Imagine you happen to be somewhere where you don't understand the locals, and the locals don't understand you. Nobody can pull off You No Take Candle. There are no interpreters. You may try speaking VERY LOUDLY and ve-ry slooowww-ly your own language, hoping that somebody would eventually understand you. Then you try international words or some basic phrases of the other language, but sadly nothing beyond Poirot Speak. Then El Spanish "-o", which is trying to make your native tongue sound like el language-o of the other person-o, is a frequent thing to do, but not very helpful either.
Generally, people will try very hard to convey at least some meaning. What the characters say in this situation may sound like Gratuitous Foreign Language but if the language is more complicated, it can be Bilingual Bonus for some viewers.
Non-verbal communication, Hand Signals and Body Language will be employed as well. The characters will try to show their meaning with their faces or hands, pointing to objects around them or drawing simple things.
If the characters are foreigners in an English-speaking country, they will talk to each other in fluent English, but the locals won't be able to hear them.
This situation can be very stressful and its consequences may vary in fiction as well as in Real Life. It's frustrating for anybody, but especially to those eloquent in their native tongue. The situation may be entirely friendly if slightly awkward, neutral or truly hostile with tragic ends. The characters may try desperately to communicate, and eventually, they may succeed. Or they might get an interpreter, or perhaps they will actually learn the language or they will develop a new one. However, sometimes the situation stays unresolved.
Compare/contrast with Aliens Speaking English, Eternal English, Universal Translator, Omniglot, Language of Love, Bilingual Dialogue and Inexplicable Language Fluency. Supertrope to Language Fluency Denial, Hiding Behind the Language Barrier, Insulting from Behind the Language Barrier and Teasing from Behind the Language Barrier. May be the cause of an Otherworldly Communication Failure.
Examples:
- Played for Laughs in a Spanish-language Verizon commercial. An English-speaking man calls a woman's son a "cute little girl". When she tells him that he's her "ninõ" (son), he doesn't understand the mother and thinks that her 'daughter' is named "ninõ".
- Appears in an ad for Berlitz Corporation (a language education company). A young German guy gets a new job as a coast guard. An older guy shows him the place and the most important devices, pats him on his shoulder, takes his coffee and leaves. Soon there is a distress call:
Voice on the survival radar: Mayday! Mayday! [static noise] Hello? Can you hear us? Can you hear us? Can you... [static noise] Over! We're sinking! We are sinking!
Coast guard: Hallo? This is -ur- German Coast Guard.
Voice on the survival radar: We're sinking! WE'RE SINKING!
Coast guard: What are you... sinking about? - A Spanish-language American cable commercial uses a lack of this as its selling point. A customer tries to call a company, but the employee can only speak a few Spanish words in a thick American accent.
- Appears in a Dutch ad for the Soesman Language Institute, entitled 'A Day Trip', in which a family gets into their car, turns it on and the radio comes to life playing the Outthere Brothers song 'FYITA'. Not understanding the vulgar lyrics, the parents start to bop along with the catchy tune as they drive off. Engels leren? (Wanna learn English?)
- In Pleasant Goat Fun Class: Animals & Plants episode 3, a small penguin and a large penguin can't understand each other because they don't use the same kinds of sounds. The larger penguin is actually Wolffy disguised a penguin, so he probably couldn't understand the small penguin in the first place.
- A few strips in Azumanga Daioh deal with this.
- One incident had Miss Yukari try to help someone only to find out he’s an American, rushing off to find Nyamo to translate. For added irony, Yukari’s an English teacher.
- Another had Kagura help another American, but her English is so poor, it comes off as hilarious.
Kagura (wanting to help the American) Help. Help. (Raises arms) Help me! - In BECK, bi-national siblings Ryusuke and Maho are bilingual, but most of the other characters — including main character Koyuki — speak only Japanese, and a few incidental characters speak only English. Koyuki's utter failure to understand a word of English despite singing in it is played for not-comedy when he runs into some of Maho's American friends, who callously make fun of him to his face, and he has no idea.
- A very creepy and malicious example in Chainsaw Man: Pingtsi laughs and replies to some Public Safety agents in Chinese, causing one of them to complain she should speak the local language when she's in Japan. Though her comment is untranslated, Pingtsi told them "A corpse is talking." because she knows their heads were about to fall apart from Quanxi's attack.
- In Dog Days, while the people in the land of Flonyard speak Japanese, their written language does not look like any Earth language at all. This leads to hilarity since Cinque can't read anything, like the fine print on the portal that brought him to the land, and when he goes into the girl's bath by mistake. In the second season, he's learned enough to read and write the language.
- In the Doraemon OVA, What Am I for Momotaro, the gang meets a Dutch scholar stranded in the middle of Tokyo, who speaks no Japanese. Attempting to communicate with the Dutchman, Suneo, who took English tuition, tries speaking in English, but it predictably doesn't work until Doraemon gives the Dutchman a piece of Translation Jelly. Suneo later lampshades "No wonder the (Dutch) stranger doesn't understand English!"
- Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet has Ledo, from a group of humans who have been in space for generations, stumble upon Earth and meet the humans who stayed behind; their speech has diverged to the point where they can't understand each other. Chamber, the AI on Ledo's Humongous Mecha, is able to translate based on an ancient language on file and dialogue samples he picks up. For a good part of the series Ledo uses a holographic screen that translates their language into something he can understand and becomes more accustomed to speaking it as the series progresses.
- In chapter 20 of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, Shuchi'in Academy hosts a party for their sister school in Paris. It's only after the party starts that Shirogane realizes he's the only one there that doesn't speak French, forcing him to try and hide it with what little he memorized from a phrasebook. This actually ends up helping him when a French girl gives him a Breaking Speech as part of a Secret Test of Character, since he has no idea that she's even insulting him, let alone what she's saying.
- The Keeper Wants to Build a Zoo in Another World, so He Tames Monsters: Zig-zagged. People in Merou's world can understand Ikuhara's speech, but not his writing.
- One episode of Lucy-May of the Southern Rainbow has Lucy-May, Kate and Ben (who just immigrated from Yorkshire, England, to Adelaide, Australia) encounter an Aboriginal Australian man.note He doesn't speak the same language as the Popple children, but they communicate non-verbally, usually through facial expressions and laughing. Because Lucy-May doesn't know (and can't ask) his real name, she nicknames him "Hercules".
- In My Hero Academia, Pony Tsunotori is an American transfer student whose Japanese isn't polished, resulting in her inserting Gratuitous English into her lines and fumbling the pronunciation of certain words. Monoma exploits this by convincing her to unwittingly spew insults at 1-A under the guise of getting her intended words across.
