system
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human
[Fallout] Why are there accents?

Being 200 plus years after the destruction of society(and to a lesser extent, culture) via nuclear war, how would survivors living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland maintain their ethnically and culturally specific accents? Arturo, the Russian brothers, Dr. Amari, and others sound to be non-native speakers of the Commonwealth's English. Where do their accents originate if the world, on cultural, linguistic, and societal levels, is gone?
gpt
I would actually think that the destruction of society would encourage accents, rather than eliminate them. People wouldn't be able to travel around as much, and there wouldn't be the anti-accent effects of mass media. So you'd tend to have smaller, more insular communities. That's where accents and dialects tend to develop more quickly, as the small community picks up their own slang and pronunciations without correction or input from the outside. Of course, these wouldn't be accents that we recognize, but you'd be able to tell where someone was from if you're well-traveled.

As to the accents we see in the games, they're probably not from the local area. Moriarty from FO3 is supposed to actually be from Ireland, and Tenpenny is supposed to be British. Raul is Mexican, and pre-War, so he's always had that accent (no idea why he hasn't lost it over 200+ years, but whatever).

I don't recall the backstory of the Dobrov brothers, but it's possible they're from a neighborhood or borough that spoke in Russian, and that neighborhood basically walled itself off and continued speaking their existing language after the bombs fell. There are regions like that all over the northeast, especially in large cities like New York and Boston. Little Russia, Chinatown, etc could all very well survive as isolated communities that speak their own language.