This has been bothering me for a while now: how is there a character with an Isish accent? Or Brittish or Russian for that matter?

I mean, Cait probably isn't from Ireland. If she were, I would expect the whole sea-voyage thing would have been included in the life story she spills all over you.

So what gives?

I prefer to think that somewhere in New England there is a town populated by the survivors of Vault 98, which was in turn populated entirely of first-generation Irish immigrants.

Perhaps similar national-origin vaults existed all across the United States, explaining the spattering of odd accents in a world where travel across the sea is so unlikely.

Accents will prevail and even strengthen in groups and even families for a range of cultural and group identification reasons.

That's why strong accents exist in society despite neutralising influences such as TV or an interchange of differing accents.

In a post-apocalyptic world, reduced population pools will only encourage a diversity in accents, not reduce it.

Oh, and it's a game

Goes back to the original Fallout titles, many of the characters, like Sulik, Aradesh, Tandi (who even changed accents between Fallout 1 and 2), had accents. So it is just a part of the Fallout theme that the cultural and ethnic variations have remained very distinct in the post-apocalyptic world.

As a philosopher once said, it is not the land we live in but the language we speak that is our homeland, even if some people where born in America, if there ancestors spoke another language, that language (and in turn the accent they get when speaking English) could inherit down the line to post nuclear days.

Then of course there are weird variations, like the band of raider ghouls that speak Norwegian because...well they are Norwegians from the pre war times.

Stop with those stupid topics.

Does this game ever claimed to be realistic? It is a freaking parody of 50s, nothing in Fallout 1 was rational, why would it suddenly become?

This game is supposed to play out like 50s comic book about villains and heroes. How was realism and logic doing there?

Except it is realistic that, in a world without mass media where most humans live in small clusters of family units or like-minded inviduals, pockets of dialects and accents will exist in greater number. Mass communication and huge intermingling with different groups can make different speech patterns blend together, but these wastelanders live in a world where you can live your life in relative isolation for large periods of time. Cait's family likely only had regular contact with traders and raiders, for example, and that would have been infrequent enough for their own mode of speech to be predominant for them.

Small isolated communities would likely develop there own accents over time, if not outright regional languages. So a small isolated community of people with Irish accents are likely to produce children with Irish accents.

Its actually more surprising that everybody in the wasteland is still speaking the same language.

So they were Norwegian? Could of sworn they were Russian XD hard to differentiate mid gunfire

They do have boat technology in fallout, people can come to america from anywhere.

You mean like american english as opposed to native american languages?

*giggle*

Come on... someone had to...

I did sort of wonder that about Moriarty in FO3.

But, in the end....

Why's that a stupid topic?

You're not interested, that's fine, but others possibly are. If you think that to be a stupid topic, simply don't look.

I for one asked myself that accent question in previous games. Where the hell do they come from? Perfectly valid, even in a fantasy setting.

Not to mention airships and vertibirds.

There are a lot of Irish in Boston. If they hid together during the war and it's aftermath then their accents should still be intact.

I'm disappointed that there's no South Boston accent.

Tenpenny and Moriarty from Fallout 3 are known to have come from other countries.

ITs very possible people like Dukov, the Bobrov brothers in Diamond city, and others did the same as well.

This. There was a whole discussion in my mass communications class about this and you hit the nail on the head. The US is the most diverse nation on the planet so post-apocalyptic America with no tv and only local radio will translate into a lot of accents *pun*.

I was really hoping for some backstory regarding European immigrants. Missed opportunity on Bethesda's part.
Perhaps there is still a chance for some DLC exploring this. Perhaps it could even make use of all that empty space just off the coast.

In Honest Hearts we meet several tribal groups who have developed their own languages.

If you think everyone in the US speaks with one accent you have not traveled across the states. Different accents from one state to the next and even in different areas of the same state or the same city. Just take a stroll through Los Angeles' China Town or Manhattan's Little Italy. Appalachian areas of Kentucky or TN have very different accents than Middle or eastern TN.

We have a very diverse variety of accents. Even here in Alaska from one village to the next we have entire different languages spoken. Russian is spoken exclusively in some villages. Yupik in others, and many different dialects of Athabaskan. I won't even go into the number or Irish and Korean and German accents that can be heard on any given day just in my little community out in the middle of nowhere and we don't even have many people here.

Does a shipload full of irradiated Nordmenn count?

Nuclear vikings (while cool) aren't the same as post war humans making the trip, IMO. I was hoping to have back story for Tenpenny and/or Moriarty, as opposed to something that may well be a Skyrim Easter egg.