- At the very end of My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, Koichi struggles to speak English when he moves to the U.S. to work as a pro hero under Captain Celebrity's employ. Anticipating this, Makoto tries to help Koichi's flagging image as "the Destructor of Naruhata" by planting a reporter he can respond to with a punchy line. Unfortunately, he's mobbed by the press after helping a failing plane make an emergency landing in the Hudson River and mistakes people shouting at him to smash up Wall Street for the planted reporters because he can't understand them.
- Needles and Orange is a one-shot about a Japanese woman and a Chinese woman who are in a relationship despite not speaking the same language.
- Pokémon: The Series: Meowth, who can speak in human language, is usually used as a translator between humans and Pokemon. However, the Sun & Moon series introduces the Ultra Beasts, alien looking Pokemon from another dimension. Meowth and presumably other ordinary Pokemon cannot understand what they say.
- Red River (1995) features a Hand Wave: when Yuri (modern Japanese teen) is transported to the Late Hittite Empire, she cannot speak the Hittite language. One french kiss from Prince Kail later, and suddenly she's fluent in it (it isn't clear whether she learns to read and write the language at the same time or was taught it normally). Yes, Kail is confirmed to be a magic user, but it doesn't seem to have been deliberate on his part, as at the time he had no idea who she was or what her circumstances were.
- Rei, an handsome alien from Urusei Yatsura. Whenever he does speak, he is only capable of uttering one word at a time. This is mostly because Rei doesn't know how to speak Japanese. But also, because he's just so incredibly, unbelievably stupid.
- In You and Me, when Chizuru was younger, he used to play with Yuki at the park. Being raised in Germany, Chizuru couldn't speak with Yuki at the time.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- Anzu/Téa needed to be the one to read Pegasus' diary because she was the only member of the group who knew English.
- The Winged Dragon of Ra's text is written in an ancient Hieratic language, so only someone who knows the language can use it.
- In the Millennium World arc, the Pharaoh needs to learn his true name to defeat Zorc Necrophades, so Yugi and his friends volunteer to find it. Unfortunately, when they find it, none of them can read hieroglyphics. They solve the problem by showing the Pharaoh their memories of the name so he can read them himself. This is kind of a Plot Hole because the Pharoah earlier revealed that due to his lost memories, he didn't know how to read hieroglyphics.
- Asterix:
- Subverted in Asterix and the Goths. When Asterix and Obelix are trying to extract information from the Gothic interpreter Rhetoric, he feigns ignorance of Gaulish, only to let it slip when he sneezes and says "thanks" in Gaulish after Asterix says "bless you!"
- Played straight in The Great Crossing; Asterix and Obelix speak Gaulish, the Danes speak Proto-Germanic, and the supposed "Roman colonists" Asterix and Obelix meet speak Proto-East-Algonquian.
- Persepolis: When Marjane moved to Austria, she could speak passable French. However, her roommate, Lucia, spoke only German. They got along amicably anyway, teaching each other French and German, and eventually considered each other sisters.
- Robin: Tim finds that his lack of Tibetan knowledge is a barrier when he arrives for training under a Tibetan martial arts master living in Paris and learns the man only speaks about three words of French. He's able to learn quite a bit from him anyway but it would have been much easier if they'd had a common language between them.
- This is how Starfire got her code name. In the original New Teen Titans comics of the 80s, the Titans rescue an alien named Koriand'r from Gordanian slavers and she starts to work with them to fight crime, but she can't speak English, so they don't know her real name. Her powers harness solar energy and she has a fiery personality, so they call her "Starfire". After about a week of not being able to communicate properly, she kisses Dick Grayson to learn English. (Unlike her animated counterparts, comics!Kory is able to learn languages through any form of physical contact—learning it via kissing is just more fun for her, and since Tamaran has different views on behavior that's considered sexual or romantic, she doesn't entirely understand why that might come off differently to people from Earth.)
- Tintin: In King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Tintin struggles with this when he finds himself stranded in the middle of Syldavia having uncovered proof of a plot to steal the titular object, as he doesn’t speak Syldavian and there aren’t any locals who speak English (French). Things improve somewhat when he reaches a nearby police department and the police chief knows English/French and provides Tintin transportation to the King’s palace in Klow.
- Ultimate Marvel:
- The Ultimates: The Wasp and Black Widow secured the Chitauri Doomsday Device, but can't understand the instructions, as they are written in Black Speech. So they call the super genius Tony Stark, but he's completely lost as well.
- Ultimate X Men: Nightcrawler speaks in German, and nobody in Weapon X could be bothered to teach him some basic English. Most of the time he speaks in his native tongue and nobody else understands anything. Jean tried to give him a telepathic crash course in English.
- In any My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfics where humans are transported to Equestria, there's a fifty-fifty chance that this problem will arise. (About 25% will eventually fix it by a Universal Translator spell). Others, such as A Voice Among the Strangers, take no such shortcuts with it.
- There are stories that transport modern humans to Middle-earth, the setting of The Lord of the Rings. Most fan authors forget that no-one in Middle-earth speaks English (a fact buried in The Lord of the Rings Appendix F). For the few stories to remember this, there are two options. One is to introduce Translator Microbes. The other is to put the Language Barrier.
- Ancient Languages brings Lyla from Colorado to Rivendell. Lyla and the elves share no languages. At first, they communicate by pointing to things. When Lyla points to a book, she wants to go to a library. Lyla and Elhael are both Cunning Linguists. In chapter 4 "Lessons", Lyla and Elhael begin to learn words, with each person pointing to an object and saying its word in both languages. Lyla learns Sindarin, and Elhael learns English.
- In Home with the Fairies, Maddie will take months to learn enough Westron to talk to others.
- In How to Survive in Middle Earth When You're a Teenaged Girl, when Priscilla arrives in Middle-earth, she cannot talk to anyone. After she learns some Westron, she uses her English for Hiding Behind the Language Barrier.
- In What About Witch Queen? most people know Confederate language, but Islander language differs from Confederate, and Weste is vastly different from the two above, giving Anna some communication problems once she arrives on Westerguard. Ferdinand also mentions once that he'd give a lot to understand Weste, because then he'd know whether he should run or not.
- Sudden Contact: Until translators are introduced, the terrans initially have trouble communicating with the Citadel races except for psionics like Kerrigan.
- In Freakin Gensokyo, the main characters Brad and Matt can't read a word of Japanese. It first becomes an issue in Chapter 5 when Brad fails spectacularly to read a map of the Human Village.
- In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku, having spoken nothing but Japanese his entire life, can't understand a word his Kryptonian spaceship is saying when he finally retrieves it. Luckily for him, it was able to quickly access the internet and absorb Japanese before continuing. Later on, he gets drilled in Kryptonese because 65% of Kryptonian texts can't be properly translated into Earth languages.
- In The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker
, various races speak different languages. This often results in confusion from Link.
Laruto: Qu'est-ce qui ne va pas ? Y a-t-il quelque chose dans mes dents ? Peut-être un morceau d'os de poisson.
