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I have an idea about the roots of different human cultures in the Imperium.
Many worlds have been colonized before the unification of Terra and the Age of Imperium and now their inhabitants keep up the cultural traditions of their ancestors' nations.
For example, Vostroya was colonized by Russians, and Krieg - by Germans etc.

I kinda think it would be hard to colonise an entire planet and keep the culture of a 'race' from 38,000 years.
We know how easy it is for a culture to change in 200 years let alone 38,000.
The various planets that are mentioned are either generic dystopia or based on a culture from history.
E.g. Vostroyans are cossacks whilst Vallhallans are Red Army.

Maybe this planet is smaller than Earth.
I'm interested how GW explain the cultural references in-universe.
Or it's simply a coinscidence? Haven't the Vostroyans ever seen cossacks' tunics on pictures and they have suddenly re-invented them?

It was 38,000 years ago.
No matter how much smaller a planet is culture is constantly evolving. (Size wouldn't make much, if any, difference though) It could have been the cossacks themselves that settled there and if they had survived 38,000 years their culture would be radically different.
And no. It's very likely the Vostroyans haven't seen a picture of the Cossacks because it was 38,000 years ago.
There isn't an explaination because they don't really need one.
I will point out that it is mainly the military of Vostroya that is cossack-like.

It was 10000 years ago.
Nations existed even in the M30 but some were called different names.
I wouldn't ask the explanation if 40k was a fantasy world without any in-universe connections to real one (like Middle-Earth or WFB). But 40k IS - it's the possible future of OUR world.
And if Vostroyan military is cossack-like, how would the Vostroyan architecture and everyday life look like?
I cannot imagine that they have Gothic architecture like plenty of the Imperial worlds because Russians and Ukraineans don't. And I think that Imperial Gothic scenery is not as universal as GW suggest.

I don't know what it looks like. I would imagine very utilitarian and possibly a touch gothic.
Frankly i doubt the countries still around in M30 were the same ones aorund in M2, they may have the same political geography but the culture is probably completly different.
Trust me. They aren't directly founded cultures in the way you think they are.

Many of the colonies were settled millennia prior to the heresy.

How can they keep their culture from changing?
They use the same faulty trope that Frank Herbert used for his Fremen from Dune. It's as implausible as mono-climate planets.

Although they were from variant Buddhist/islamist stock to start with (Zun-Sunni).

Humans on earth haven't managed to keep the same culture going for more than a few thousand years at best.
This is not likely to change.

Really they couldn't and didn't keep their culture from changing.
Fremen culture resembles the mixture of Arabian and African ones. And interestingly they use pseudo-Russian as the ancient language (Ima trava okolo! I korenja okolo!).
We cannot imagine what nations and cultures we will have in the far future.
Another sci-fi writer, Alexander Zorich, gave the idea of retrospective evolution. It means that due to some mysterious anomaly people in the far future started to "roleplay" their forgotten ancestors. For example, inhabitants of a large interstellar empire began to wear Persian clothes and practice Zoroastrianism. Earth was luckier - it was "roleplaying" the twentieth century.
And it is never said that planets in 40k are mono-climate. Cadia has warmer and colder regions and there may be mountains on Catachan. Tallarn had turned into desert because of the devastating war.

Whats interesting is that the inhabitants of the planet retain the accent of the culture they're based one

example: the Tallarns in that live action 40k movie still had middle eastern accents

Do you mean cutscenes for the Final Liberation game?
And Vostrrroyans should have theirrr horrrible Rrrussian accent?
Interestingly official GW and FW Vostroyans and people of Krieg have English writings on their tanks and banners, not Russian and German respectively.
So how Tallarns forgot their language but retained the accent?

It's a literary conceit, one which is convenient because it makes worlds, cultures and armies identifiable to the players. Of course it's utterly implausible, and of course it's lifted from Frank Herbert (and Michael Moorcock, and various other pulp writers) but the Warhammer 40,000 doesn't pretend to be a hard science fiction setting (or a particularly original one).

And yes, judging from Final Liberation's cutscenes, all of the galaxy's cultures sound like English drama students putting-on unconvincing accents.

English Assassin wrote:It's a literary conceit, one which is convenient because it makes worlds, cultures and armies identifiable to the players. Of course it's utterly implausible, and of course it's lifted from Frank Herbert (and Michael Moorcock, and various other pulp writers) but the Warhammer 40,000 doesn't pretend to be a hard science fiction setting.

And yes, judging from Final Liberation's cutscenes, all of the galaxy's cultures sound like English drama students putting-on unconvincing accents.

Don't you dare to insult the awesomenes that is Commissar Holt.

Holt is indeed awesome, his fellow Imperials markedly less so.

Farseer Petriel wrote:It was 10000 years ago.
Nations existed even in the M30 but some were called different names.
I wouldn't ask the explanation if 40k was a fantasy world without any in-universe connections to real one (like Middle-Earth or WFB). But 40k IS - it's the possible future of OUR world.
And if Vostroyan military is cossack-like, how would the Vostroyan architecture and everyday life look like?
I cannot imagine that they have Gothic architecture like plenty of the Imperial worlds because Russians and Ukraineans don't. And I think that Imperial Gothic scenery is not as universal as GW suggest.

