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How do names work out in Warhammer 40k?

I noticed that names are usually really fancy like "Boreale"

Do casual or regular names still exist(ex: John, Bob, Richard etc)

All the names are of Latin origin, as are the words

Not all of them...
At any rate it depends on the culture of the character.
Tallarn names=Arabic sounding names
etc etc

It's because 'Brother captain Mike' doesn't really sound grimdark.

It's 40K's answer to manga's Adjective-Noun-Name system

No, the 40k authors all say that the name origins are latin

thefarseerofnorthryde wrote:No, the 40k authors all say that the name origins are latin

Chenkov and Al'Rahem don't sound very Latin-y to me.

The 'standard' imperial name is probably something latin~esque, I'm willing to be that's because they name their kids in High Gotic, which is represented to us as pseudo-Latin.

However, it depends.
Armageddon and Krieg get Germany sounding names (von Strabb, Jurten)
Tanith got Celtic sounding names (Mkoll, Larkin)

Depending on the theme the author wants for their world, the names will change, and the author will definitely try to give them cooler sounding names.

Well in Legion,there is a man named John.

It's a great big galaxy out there,I guess Jane Doe is out there somewhere.

But with maybe a few million in one city,then I guess they add a number or your district to your name for official use.

Not to mention most hive gangs just give you a nickname like "Sruffy" or "Thumbs",and after time that's really all the name you'll ever have.

thefarseerofnorthryde wrote:No, the 40k authors all say that the name origins are latin

You wanna cite your sources there, cowboy?

Going from the diversity of names in the Imperial Guard Codex alone would indicate that names are tied to their home culture. Which is normally a knock-off of an Earth culture. Space Marine Codex backs this up, Mssr. Khan, leader of the White Scars being a case in point.

I always thought that carecters were given fancy names to make them sound cool.

as Leigen_Zero said brother captain mike dosen't sound very big tough space marine to me.

It depends on the culture of the world, legion, regiment, or other factions. But yeah most of them are Latin, Greek, and one names are sort of Turkish.

Gothic is a debased form of Latin.

so people living on planets with Gothic as the primary language and culture will have Gothic names.


Gothic is most common the closer you get to Terra and the more densely populated a planet is.



other planets will have their own distinct culture and language, using Gothic for official business.



and there is also low and high Gothic.

Low Gothic is the common language and people that speak Gothic will be using this version.


High Gothic is used almost exclusivly for official business.

Being "high" gothic is extremely like latin and roman culture but the feel of the art is different. how ever in all the worlds their is different accents and languages (ie: Fenris). just look at the space wolfs ragnar, swen dolf. And the dark angels, johnson ect... so theirs actually lot of diversity

How do names work out in Warhammer 40k?

I noticed that names are usually really fancy like "Boreale"

Do casual or regular names still exist(ex: John, Bob, Richard etc)

Yes, casual names exist, just not normally in fluff/stories/background.
Each world has a language, usually, but not always or even exclusively, some form of Gothic, a language modeled after latin.

So you get "Battle Brother Mikail Silverflash" instead of "Sergent Mike".
OTOH, I ran into a Chaos player who had a Chaos Dreadnought, with a back banner proudly displaying his name: Bob

Well, Rick Priestly says in an old thing on games workshop that the names are all of latin origin

Except they're clearly not. As people have said, it depends where the person is actually from.

Al-rahem, Horus, Chenkov etc aren't latin at all.

Yes, casual names exist, just not normally in fluff/stories/background.
Each world has a language, usually, but not always or even exclusively, some form of Gothic, a language modeled after latin.

So you get "Battle Brother Mikail Silverflash" instead of "Sergent Mike".
OTOH, I ran into a Chaos player who had a Chaos Dreadnought, with a back banner proudly displaying his name: Bob

Thats too funny! It must be a thing with Choas Dreadnaughts because our club has a Chaos player who's dread we all call "Steve"... he doesn't like it much but we all find it pretty funny. "oh no! It's Steve! And he's got fire frenzy, run!" lol!