Link: [gesturing wildly] Sorry! I can't understand what you're saying! I don't speak... that! - By the Sea: English and Mando'a have absolutely nothing in common, and it's one of the biggest impediments in Cody and Obi-Wan's early relationship until they're both able to pick up enough of the other's language to communicate their needs and wants (and eventually try out some dirty talk). Even years into their marriage, both still sound a bit You No Take Candle-ish when speaking the other's language.
- In Metro Master
, Ingo returns from Hisui and is dumped in Kalos rather than his native Unova. He can only speak the extinct Hisuian dialect of Ranseigo (Japanese), since he never learned Kalosian (French) and lost his first language of Galarian (English) to atrophy. Somehow, he is able to become the new Metro Master, transform the derelict Kalos metro into a functional subway, and build a brand-new Battle Metro that costs millions of dollars, just by pointing and yelling in a foreign language. It helps that Ingo is completely terrifying, and that circumstantial evidence spawned rumors that he's some kind of 'train ghost' that drags people to hell for their subway-related crimes. Specifically, the previous Metro Master.
- The Truth Behind The Lie: The Child cannot understand what Tecteun is saying because she has never heard the Gallifreyan language before.
- Double Subverted for laughs in this post by hajnarus
. Giorno is feeling left out when the other Joestars are speaking either Japanese or English until Jotaro comes over to greet him in Italian, having learned from his grandmother Suzi Q. Giorno is excited to have a common language and began speaking in a quick fashion, too fast for Jotaro to properly understand
- The Phoenix Corps: Because she is now mute, Black Canary is completely incapable of speaking and can only communicate through sign language and written word. This gives a heartbreaking bent to her reunion with her mentor Wildcat, as Ted can't understand a single thing she's saying and has to have Green Arrow translate for them. It only reinforces how much Dinah had to struggle during their separation.
- Brother Bear: Kenai transforms into a bear and gains the ability to talk to animals, but also loses the ability to talk to humans. This becomes an issue when Denahi mistakes him for the bear who killed him and tries to avenge him.
- Finding Nemo: Humans can't understand Fish, and Dory is the only fish who understands English.
- Played for Drama in Happy Feet. All the humans hear when Mumble tries to speak to them is squawking.
- Madagascar:
- Madagascar: Whenever Alex tries to communicate with humans, all they hear is roars and growls.
- Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted: Played straight when DuBois talks to the zookeepers at Central Park Zoo and all they hear is her speaking French. Zig-zagged with animals and French people — animals are able to understand what French people are saying, but DuBois is the only one able to understand what animals are saying. Also zig-zagged when DuBois has no trouble understanding the Italian cops, but they can't understand her.
- Open Season: When Boog is trying to stop Elliot from ruining his show, the humans hear them behind the curtain and since they only hear roaring, mistake him for trying to kill Elliot and then all of them.
- Pocahontas: A very short-lived case. When the titular character first tries to speak to John Smith all he hears is the Native American language called Powhatan, but a magic swirling of leaves breaks down the barrier in seconds, either giving him the ability to hear her speak English or giving her the ability to talk to white people.
- Space Chimps 2: Zartog Strikes Back: When Zartog is trying to communicate with the scientists, all they hear is gibberish. He understands them perfectly and thinks they're just pretending to not understand him.
- The Sword in the Stone: Wart tries very hard to explain to the female squirrel who pines for his squirrel form that he's not what he appears to be and doesn't want to be her mate. After he returns human and she started to cry, he realizes she couldn't understand a word of what he said.
- Tarzan: When Jane meets Tarzan, she can't understand him, and he can't understand her. They eventually learn each other's language.
- Arrival: A major plot point in the film. The aliens who arrived on Earth cannot speak or write any human language, and humans are likewise ignorant of the aliens' language. It takes many months of work and international cooperation before humanity is able to communicate on even a very basic level with them.
- Babel: The couple Richard and Susan are tourists who get stranded in Morocco after Susan gets shot. Richard attempts to get help for her, which is complicated because he only speaks English while everyone around him speaks Arabic.
- A Bad Moms Christmas has Ruth taking her grandchildren to the Russian version of The Nutcracker, insisting it's the superior version. The kids obviously aren't positive ("It sounds like they are shouting at us").
- Battlefield Earth: Whenever the perspective switches to a human character, the Psychlos can only be heard making gibberish sounds.
- Beauty and the Beast: LeFou says 'Je ne sais quoi?', which Gaston does not understand (despite the film being set in France). (This is Rule of Funny: the literal meaning of 'Je ne sais quoi' is 'I don't know what', so Gaston's 'I don't know what that means' is accidentally the correct meaning.)
- Big Bird in Japan: As a Running Gag, Big Bird believes that everyone greeting him on the streets of Japan is claiming to be from Ohio and meaning "Hi!" when they're saying "Yes." This becomes resolved thanks to the Shimizu girls' song, "One, Two, Three."
- Big Game:
- Downplayed. While Oskari's English is pretty good, he doesn't understand some more obscure words Moore's using and speaks much slower than in his native Finnish.
- Morris and Hazar's mooks play it straight, as Morris doesn't speak Arabic and has Hazar translate for him.
- In the film Boy Meets Girl set in New York's Little Italy, the two main characters fall in Love at First Sight thanks to Cupid and don't realize they have a language barrier (English and Italian) till their second date.
- Chicago: A young Hungarian woman is accused of murdering her husband, but nobody listens to her pleas. She's the only one among the prisoners who's innocent, but the only one who's executed. She doesn't speak English except "not guilty" and nobody bothered to get her a translator.
- Circle: When attention is drawn to Illegal Mexican, there's a debate about whether he should be eliminated next since he doesn't speak any English and they're already short on time. Spanish Translator tries to act as an intermediary until she's killed off to shift votes in favor of the pragmatists.
- Decision to Leave is set in South Korea. Seo-rae speaks Korean quite well, but sometimes she struggles with some word. When she has to say something difficult or important, she often speaks Chinese and uses her phone to translate.
- In Dr. Dolittle, some scientists who doubt Dolittle's ability to speak to animals decide to test him by hooking an orangutan up to an EEG machine. Dolittle tries to talk to it in Ape, but it just stares at him blankly and the machine shows no sign of increased brain activity. After the scientists turn off the machine and leave the room, the orangutan starts speaking in Spanish.
- Duck Butter: Sergio chides her mom to not speak in Catalan while Nima is there, as she can't understand it.
- The Emerald Forest: Downplayed as Bill and Tommy do know a little of each other's language, but they still struggle communicating with each other.
- Enemy Mine: A Human and a Drac are trapped alone together on an isolated planet in the middle of a war between the two species. They manage to forge a friendship out of necessity, despite a complete lack of any common language.