A.The 40k universe is not a possible future of OUR world, it is a possible future of a world like ours but with the fact that it has access to the Warp.
B. Humans left Earth well over 10000 years before 40k, the Great Crusade would be alot different otherwise
C. the Nations were completely different to ours now
D. GW use cultural reference to make thematic point or backdrop, they don't have to explain them because they are just backdrops
E. You don't have to have Russians to get a Russian style civilization, because everyone of our world cultures evolved on their own (the first modern cultural russians, weren't created by modern cultural russians)

BluntmanDC wrote:A.The 40k universe is not a possible future of OUR world, it is a possible future of a world like ours but with the fact that it has access to the Warp.
B. Humans left Earth well over 10000 years before 40k, the Great Crusade would be alot different otherwise
C. the Nations were completely different to ours now
D. GW use cultural reference to make thematic point or backdrop, they don't have to explain them because they are just backdrops
E. You don't have to have Russians to get a Russian style civilization, because everyone of our world cultures evolved on their own (the first modern cultural russians, weren't created by modern cultural russians)

A. In the 40k world in M3 people didn't know what is the Warp. And we don't know what will our future in M40 look like - it's useless to predict this. Maybe in the real world will be things a lot cooler than Warp and others.
B. According to Fluff, humans colonized their first planet, Mars in the twenty-second century. The human domain (including not only the Imperium but many other small independent states and space pirate empires) had been expanding from that time to the "recent" M41-42.
C. Yes, the nations were different but obviously they saved something from their glorious past. Remember the Geno Five-Two Chiliad with their Crimean (Ukrainean) origins and cossack uniform. And there were still countries like Merica (America, maybe even the USM ), Jermani (Germany), Alba (ancient Roman name for Scotland), Gyptus (Egypt), Yndonesia (Indonesia) and many others. But the Earth has also become more international - John Grammaticus obviously isn't a Caucasian name.
D. It's almost improbable to create cultures very similar to Ancient Terra's without any knowledge about them.
E. I agree with you but nothing stops the world cultures from the further development.

Farseer Petriel wrote:A. In the 40k world in M3 people didn't know what is the Warp. And we don't know what will our future in M40 look like - it's useless to predict this. Maybe in the real world will be things a lot cooler than Warp and others.
B. According to Fluff, humans colonized their first planet, Mars in the twenty-second century. The human domain (including not only the Imperium but many other small independent states and space pirate empires) had been expanding from that time to the "recent" M41-42.

A. Apart from the fact that the warp still effected Terra by this time, the 3 Chaos gods were already born and psykers did exist. GW have never said this is Earth's future, but like many sci-fantasy/sci-fi writers they use alternate universes (Doctor Who is not set in our world but a world very much liike ours for example).
B. Thank you for agreeing with me

Farseer Petriel wrote:Yes, the nations were different but obviously they saved something from their glorious past. Remember the Geno Five-Two Chiliad with their Crimean (Ukrainean) origins and cossack uniform. And there were still countries like Merica (America, maybe even the USM ), Jermani (Germany), Alba (ancient Roman name for Scotland), Gyptus (Egypt), Yndonesia (Indonesia) and many others. But the Earth has also become more international - John Grammaticus obviously isn't a Caucasian name.

I think the point people are trying to make is that, while it certainly makes it easier for us to understand if we reference real world cultures, there's no indication that these real world cultures ACTUALLY influenced say, the Vostroyans or the Tallarn.

Although there are many similarities to real world cultures, all the ones you've referenced so far are from the last couple of thousand years. If we accept that a culture in M40 should be heavily influenced by the dress style of M2 (when they have NO historical records of that time), you'd then have to accept that modern American dress is influenced by the inhabitants of America in the years BC at least! Does the Iraqi military of today dress the way the inhabitants of ancient Mesopotamia dress? Not really.

It's more likely that certain similarities evolved because there's only so many ways to cut clothes, or that things were done in relation to the climate of the time. In the 41M, Tallarn are depicted as having quite middle-eastern customs and dress style. But, until the Horus Heresy, Tallarn was a paradise planet, not a desert one. 10,000 years of living on a desert world mean that not only have the Tallarn people 'evolved' to look like people who eveolved in a hot climate, their culture has also changed into something very similar to cultres of M2 that lived in a desert climate. None of this required M41 Tallarns to even be aware of what M2 Saudi Arabia was, OR be descended from 'Arab' colonists.

And finally, although we know that the first human colony was in the 22nd Century, we don't know when they start the calendar! For all we know, due to some massive event in 1000 years time, we're all currently living in M-10!

BluntmanDC,
A. In M3 people didn't know neither about Chaos gods nor psykers so their lives didn't differ greatly from ours. I said that 40k is a possible future so it's an alternate universe but the bifurcation point came for the humanity much later than in our times.

ArbitorIan,
In 40k or at least 30k humans did have records of M2. During the Great Crusade people knew ancient myths and watched the Tragedy of Amleti with Lady Ophelia as one of main characters (as written in False Gods and other HH books).
When Tallarn turned into a desert planet, did the Tallarns start calling themselves with Arabic names (Al'Rahem) and speaking with Arabic accent? Maybe Tallarn had been already colonized by Middle-Eastern descendants as a world which greatly differs from their homeland?
The humans use the same chronology as modern Christian civilizations and M41 is the 41st millennium Anno Domini. It looks weird for me because it would be more appropriate to start the timeline from the ascension of the Emperor but it's canon.

Farseer Petriel wrote:BluntmanDC,
A. In M3 people didn't know neither about Chaos gods nor psykers so their lives didn't differ greatly from ours. I said that 40k is a possible future so it's an alternate universe but the bifurcation point came for the humanity much later than in our times.

Apart from the fact that they did, The Emperor being a prime example

I think you represent 0.000001% of 40k players in your belief

BluntmanDC wrote:
Apart from the fact that they did, The Emperor being a prime example

I think you represent 0.000001% of 40k players in your belief

Maybe.
But the Emperor had revealed his true identity to people only in M30, during his ascension. And Warp was discovered only in M4.