The rule is:

Make up whatever you want, the universe is a big place.

Also I play Krieg and so all my Officers and Commissars have very german sounding names. Marshall Grimtag, Lt. Kalte, Commissar Angst, Geist (for my marbo counts as)ect.

Cerebrium wrote:Except they're clearly not. As people have said, it depends where the person is actually from.

Al-rahem, Horus, Chenkov etc aren't latin at all.

Sorry, I should correct myself. Marine names are latin origin

Just depends on the culture of it. If you see most SM names are of latin origin. White Scars OTOH have a very Monggol/Northern Asian style of names like Jaghatai/Khan/etc....

thefarseerofnorthryde wrote:

Cerebrium wrote:Except they're clearly not. As people have said, it depends where the person is actually from.

Al-rahem, Horus, Chenkov etc aren't latin at all.

Sorry, I should correct myself. Marine names are latin origin

Do you mean Ultramarine names?

Horus, Jaghatai Khan, Leeman Russ, and Lion El'Johnson are not Latin...the last one is English.

Although almost every battle brother in the Ultramarines books tends to have Latinesque names. But even look at ADBs Night Lords, they all have Slavic/Batlic names. Etc.

Lightcavalier wrote:

thefarseerofnorthryde wrote:

Cerebrium wrote:Except they're clearly not. As people have said, it depends where the person is actually from.

Al-rahem, Horus, Chenkov etc aren't latin at all.

Sorry, I should correct myself. Marine names are latin origin

Do you mean Ultramarine names?

Horus, Jaghatai Khan, Leeman Russ, and Lion El'Johnson are not Latin...the last one is English.

Although almost every battle brother in the Ultramarines books tends to have Latinesque names. But even look at ADBs Night Lords, they all have Slavic/Batlic names. Etc.

And Blood Angels are Italian/Greek ie Dante. Tycho, Leonatos

I avoided those because Latin is strongly influenced by Greek, and Italian is derived from Latin....unlike Egyptian, Mongolian, Slav/Rus, or large parts of English.

Lightcavalier wrote:I avoided those because Latin is strongly influenced by Greek,

Excuse me what? Latin strongly influenced by greek? Well, that's the first time I've ever heard that, seeing as the Greeks have an entirely different alphabets. Romans and Greeks may have worshipped the same gods but the names were still pretty different. Do you have anything to back up what you're claiming, because I would actually be really interested in knowing if one language was strongly influenced by the other.

thefarseerofnorthryde wrote:

Cerebrium wrote:Except they're clearly not. As people have said, it depends where the person is actually from.

Al-rahem, Horus, Chenkov etc aren't latin at all.

Sorry, I should correct myself. Marine names are latin origin

There was a very early short story called Deathwing which gave the origins of the Dark Angel Deathwing company.

One of the itneresting things is that all the Marines were of American Indian origin with names like Two Heads Talking (the librarian). However when they became Marines they all took on latinesque names to show their Imperial identities. In the same way Christian converts take on Biblical names.

And one of the plot points was the conflict, are they loyal to their homeworld or to the Imperium, would they save their people from genestealers or call in an exterminous.

Since then the story's been retconned on some minor points (their world is now just one of many worlds the DAs recruit from) but it more or less still works.

So that might be what you're remembering.

To the OP, generally in 40k you want to capture a grand epic but somewhat familiar feeling. So GW tends to go with 'slightly foreign' names that we recognize but don't hear every day. Mike-> Mikhail or Miguel for example. Looking at lists of foreign translation of names is a good way to do it. Avoid mundain names like Joe or Bob, and avoid completely made up ones like Zaggaggor. Corrupted spelling like Jessiquia or Kristoffor can also work. Abnett gave the Guants Ghosts celtic names but goes with M'Andrew rather McAndrew or MacAndrew.

It can even be a reference to something you like I suppose, just ask Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau.