- In Erik the Viking, the character named Slavemaster on Halfdan the Black's ship speaks only in Japanese. As he whips the oarsmen, he criticizes them at length for their flawed understanding of his culture, a message (presented in subtitles) clearly aimed at the viewing audience, as one of the slaves' comments: "I wish I could understand what he's saying."
- In Father & Soldier Bakary Diallo only speaks Fula but joins the French army. Most soldiers in his unit are African like him but speak different languages.
- In The Force Awakens, Finn is shocked that all the other characters can understand what BB-8 and Chewbacca say, because he can't.
- Get Ready to Be Boyzvoiced: Despite having an English given name and the fact that most Norwegians his age are essentially bilingual, the band's manager Timothy Dahle has a very limited grasp of the English language, so when American Record Producer Brian Kauffman announces at a meeting that his label isn't willing to risk one million dollars releasing the band's new album in light of their recent scandals, the only part of it he can understand is "one million dollars."
- Ip Man 4: One of Bruce Lee's students named Billy travels from San Francisco to China and visits Ip Man's dojo to deliver an invitation to attend a tournament Lee is participating in. The problem is that Billy only speaks English and Ip Man's students only speak Chinese, so this eventually leads to a misunderstanding and a fight. It isn't until Ip Man, who can speak English, shows up that the misunderstanding is cleared up.
- In Jack the Reaper, Maya is deaf and communicates via sign language. After her cousin Sommer is killed, there is no one to translate for her. Interestingly, the Big Bad Railroad Jack does understand sign language.
- In Kolya (set in the late 1980s in socialist Czechoslovakia), Mr Louka is Czech and doesn't speak any foreign language. He marries a Russian woman for her to get Czechoslovak citizenship. She then emigrates to West Germany, and when her elderly aunt goes to hospital (and later dies), Louka has to take care of his wife's five-year-old son Kolya who only speaks Russian. The first weeks are very hard for both and very sad for Kolya. One of the scenes has Louka calling his mistress who teaches Russian to tell Kolya a fairy-tale over the phone.
- Love Actually: An English-speaking man and a Portuguese-speaking woman experience language barrier mixed with mutual attraction. It's mostly Played for Laughs until the end when he returns to her home town after studying Portuguese so he can propose in her native language. She says yes in English. (In the "where are they now" YouTube short set several years later, he still has some work to do.)
- In Machete Kills, the assassin El Chameleon doesn't know Spanish, despite his codename. At one point, he tries to ask an old Mexican man for directions, but the man cannot understand him. Frustrated, El Chameleon kills him.
- In Major League II, two language barriers collide in a confrontation between native Spanish speaker Pedro Cerrano and Japanese speaker Isuro Tanaka. Tanaka wanted to call out Cerrano's softness, but needed to find the right word, so he looked through a translation dictionary to find it.note
Tanaka: You know... you have no... (pauses, grabs his translation dictionary, frantically looking through) you have no... (finds something, throws the book down) MARBLES!
Cerrano: Marbles?
Tanaka: MARBLES! YOU HAVE NO MARBLES!
Cerrano: Marbles? (Beat, then he realizes something, and his stupefied look changes to anger) Huevos? - Monos: The Monos are watching over their paramilitary group's hostage, an American they call Doctora. They don't speak any English. She speaks some Spanish, but sometimes she gets confused by what they're trying to tell her.
- Nine Dead: Mrs. Chan only speaks Chinese; the rest of the captives only know English. The captor still demands that they figure out her place in the plot why they're all there, or they will all die anyway.
- In the sci-fi movie Pandorum, the protagonist encounters Manh who speaks entirely in unsubtitled Vietnamese and heavy pantomime. Until he meets another crewmember who can speak English, he's actually heading in the wrong direction on the rather large spaceship because he misunderstands what Manh is trying to tell him.
- The Perfect Weapon (1991): Tanaka neither speaks nor understands English, and nobody understands him.
- Red Dawn (1984). The guerillas are trying to interrogate a captured Soviet soldier, but none of them speak Russian. One asks, "Sprechen ze Deutsch?" only for another guerilla to retort, "So what if he does? You don't!"
- In Rush Hour, Carter doesn't understand Chinese. In the second film, he's made some progress, but often descends into My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels. In the third film, he's apparently mastered the language but to his and Lee's chagrin, the bad guys speak French this time around.
- In Saint Laurent there's a long boardroom scene where Pierre Bergé negotiates with American distributors of the YLS brand, and it's done through a translator because Pierre does not speak English. The Americans tell him dismissively that he should learn English.
- Exploited several times in Scarface (1983):
- After Elvira tells Tony that Frank never talked about money, Manny says something to Tony in Spanish.
- At the beach, Tony calls a bikini-clad woman "sabrosura" (tasty).
- After Alberto refuses to go with Tony's suggestion to wait until the journalist is alone so they can kill him without killing his wife and children, Tony tells Ernie and Chi Chi "This fucking guy" since he knows Alberto doesn't understand English.
- Shanghai Noon: Chon Wang speaks Chinese and English. At one point, he speaks Chinese to a bunch of Americans and realizes they don't understand him, so he switches to English. Later, he meets a tribe of Sioux Indians who neither speak English nor Chinese.
- Stargate has the Tau'ri stargate team unable to communicate with the Abydonians due to them speaking a derivative of Ancient Egyptian, which, we know how it's written but not how it's pronounced. Daniel Jackson is quickly able to learn the language after discovering a wall of hieroglyphics and having Sha'uri walk him through the pronunciation.
- The Thieves: While there are characters who are fluent in both Korean and Chinese, most are not. They either use their bilingual colleagues for translation or communicate through other languages like English (Julie and Pepsee) or Japanese (Chewing Gum and Chen).
- Titanic (1997):
- Jack and Rose are trying to escape the rapidly flooding ship when they run into a man who yells at them in a language they can't understand and then runs into a hallway. Jack and Rose try to warn him not to go that way, but he can't understand them and gets swept away by a rush of water when he opens a door.
- One family fails to escape the ship because they can't read the English signs that were clearly pointing the ways toward the exits.
- The 13th Warrior, the movie starts out with many moments like this until Ahmad ibn Fadlan sits quietly with the group and figures out the Norse language over many days or weeks. The Vikings made many jokes at his expense which comes to backfire on them when he reveals he can hear and speak with them. They were convinced for half the movie that his first name was "Iben." When they meet, the Vikings can't speak Arabic or Greek, but it turns out one speaks Latin which gets them an introduction to their king.
- Twilight Zone: The Movie, segment "Time Out". An American bigot is sent back in time to Nazi Germany during World War II. He is approached by Nazi SS officers, who start questioning him... in German. He doesn't speak German, and they don't understand English. He rapidly gets deeper and deeper in trouble and finally runs away from them. He's later caught, considered to be a Jew and sent to a death camp.
