EVE Fiction

Hello everybody!

In EVE pretty much all the NPC names seem to have a distinct Scandinavian touch to it.

Are there official names lists for the EVE universe anywhere, and do they differ from one major (or even minor) faction to the next?


I know Gallente has some roots in French (even though they are... distorted), and Caldari seems Baltic.

Amarr is somewhat Arabic, North-African to Iranian?

Minmatar Icelandic?

Is there any difference in the major factions subraces? Do some of the minor (or pirate) factions have a specific cultural background?

Is there any way to get lists of these names, apart from typing them in from e.g. EVE-Agents.com?

The "Ethnic Gallente" (Gallente/Gallente) are, indeed, in some old PF mentioned to have ancestors in Tau Ceti, and these settlers had ancestors who were French. There is a notable French influence. (edit: would be probably better say "Romance" instead of "French")

Gallente/Intaki used to have Indian (as in the place in Asia) influences in the character creator. Art of Eve mentions "elvish" hints.

Gallente/Jin-Mei, I believe, are space Chinese. (Added in Blood patch.)

There's at least Gallente/Mannar, who are not in game. Possibly a Hispanic bloodline.

Minmatar/Brutor were supposed to be based on Maori. Since they were one of the few races with a dark skin option in the old character creator and Minmatar backstory had a period of slavery, therefore all Minmatar were aparently black slaves if you ask some players. Go figure.

Minmatar/Sebiestor were the Norse punk race. Reminds me of Scandinavia/Germany, together with pseudo-Norse system names for Minmatar systems.

Minmatar/Vherokior are... uh, Indoasian? (Added in Blood patch.)

The True Amarr are hard to place. Again, descendants of descendants of some group that includes the word "Catholic" in name, but that doesn't mean they're in any way connected to Christianity the better they are connected to, say, the Korean Unification Church. They seem to take hints from Persia (for example "Ardishapur"), Middle East and Balkans.

Amarr/Ni-Kunni (the another original "black race" - they had one dark-skinned option in the character creation) originate from a desert planet. Some have tried to put them into a Middle-east template, not sure how much there is PF of them.

Amarr/Khanid are Space Mongols, essentially. (Added in Blood patch.) Ingame, though, Khanid Kingdom does not equal the Khanid bloodline. (For example, the leading Khanid family is actually True Amarr.)

Caldari/Deteis and Caldari/Civire are supposed to be some kind of a Finnish/Japanese mix, at least if you look by the generated names. In the back story, there used to be several Caldari nations on Caldari Prime, but they were mixed all together. There should be no noticeable "race" differences (well, stereotypical Civire jaws...), but the Deteis and Civire cultures were the two strongest ones and came to dominate the Caldari "mainstream" culture. (Each megacorporation has their own corporate culture.)

Caldari/Achura are Space Japanese. (Added in Blood.)

As noted, the backstory of the "oriental" bloodlines is not very well developed, though I am not very well aware of the most recent developments.

There's lots of different influences for each, and it also depends on whether you're referring to aspects like nomenclature/language or actual cultural practices. For language/aesthetics, for example, I use Hellenic, Romantic, and Celtic concepts for straight Gallenteans. Some people want to go with Straightforward Americans, which I sort of am averse too, since we don't have an ancient culture that you can lift some neat concepts from (like Arthurian overtures for the Gallente King Rouvenor).

You can go with "French" for Gallente but these are entire planetary civilizations we're talking about, and France is just one nation of an entire planet. It would more accurate to group the factions by civilization of origin, not nation of origin. After all, Italian and French have a lexical similarity of 89%, and the capital of Federation (Villore) is a place in Italy. So, it's safer to identify the 'ethnic Gallente' as having 'Western World' origins, not just one particular nation in the Western World. Same with the other factions. We Americans fail to note that France and the US can be grouped into the same cultural bloc. There's no reason you couldn't RP Gallente as Welsh, Spanish, Belgian, or any European culture (on the presumption this isn't the only influence)

I still stand by failing to see any relation between Amarrians and Romans. Byzantine/Orthodox maybe, but look at the Amarr system names, and the randomly generated Amarr names; all Arabic-looking. If people go 'Oh the Gallente are French', they do that by looking at the system names; all quite Romantic-sounding. In comparison, Amarr system names aren't exactly Latin, are they? Maybe, as a Westerner-dominated game, we'd rather play Romans than Persians/Arabs? We all know the stigma against modern Arabs, after all.

EDIT - OP, start a new character in the creator, and click 'Random Name'. There are your influences.

Hopefully our New Eden language theorists Roga Dracor and Horatius Caul will weigh in here. But if not, here's an old thread that discussed the New Eden languages and cultures in depth. True Gallente as French-derived, Brutor as South Pacific and Nordic blend, etc.
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=189300#post189300
This one also: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=2043056#post2043056
And here's Horatius's Amarrad language project: http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=1078.0 I believe Horatius has the language as mostly derived from Persian, which sounds about right to me.

[Edit: Replaced the first link with a link to a better thread.]

I am trying to find out how to extract a list of existing names through the API, but that seems to be overkill. Is anybody reading this able to do this with less effort?

Basically what I need is a list of all names (first / last, if the database separates them) with their corporation and faction.

Amarrad is based on Farsi, Romani, Arabic, Hittite, Ancient Persian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Basque and... Croatian, I think.

I haven't worked on it for some time.

Some time back a few people agreed that the agent names are computer-generated. The theory was that each race has a set of syllables, and the algorithm randomly mixes and matches them to form names. True or not, seems the agents' names would give a set a syllables to work with in that language.

In a way they are. If you use the generator on each race you'll get distinct names.