Gothic is REPRESENTED as Latin.

Low Gothic is REPRESENTED as English... or whatever language the reader hapens to be able to read (if you get my meaning).

There is no direct connection as far as I know.

Lord Rogukiel wrote:

Lightcavalier wrote:I avoided those because Latin is strongly influenced by Greek,

Excuse me what? Latin strongly influenced by greek? Well, that's the first time I've ever heard that, seeing as the Greeks have an entirely different alphabets. Romans and Greeks may have worshipped the same gods but the names were still pretty different. Do you have anything to back up what you're claiming, because I would actually be really interested in knowing if one language was strongly influenced by the other.

Ill qualify this a bit...

The Latin Alphabet originated from the Cumae Alphabet, which was a variant of the Greek Alphabet. It is believed that the Etruscans adopted this in the 7th century BC.
After the Roman Conquest of Greece even more elements of the Greek Alphabet were Romanized and added to the Alphabet proper...creating the precursor to our modern Roman Alphabet.
Ever notice that the Greek Alphabet contains: A, B, E, H, M, N, O, P, T, Y and X.

Linguistically both languages grew out of "indo-European" which spawned the Celtic, Germanic, Romanic and Hellenic languages. The Italic/Etruscan languages of Pre-Roman Latin developed in parallel to Greek, and much like modern languages, began to borrow terms/constructs/ideas as commerce and diplomacy developed between their constituent cultures.

As well, in the late centuries BC there were a number of Hellenic migrations into the Italian Peninsula and the island of Syracuse.

In the early Roman period when what we now call Latin came into full swing, Greek was the international language of trade, diplomacy, etc. As such the Romans adopted more and more of the Greeks language constructs, especially where it came to philosophical ideas which could not be properly expressed in both languages.

The origins of Roman Latin are very similar to the origins of modern English or Slavoic (but less contrived)

So yes, Greek strongly influenced Latin, as the languages were already similar and simply grew closer over time. It was the medieval period where they began to seriously diverge again.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Sorry if that was a little off topic,

The authors appear to choose names for their difference from the norm...so as to give that sci-fantasy feel.
Like everyone adding hard K sounds to their D&D character's names so that they sound more Medieval.

Lightcavalier wrote:

thefarseerofnorthryde wrote:

Cerebrium wrote:Except they're clearly not. As people have said, it depends where the person is actually from.

Al-rahem, Horus, Chenkov etc aren't latin at all.

Sorry, I should correct myself. Marine names are latin origin

Do you mean Ultramarine names?

Horus, Jaghatai Khan, Leeman Russ, and Lion El'Johnson are not Latin...the last one is English.

Although almost every battle brother in the Ultramarines books tends to have Latinesque names. But even look at ADBs Night Lords, they all have Slavic/Batlic names. Etc.

Ultramarines names

The tables in the Dark Heresy books give root categories of names that end up sounding rather different from each other; things derived from High Gothic tend to sound very Latin (Ultramarines can get away with a mixture of these and things derived from the native tongue of Macragge, which sounds a bit more Greek. I may be making that up, I don't have canon backing for it.). You've also got Primitive names (short monosyllabic affairs), Low Gothic names (abbreviations, misspellings, etc. used to tweak High Gothic names into something less pompous-sounding), Archaic names (misspellings and corruptions of modern/historical names), and Informal names (nicknames) in that book; but consider that it all depends broadly on what sort of culture you're trying to write names for. Kriegers would have German-derived names, Space Wolves would have old Norse names, Ulthwe Eldar could be named after obscure Tolkein characters...

In short, casual or regular-sounding modern names could theoretically exist, but it's best to misspell or use a different form of the name to make it pompous-sounding (no "Brother-Captain Mike", yes "Brother-Captain Mikael").

Or you could take my route and take names from other works of fiction. Bonus points to the people who figure out where Farseer Elan Morin Tedronai and Grand Master Furyk Karede got their names. Except that doesn't really work. Damn you, Google!