thing I also kind of humorously ponder about is, do people in the wasteland use their own period specific insults? We all know what "bullshit" is, but say bulls died out and we only got Brahmin, if people still use the word bullshit, what is their knowledge of what a bull is? Or do they use brahminshit instead?
It's kind of a fun thought, because you could take in consideration how our English uses words the major consensus (not counting the linguistically nerdy, or in most cases, pretentious crowd) knows the context meaning of, but not necesarily what the word actually means in itself.

What do you think?

Also, am I the only over-analizing brahminshit like this, or is it somewhat genuinely interesting?

[MrFancypants]

Pretty sure the latest FO game mentions brahminshit in one dialogue early on. I thought that was a nice little thing that helps with immersion.

Interesting idea to think about linguistics in the post-apocalpyse setting though. For gaming conveniene the language is pretty much unchanged. Pretty sure that such a major event and the big time lag would have a more dramatic effect. Most of the people surviving nuclear war would be those who live in remote areas. So I guess as a baseline you'd have some rural accent. With people mostly concerned with surviving and a lot of knowledge being lost (most eletronics dead, facilities to produce them destroyed, many books burned) a lot of words, especially those borrowed from other languages, might disappear or be simplified.

Anyway, if you like language as an aspect of gaming take a look at Outcast. It is a pretty old game, but I think they recently re-released it with better graphics. That game had a pretty big alien vocabularly.

[Schofield]

This is something I've thought about quite extensively, although usually from other works. Obviously we have to take into account the fact that they have to use standard English to communicate with us, but I wonder if many words would have their own counterparts in the Fallout universe.

---Will post the rest when I'm able---

[FileTrekker]

Don't we use lots of words in our modern language that aren't actually words we necessarily understand, a lot of it is evolved from Roman and Greek terms that we would no longer use or understand;

I imagine it much the same in Fallout's universe, they use the word Bullshit because there's not a lot of scope for language to change that radically in the 200 years or so since the war, and although people might not know what a bull is, they know that 'bullshit' means 'rubbish' or a lie, not that it means shit from a bull, if you know what I mean.

[Silberio]

^ That's pretty much what I've thought, seems like that's the general course languages evolve. Although, as MrFancypants mentions it, I think it's Mama Murphy that says brahminshit about something early on when you discover the distressed group.

[Mr. Matt]

Few people know that the word 'mortgage' literally means 'dead pledge'. As FT says, words continue to be used long after their meaning is forgotten. The same is true of most phrases and idioms, most of which are nonsensical if you aren't familiar with them. Hell, most of them are used incorrectly anyway. Carpe diem means the exact opposite of 'live like there's no tomorrow' (or YOLO, for you millennials), which is what most people mean when they say it.

[Emperor Benedictine]

The lack of any linguistic evolution is a convenience, but aren't most of the English-speaking characters supposed to be descended from vault dwellers, anyway?

The fact that they still use idioms like "carved up like a Christmas turkey" is a little harder to swallow.