- One of the scenes cut from the US release of Way of the Dragon involved Bruce Lee's character having this difficulty in an airport restaurant. Bruce is unable to read the menu and the waitress can't understand him so Bruce just points to several items on the menu. He ends up getting several bowls of soup which get devoured quickly.
- All of Takashi's dialogue in The Windmill Massacre is in untranslated Japanese, indicating that he doesn't speak English or Dutch; the common languages of the other characters. When Ruby is present, she is able to translate (although her Japanese is implied to be rusty, and she frequently has to ask him to slow down). When Ruby is not present, Jennifer is reduced to mime and guesswork to work out what he is saying, which is not easy when he needs to convey information on complex topics like guilt and repentance.
- The Young Vagabond: Early in the film, the hero Su Qi-er unintentionally gets himself into trouble for assaulting his father's guest, a white man, mistaking the guest for making a racist remark on the Chinese. Turns out the unfortunate foreigner was only complimenting their kitchen's seafood.
- Two Americans are in a bar when a Funny Foreigner comes up to them. "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" he asks. "Uh, what?" the first American says. The foreigner tries, "¿Habla usted castellano?" "Try English," the second American says. "Parlez-vous français?" The first American shakes his head, and the foreigner gives up and walks away. American #2 says to his drinking buddy, "You know, we ought to think about trying to learn a foreign language." "Why? He spoke three languages and it didn't do him any good."
- Luis Fernando Verissimo's Analyst Of Bage once referenced this to a patient questioning his unorthodox thinking:
Analyst: You're not depressed, fool, stop being a sissy!
Patient: Freud would never say me this.
Analyst: What Freud would say, you wouldn't understand anyway. Or do you speak German? - The Andalite Chronicles has Chapman try to talk in English to Sub-Visser Seven, who doesn't understand him. They get around the problem by miming. This problem doesn't exist between him and the Andalites, however, due to Translator Microbes.
- Bakemonogatari: All three vampire hunters looking for the vampire Kissshot Acerolaorion Heartunderblade in Japan came from abroad. One of the hunters, Dramaturgy, forgets to speak in Japanese, so his foreign speech is rendered as a string of black squares since the narrator, Araragi, cannot understand other languages besides Japanese. The other hunters remind him to speak the native language of the country they're currently in.
- Bridge of Clay: Penelope Lesciuszko emigrates to Australia from Poland with almost no knowledge of English and at first she mangles it terribly and speaks with very heavy Polish accent. However, she is very determined and finally becomes a teacher of English.
- Caging Skies:
- A good chunk of the book takes place in post-WW2 Germany, when it's under Soviet occupation. The authorities order Ex-Nazi Johannes Betzler is ordered to take in two Polish men in his house. Because they don't speak German, Johannes and the Poles rarely ever speak to each other. However, he still finds some way to communicate to them.
The Poles were arguing over something that I assumed, from the complex sounds, to be philosophy or astrophysics. Unexpectedly, the older one exposed his molar. I burst out laughing, imitated their grandiose sounds, then pointed to my back tooth. We all roared, except Pimmichen, who hadn't caught on.
- A later chapter also mentions that they play games with Pimmichen (Johannes' grandmama), even though they can't speak to each other.
- A good chunk of the book takes place in post-WW2 Germany, when it's under Soviet occupation. The authorities order Ex-Nazi Johannes Betzler is ordered to take in two Polish men in his house. Because they don't speak German, Johannes and the Poles rarely ever speak to each other. However, he still finds some way to communicate to them.
- A Certain Magical Index:
- Touma and Index win a trip to Italy. Touma gets separated from Index and ends up needing Orsola Aquinas' help because he can't understand Italian.
- Later, Touma tries really hard to learn other languages besides Japanese to avoid this problem, but doesn't make much progress outside of understanding and being able to speak basic English (and even that's incredibly rough). There are several cases where he has to talk to people who speak English, French, Russian, etc and is completely out of his depth.
- The character Cendrillon only speaks French, so usually only Mikoto can understand her.
- Toyed with in a scene where Mikoto meets the New Light magic cabal. They start out speaking in Japanese for her benefit, but when they briefly switch to English, it turns out Mikoto speaks fluent English as well, so they continue in that language.
- Played for Drama in Charlotte's Web. The animals can all understand each other, but humans can't understand them. Wilbur the Pig has never seen snow and is distraught to find out he is going to be killed and eaten on Christmas, but the humans never realize the stress and fear they're causing him. Luckily for him, Charlotte the Spider knows English and breaks the language barrier by writing words in her web.
- In Child of the Owl, when Casey first moves to San Francisco's Chinatown to live with her Paw-Paw (grandmother), she has trouble fitting in partly due to the fact she doesn't speak Chinese.
- In The Circumstances Leading to Waltraute's Marriage, Asgard's written language is different from Midgard's. Waltraute's horse learns this to his dismay when he tries to communicate with Jack by writing on the ground with his hoof.
- Dancing Aztecs: The man telling Jerry which crate to pick up says "Crate A." Too bad no one ever told him that the Spanish alphabet's pronunciation of the letter E is pronounced similarly to the American alphabet's pronunciation of the letter A.
- Down to a Sunless Sea: Many refugees on Jonah's plane. He at one point describes an Armenian family where only the four-year-old grandson can speak any English.
- Played With in Escape Attempt, where the sufficiently advanced Earthlings land on an alien planet, discover what appears to be a region-wide natural disaster, and try to help the native Human Aliens. The natives, however, reject their help, which they first blame on the language barrier, but when they pick up the language, it turns out that this is just that kind of a Crapsack World and the natives are used to it. Another interesting tidbit is that not only the local language is alien but even the intonations are weird to Terrans, e.g. the commanding tone sounds more like whiny wailing to Terrans. Still, when Saul (a time-traveling Soviet officer) takes over an interrogation of a native, the latter learns the Terran intonations very quickly, thanks to Saul's unambiguous body language.
- In The Familiar of Zero, Saito, a Japanese boy, is summoned to Halkeginia. He and the other characters are unable to understand each other until Louise accidentally casts a translation spell. Presumably, the other people from Earth who ended up here in the past had similar situations. Later, Tabitha teaches Saito how to read their language. On the flipside, when the group finds ruins marked in Japanese, Saito is the only one who can read them.
- In the Forges of Mars trilogy, Archmagos Kotov initially struggles to communicate with fellow Archmagos Telok because his cybernetic implants are not reverse-compatible with the obsolete form of binary that Telok speaks. Similarly, Linya Tychon has trouble communicating with the other victims of Galatea's Brain Theft because their brains are literally not equipped to receive the hexmathic code she speaks.
- Grimoire's Soul: Harper ends up sneaking aboard the boat back to Kesterline with Ceyda and Reiner unbeknownst to either, and runs into the issue that she and Ceyda can't directly communicate because neither speaks the other's language without the Translator Microbes of the Atrium. It's mostly solved when Reiner uses effectively the spell equivalent of Google Translate to read out Harper's words for Ceyda, but she can't communicate with any other Kesterline citizens directly.
