If you’re playing Space Marine 2 – or pretty much any other game in Warhammer 40,000 – you’ll be relentlessly bombarded with bizarre words. But things like Vox are not complicated technical terms; they’re simply part of the world’s language. MeinMMO explains what lies behind them.
If you’re wondering what the hell the task: “Interact with the Cogitator” is supposed to mean, you’re certainly not alone. Space Marine 2 attracts a ton of players who have no real clue about Warhammer – and who can’t make heads or tails of such terms.
Behind such strange expressions are actually quite simple terms. So why doesn’t the game simply use the word “computer”? Strictly speaking: Because a Cogitator functions like a computer but is not one.
Space Marine 2 had to adhere to numerous guidelines, and it is quite possible that such terms are part of that. Essentially, it simply reflects that over the history of Warhammer 40,000, the language has evolved and is no longer what you know today.
No one speaks English, German, or any other ‘dead’ language anymore
Space Marine 2 takes place, like almost all games in the Warhammer 40k universe, in the 41st millennium. The language has therefore had quite a lot of time to develop. And just by looking at the new terms in Cyberpunk 2077, it should become clear that you won’t get far with German or English when dealing with the Adeptus Astartes.
In the Imperium of Man, there is basically only one language left: Gothic. However, there are still subdivisions:
- High Gothic is the language that was supposedly spoken by the Emperor, the holy language of the Imperium. According to the story, High Gothic is a mix of English, European, and Pacific languages.
- Low Gothic is derived from High Gothic and has countless dialects that are spoken across the thousands of worlds and planets of the Imperium and have evolved over time.
Basically, no one speaks High Gothic as their mother tongue. The language is roughly equivalent to medieval Latin, and just like Latin, the average person cannot understand a word of it. High Gothic is primarily used by the Inquisition, the nobility, or during sacred rituals. The language of the people is Low Gothic.
In the world of Warhammer, you can recognize Gothic by the pseudo-Latin used in some terms. The fact that words like “computer” are still not easily readable is partly due to the long history of Warhammer and a millennium-long tech war.
A remnant of this is that servitor robots are made from humans instead of being purely technical. Here is a small dictionary with the most common terms and what they roughly mean:
- Vox – Radio
- Cogitator – Computer
- Auspex – Scanner
- Servitor – A lobotomized human who no longer has free will and whose body has been largely replaced by machine parts
- Xenos – literally “non-human”, essentially aliens
- (Adeptus) Astartes – Space Marines
- Adeptus Mechanicus – The “tech department” of the Imperium
- Astra Militarum – The imperial army
- Magos – A high rank in the Adeptus Mechanicus
- Heresy or Heretic – Heresy or Heretic; used for anyone who turns away from the Emperor and, for example, worships Chaos
- Exterminatus – The complete destruction of a planet, such as by igniting the atmosphere and blowing up the core
- Immaterium or Warp – The realm of Chaos, through which humans must travel to quickly get to other locations
Nerds have their own language and disdain “meat speech”
However, Warhammer wouldn’t be Warhammer if there were only one language. Of course, it has to be a bit more complicated. After all, not all citizens of the Imperium speak Gothic; there is another, very widespread language: Lingua Technis, or “the binary language.”
The Lingua Technis cannot be spoken or understood by “normal” humans because it consists of various noise sounds and interference noises generated by cybernetic implants.
The idea behind this language is the ability to transmit information quickly and directly without room for interpretation – essentially binary. The information is either correct or it is not; there should not be any way to interpret it. A tech-priest in the RPG Rogue Trader says: “Binhärspeech is more informative, ergonomic, and less prone to misinterpretation.”
Additionally, in Warhammer 40,000, there are also Astropaths. They are akin to long-range satellite communication, except that instead of machines, magically gifted humans function as transmitters and receivers.
Corresponding messages are transported through the Warp, and communication makes Astropaths susceptible to the influence of Chaos. Accordingly, these individuals quickly go insane and usually do not live long. In detail, an “astropathic choir” can be observed in Rogue Trader: The RPG for Warhammer 40k on Steam gives me as a fan exactly what I miss in Space Marine 2
