Lawmaker's electorate is not set dressing. When you campaign, you are campaigning at named individuals whose circumstances the game actually tracks, and whose reactions you read one by one. That falls apart the moment the names stop matching the country — and with four groups to choose from (Anglophone, Francophone, Germanic, Hispanophone), a great many countries had no honest option at all.
Five new groups ship today, taking the total to nine. Each one covers a family of closely-related languages, because a fictional country rarely maps onto exactly one real nation:
| Group | Drawn from | A few of the names |
|---|---|---|
| Nordic | Danish, Swedish, Norwegian | Lars, Anna, Søren, Karin, Bjørn |
| East Slavic | Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian | Aleksandr, Yelena, Taras, Olga |
| West Slavic | Polish, Czech, Slovak | Jan, Katarzyna, Václav, Paweł |
| Balkan Slavic | Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian | Marko, Ana, Špela, Đorđe |
| Arab | Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the wider region | Mohammed, Fatima, Elias, Reem |
The lists are not thin. Each of the new groups carries between 150 and 195 names per gender, spanning the full 18-to-90 range a real electorate covers — so a country is not populated entirely out of one decade's birth records. A Nordic roster holds both the Stigs and Bentes of a country's pensioners and the Almas and Isaks of its first-time voters, and they turn up in the same room the way they do in life.
Plenty of Yelenas, and just occasionally an Oktyabrina
Drawing names at random from a list gets you a roster that reads wrong, because real names are nothing like uniform. So every name carries a frequency weight: the commonest name in a group is roughly a hundred times likelier to come up than the rarest one. Your Russian-speaking country will be full of Yelenas and Aleksandrs, and every so often — not often — it will hand you an Oktyabrina, one of those Soviet-era coinages that a real electorate of that age range genuinely still contains.
The same logic put the minority-origin names in. A modern electorate is not a monoculture, so the Nordic list carries Turkish and Somali names, the West Slavic list the Hungarian names of southern Slovakia and the Vietnamese names of Czechia, the Balkan list Bosniak and Albanian names, and the Arab list the Christian names of the Levant alongside Armenian and Kurdish ones. They are weighted as part of the population rather than dropped in as tokens.
Weights alone still aren't enough, though. Left to itself, a weighted draw cheerfully hands the same country three Verónicas — which is exactly the complaint that started this work. So a name that has already been used in a country gets half its weight back for the next draw, and after two uses it drops out of that country's pool altogether. A natural-looking coincidence survives. A pile-up doesn't.
| How often a name came up | Names |
|---|---|
| Once | 42 — Bolesław, Joanna, Vojtěch, Mateusz, Wanda… |
| Twice | 4 — Małgorzata, Hanna, Maria, Erik |
| Three times | None. Ever. |
Two Marias in a country of fifty is a coincidence. Three is a bug report.
One name, one spelling
Here is the problem with bundling three languages into one group. Søren and Sören are the same name. So are Fredrik and Frederik, Aleksandr and Oleksandr, Jan and Ján, Mohammed and Muhammad. Put both spellings in one list and a country eventually draws both — at which point it stops reading as variety and starts reading as a typo, and the two entries have quietly split the frequency of what was really one name.
So each name appears in exactly one form, chosen once per group. The Russian form carries the East Slavic list, with Ukrainian supplying the names that have no competing spelling — Taras, Bohdan, Solomiya. Serbian is written in its Latin alphabet so one script runs through the Balkan list. The Arab list settles on a single transliteration and sticks to it. It is a small piece of discipline that nobody will ever notice, which is rather the point.
Activists and journalists get surnames too
Electors go by a first name alone. The characters you recruit and read — activists and journalists — carry a full name, and that turns out to be the harder problem, because in half of the new groups a surname changes with the person carrying it. Anna Kowalski is not a name a Polish speaker would ever write; she is Anna Kowalska. The same goes for Nováková in Czech, Ivanova in Russian.
So surnames in the East and West Slavic lists now agree with the person they belong to, and the ones that genuinely don't inflect — Serbo-Croatian names ending -ić, Ukrainian ones ending -enko, and every Nordic and Arab surname — are left exactly as they are. Your press corps comes out as Weronika Zając and Miroslav Kamiński, Vera Zakharova and Matvei Sokolov, Amira Al-Tamimi and Saeed Khoury.
Choosing yours
The language group sits on the country proposal form, under Language, next to population and economic focus — it is part of deciding what your country is, alongside where it sits on the map and how its constitution works. Countries already in the world keep the group they were founded with.
None of this changes a single rule of the game. No law passes differently, no vote lands differently, no seat changes hands because of it. It changes something else: whether the fifty people whose opinions you spend the whole game trying to shift read like a population that lives somewhere in particular. Campaign in a Balkan country now and you are arguing with Jasna, Josip and Andraž — and it is a great deal harder to think of them as rows in a table.