- Frequently among the pan-European inmates of Auschwitz in Primo Levi's memoir If This Is a Man.
- Island of the Blue Dolphins: In the sequel, Zia, nobody can understand Karena because she is the last real member of her tribe. Even Karena's niece Zia only knows English and Spanish because she was raised in California.
- Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: Mr Rochester's little French ward Adele and her nurse Sophie only speak French when Jane arrives at Thornfield. It's stated that they both felt lonely while Mr Rochester, who was the only one who could speak French and interpret for them, was absent. They are both very happy when a French-speaking governess appears. However, Sophie is later unfriendly and doesn't appreciate Jane's attempts to talk to her.
- In L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz, Jack Pumpkinhead takes it into his head that he and the Scarecrow have this problem, resulting in a farcical routine, during which the Scarecrow offers him a seat, and Jack solemnly explains that since he [Jack] doesn't understand him, the Scarecrow has to use gestures or some such instead. When the Scarecrow pushes him into the seat, Jack complains.
- E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series plays this straight in Triplanetary, after Costigan, Bradley and Clio are captured by the Nevians and neither side is able to communicate with the other. It's the Nevian commander, Nerado, who first clues into the fact that the Nevians and humans don't even hear and speak on the same frequencies. He builds them a frequency changer, after which each side goes to work on learning the other's language the slow way.
- Later, when humanity receives the Lens, which acts as a Universal Translator for its wearers, the humans learn that some races have concepts that can't be expressed in ANY human language, in which case the Lens creates a neologism to handle the situation. The Lensmen posit the existence of alien races so different from humanity that literally no point of contact exists, but none such are ever encountered.
- In A. Merrit's Lost World novels The Moon Pool and The Face In The Abyss, the heroes avert the trope by conversing with the Lost World natives in languages of the surrounding land (Aymara in the latter novel set in the Andes, "Polynesian" dialect of Ponape in the former). They get outside the realm of reality when they can express themselves as good as in their native tongue.
- My Ántonia: When the Shimerdas came to Nebraska, they could use only several very basic (and not entirely correct) English expressions. Mr Shimerda asks Jim to teach his Antonia English and promises to give him his nice gun as a present once Jim grows up. Jim narrates about their language lessons and mentions how Czech language sounded to him when the Shimerdas talked to each other, and he didn't understand. Mr Shimerda has a hard time in Nebraska and misses his home, but he cheers up a bit when he befriends two Ukrainian men (as Slavic languages are mutually comprehensible, if speakers try hard enough).
- Isaac Asimov and Janet Asimov's The Norby Chronicles:
- Norby, the Mixed-Up Robot: When first arriving on Jamyn, Jeff doesn't speak the language, but Norby does. One of the dragons bites him, which Norby realizes gives him Touch Telepathy with other telepathic creatures.
- Norby's Other Secret: In the previous book, one of the dragons bit Jeff, and in the interim he's adapted to the Jamyn language. This leads to dragons biting new humans, such as Yobo and Fargo, in order to Avert this trope.
- Norby Finds a Villain: When they're flung five hundred years into the future, they find a tree-like alien species has taken over, but they cannot understand the language. There are translators who use Martian Swahili, but one of the aliens teaches Jeff the language via Touch Telepathy to make it easier to talk.
- Red Thread Sisters:
- At the start of the story, Wen knows some English but spends the first few chapters too nervous to speak. Her adoptive parents mostly speak English, but try to ease the transition by trying to speak in basic Mandarin Chinese, using a ring of bilingual phrase cards. Wen manages to come out of her shell in Chapter 6, with a comment from her adoptive mother Christine suggesting that they believed she didn't know any English until she spoke.
- A few scenes involve a bilingual character playing translator for those who speak little Mandarin and those who speak no English.
Then Wen heard her mother talk and Auntie Lan Lan translate her words for Director Feng, who spoke no English.
- Re:Zero: A partial example. When Subaru arrives in the fantasy world, though he hears the spoken language as his native Japanese, he cannot read anything, which leads to him making mistakes like going into a girl's bathroom and a demihuman-only bar. Emilia and the others start teaching him.
- In The Royal Diaries book Cleopatra VII: Daughter of the Nile Pompey banks on this in order to insult Ptolemy to his face about being a drunkard and say very crude things about Cleopatra. Unfortunately for him, Cleopatra had taken the time to learn Latin, and calmly informs him that if he was only there to insult the Egyptian Royal Family, they would leave. A cowed Pompey doesn't try that again.
- Somewhither: While the Ursprache language (which essentially grants Omniglot abilities) eliminates that problem for most servants of the Dark Tower (who come from all over The Multiverse), Ilya hasn't learned it and two of his companions haven't either, so Abby has to act as a translator between him, Nakasu and Master Ossifrage.
- Peri from The Storm Swimmer is one of the sea people, a human subspecies that has adapted to live in the ocean. His native language is unrelated to English and features a lot of clicks and trills. When he befriends the human girl Ginika, they learn a few words of each other's languages, but mostly communicate through body language and mime. They eventually establish real communication with the help of Ginika's grandfather's National Geographic collection. They use pictures from the magazines to tell each other about their lives.
- Suppose a Kid from the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to a Starter Town: Lloyd Belladonna fails a written test because he wrote in ancient runes, which the proctors couldn't read and thought was just gibberish. Colonel Choline Sterase, who can read them, calls them idiots for not recognizing the runes and says Lloyd actually got the right answers.
- Venus Among the Fishes has an interspecies example. During a dolphin show, an audience member throws a metal ball into the tank, and the dolphin Spray swallows it. It gets lodged at the entrance to her first stomach. Once the other dolphins realize she's sick, they whistle in their loudest, deepest voices to get the attention of the trainers, and Spray's mate Silver jerks his head at her. The trainer thinks Silver and Spray are just having a lovers' spat. By the time the humans realize something's wrong with Spray, it's too late to save her.
- Charlotte Brontë's Villette: Lucy Snowe, a young English woman, is having a hard time in Villette, not speaking French and nobody around who would understand English. She even suffers a long depression over her language barrier and lack of friends and acquaintances.
- In The Winter War by Antti Tuuri, the Finns fail to deliver a surrender demand to the Russians in the casemate because they simply cannot find a Russian-speaking man from their local units.
- The 2008 Yoko book Yoko Writes Her Name by Rosemary Wells involves the titular kitten unable to read and write English words at school due to only writing in Japanese. As a result, she becomes a target of mockery by Sylvia and Olive. Happily, Angelo the mouse helps her out by teaching her how to write English letters, words, and numbers which helps her graduate Kindergarten. Near the end of the story, Yoko helps out Sylvia and Olive who are scared that they won't graduate since they can't understand Japanese.
- 90 Day Fiancé: Anna (American) and Mursel (Turkish) from season 7 started a relationship online and didn't speak the other's language, relying on translator apps when they finally met in person.
- 'Allo 'Allo!:
- The British airmen Carstairs and Fairfax don't speak French, and Michelle is the only one in the Resistance who speaks English. People from Café René who hide them don't understand them a single word.
- Averted with other characters who presumably speak their national languages (French, German, Italian) all the time, but understand each other just fine.
- British agent Crabtree who poses as a French policeman speaks horrible "French" and speaks nearly entirely in malapropisms. What he means is usually confusing, but there is always someone who gets it and translates it to others.
- Naturally, this happens all the time on The Amazing Race when the racers try to interact with locals. Almost inevitable if the season's route visits Asia, as even the travel-savvy teams are unlikely to know the local languages.
- Andor: When Maarva and Clem try to warn a young Kassa about the impending danger of him staying on a downed Republic ship he can't understand them, and they can't understand him, so Maarva decides to abduct him rather than leave him to die.
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine: In "The Fugitive", there's a witness at Precinct 99 who doesn't speak any English. Eventually she just repeats [kanalizatsia] ("Kанализација", its meaning is connected to word "canalisation") and tries to draw a picture. All in vain. Much later Captain Holt identifies her language as very likely Slavic. (He's right, it's Macedonian). She's trying to say "sewer" or "sewerage (system)" and keeps drawing a manhole cover. Nobody can decipher the picture. Hard to say what she's doing in New York and how she's enjoying it when she can't utter a word in English and can't think of using her mobile phone as a dictionary (provided she has one). And she's sitting in front of computers and telephones, too. Who's holding the Idiot Ball, her or the cops? (Since this is a sitcom, it can be explained by Rule of Funny.)
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The episode "Fool for Love" has a flashback to when Spike killed a Slayer during the Boxer Rebellion. Spike gets the better of her, but can't understand her Last Request.
Chinese Slayer: [subtitles] Tell my mother I am sorry.
Spike: Sorry, luv, I don't speak Chinese. - Capadocia: Guadalupe is in the titular prison for the murder of her employer. It is not until Teresa, the warden, gets an interpreter for Guadalupe (she is indigenous and cannot speak Spanish) that she can tell anybody that her baby was left behind at the home where she worked (he turns out to be OK even though several days must have passed) and that she was framed by the victim's husband. After his arrest, Guadalupe is released.
- In Coupling, Jeff falls for an Israeli girl, who, fortunately for him, doesn't speak a word of English, and therefore, doesn't understand his embarrassing and somewhat offensive babble when he first meets her. He manages to calm down by the time her translator arrives, and they hit it off, but on a second meeting, without the translator present, their attempts to set up a date go horribly awry.
- Dexter:
- Sergeant Doakes, currently off duty, is lost in the Everglades forest. He meets some dangerous smugglers who have a secret cottage nearby. When they understand that he's a police officer, they take him hostage and decide to kill him. This is an example of how international words and Poirot Speak can make the situation go From Bad to Worse.
- Detective Debra Morgan, being a Detective and later a Lieutenant at Miami Metro PD, doesn't understand Spanish, although Florida is full of immigrants from Cuba and other Latin American countries. She swears she will take Spanish classes after one particularly painful questioning of a witness. It was a bit strange that it didn't occur to her to use her cellphone and call one of her colleagues, as many of them are Spanish-speaking.
- In Doctor Who, the TARDIS normally translates everything everyone says. However, if the Doctor is not around and unconscious, this apparently stops working. This appears in "The Christmas Invasion" when the Doctor has just regenerated and is unconscious, causing Rose to be unable to understand the invading Sycorax. This is resolved when the Doctor returns and the translation resumes.
- Friends: In the one where Phoebe dates a foreign diplomat, Phoebe and him happen to insult their interpreter who then leaves the scene with Monica. The date ends up in the coffee place when they sing and play the guitar together, but Phoebe doesn't look too pleased.
- Highlander: In "Little Tin God", back in 1830, Duncan MacLoud and his guide Paco were exploring the Peruvian rainforest when they got captured by a Moche tribe. Duncan's attempts to talk to them in both English and Spanish don't go anywhere, since they speak Mochica.
- In the iCarly episode "iSell Penny-Tees", Spencer can't communicate with his Girl of the Week who only speaks Uzbek while he does not, even watching an Uzbek movie with her despite not understanding it himself. Gibby invites his Uzbek driver over to translate for Spencer, but neglects to mention he doesn't speak English.note The end result is Spencer's girlfriend falling in love with the driver, much to Spencer's dismay.
- Intimate: Danish actor Roland Møller guest stars on a German TV show, but he's far from fluent in the language. This becomes a major problem for the leads Bruno and Oskar, as they are usually too lazy to memorize the scripts and prefer improvising, something that understandably doesn't sit well with Møller. He repeatedly warns them, in a mix of English and German, to "stick to the Linien", a literal (and wrong) translation of "lines".
- Loki (2021): In "Glorious Purpose", Loki teleports to a village in the Gobi Desert and immediately demands the people to kneel and worship him. The people don't speak English and he doesn't speak Mongolian, creating an awkward moment.
- Lost: Sun and Jin were Korean and knew no English, so they couldn't communicate with other survivors. Sun actually knew English the entire time but couldn't use it as she didn't want Jin to know she'd learned the language. He eventually starts to pick up English and after a time skip in season 5 he's become fluent.
- In the Madam Secretary episode "Whisper of the Ax", Arthur Gilroy hires Stevie McCord as an intern at his microloan agency when she rescues him after he tries and fails to negotiate a deal with a broker in Senegal using half-remembered high school French.
- This happens in M*A*S*H several times, especially when one of the doctors goes away to help some Koreans and somehow manages to get lost.
- Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: In episode 3, the main characters need to get in contact with Shaw's old friend Du-Ho at the customs office in South Korea. Shaw tries to meet up with Du-Ho by getting into queue 2, but instead he's forced to speak with another customs officer at queue 1. The customs officer doesn't speak English, just as Shaw doesn't speak Korean, and Shaw, being a 90-something man who was born in the 1920s and has been effectively cut off from the outside world since his retirement, doesn't care to be sensitive or considerate of the other man's position when trying to get past the language barrier, exacerbating the situation.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus:
- Used in the famous My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels sketch. A Hungarian comes to a tobacconist's and wants to buy a pack of cigarettes and a box of matches. He has a phrasebook, but unfortunately it contains trickster translation and he says insulting and non-sense phrases. The poor tobacconist has to guess what he wants from his gestures and from the context. In addition, he must try very hard not to feel offended.
- In the sketch about penguins and their contribution to science, the language barrier was a stumbling block to researchers. Thus, they posed standard I.Q. tests to the penguins and to a random group of non-English speaking humans. The results: the scores between the two demographics were constantly the same.
- One episode of Murdoch Mysteries features a man who suffers from aphasia and who can only answer yes or no with ringing of a bell. He's actually faking it.
- The Professionals: As typical of an action series of the era, foreigners either Switch to English or have Just a Stupid Accent. The episode "Blind Run" however has Bodie and Doyle escorting an Arab dignitary to a series of meetings, and it takes half the episode before someone fluent in English turns up. This is to convey their sense of frustration over being kept in the dark about what's really going on.
Doyle: Look, tell Sinbad here he needs subtitles, will you? Just there [gestures at speaker's chest] in big white letters so that when you talk, we can read what you're saying.
- Radio Enfer: One episode features a girl from Edmonton named Pamela, whose native tongue is English. She is friends with Camille and has come in town to learn French for one week, while Camille would come to Edmonton with her the following week. Carl tries to seduce her by speaking English and making a bilingual song for her. As for Jean-Lou, he has a lot of trouble understanding her (and vice-versa). Pamela manages to improve her French by the end of the episode after dating Carl.
- Runaways opens with a young homeless girl being accosted by two men who only speak Spanish. The Pride shows up and "rescues" her from them in exchange for one night at their Church, while she can't understand them warning her from stepping into the car.
- The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Sanctuary" has the universal translator initially struggle with the Skrreean language, which seemingly is just filler to stretch the length of the episode.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In the famous episode "Darmok", the crew encounters friendly aliens who communicate solely in metaphors and cultural references. The perfect — at least so far perfect — universal translator fails: It can translate the words well enough. But without the proper cultural context, the words themselves do no good. The whole conflict turns out to be a first contact mission on the Tamarians' part. They kidnapped Picard and put him and an alien commander in a situation that would force them to communicate. At the episode's end Picard has a rudimentary grasp of the language, at least enough to form a base for further communication.
- Stargate SG-1: The pilot episode has Daniel Jackson briefly trying to learn the local language of Chulak and having to translate bits of an Arabic variant for the team. However, Teal'c for some reason speaks English, as do 99% of the aliens and Transplanted Humans Earthborn humans encounter for the rest of the franchise.
- In the Starsky & Hutch episode "Death Notice", an elderly immigrant overhears two people plotting to murder a stripper. Unfortunately, his extremely poor English makes his attempts at warning the girls sound like death threats, and when he tries to explain himself to the police, he says that he wrote the messages because of "the voices", making him sound like a murderous schizophrenic.
- Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye:
- Downplayed when Sue's roommate decides to learn some sign language and to mix with Sue's deaf friends. She understands quite well but she's also slightly confused and doesn't catch everything, which makes her uneasy.
- Later when Sue's deaf friend the prosecutor joins the hearing agents, this communication failure and uneasiness is mirrored because Sue doesn't manage to interpret everything.
- The Twilight Zone (1959):
- In "Two", two soldiers who survived an apocalyptic war, a man and a woman, are wandering in a deserted city. They don't speak the same language. After they meet, they have to learn how to communicate.
- In "Probe 7, Over and Out", two humanoid space travelers from different races, Colonel Cook and Norda, are stranded on a planet. After they meet, they have to learn how to communicate with each other.
- The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Wordplay", a man starts hearing wrong words in other people's speech. The number of wrong words increases until all the man can hear is them. The episode ends with him starting to learn the "wrong word" version of English so he can understand everyone else.
- Upstairs Downstairs: In the fourth season's premiere, Eaton Place houses a family of Belgian refugees from the War. Living in the servants' quarters, the staff, unable to speak the language, are confused and irritated by their guests' unusual and hostile behavior — like one woman's obsessive bond with a doll. Finally, Belgian-fluent Georgina breaks the barrier by explaining that the refugees' behavior is based on their tragic experiences. The doll is the woman's Companion Cube after her husband, son, and daughter — the doll's owner — were killed in a raid on her town. Once their experiences are explained, the servants become more hospitable and the refugees reciprocate.
- Vikings:
- There is a language barrier between Norsemen and Saxons, whose land the Norsemen invade. Ragnar spares the life of a monk and scribe Athelstan when he realizes that Athelstan understands and speaks Old Norse. Ragnar has great plans and wants to raid in England, so he feels it will be useful to learn the language.
- A language barrier stands between Franks and Norsemen. Luckily, one Viking traveler speaks Old French and is able to interpret.
- To save Paris, Princess Gisla of France is forced to marry Rollo, a Norseman and Ragnar's brother. They don't understand a word of each other's language. Rollo is shown being taught Old French by a clergyman at the court and he's having a terrible time.
- Downplayed in Warrior (2019). Ah Sahm can talk to white people, but he's the only Chinese character who can talk to white people; when the Chinese characters talk to each other, the non-Chinese characters only hear Chinesenote coming out of their mouths.
- In the Wizards of Waverly Place reunion special Wizards Return: Alex vs. Alex, Max falls in love with an Italian girl during the Russo family reunion in Italy, not knowing she's actually his distant cousin. She repeatedly keeps trying to tell him they're related, but since she only speaks Italian he can't understand her and never does find out who she really is.
- The X-Files:
- Some languages are treated as Black Speech, most notably German, Japanese, and Russian in the sense of post-World War II and post-Cold War paranoia. When somebody speaks a foreign language, Agents Mulder and Scully are sometimes able to understand as Scully speaks German and is "rusty" in some others, while Mulder claims that he had French at high school. The foreign languages are sometimes subtitled for the audience's benefit, but at times, viewers are left as clueless as the characters are.
- In "Little Green Men", Mulder travels to Puerto Rico to a carefully watched observatory and he meets there Jorge who is very scared and obviously had a weird encounter. Mulder tries desperately to calm him down and question him, but he only manages to produce some broken basic sentences and one hilarious El Spanish "-o". Finally, Jorge grabs Mulder's pen and draws on the wall something that looks like a head of an alien with big eyes.
- In "Nisei", Mulder catches and arrests a Japanese spy who is a part of The Conspiracy. It's not clear whether he can speak English, but he only yells at Mulder in Japanese. Mulder also doesn't understand his notes, which frustrates him. Sadly, at the moment, there is nobody at the Bureau who will interpret, and the evil spy is set free based on a fake claim that he's a diplomat.
- Defied in "Tunguska"/"Terma". Mulder specifically takes his nemesis and The Chew Toy Krycek to Russia to have an interpreter. He's also lucky to meet people who know some English.
- Subverted in "Amor Fati" when Scully looks all confused and lost among the natives in Ivory Coast, but she's lucky that an interpreter willing to help occurs.
- Zoey 101: One subplot in the episode "Haunted House" deals with a pair of French teachers who arrive at PCA, and they both speak nothing but their mother tongue. When they see Michael wearing his Halloween costume (a bruised, beggar-looking zombie) they both think he's suffered an accident and needs to be taken to the hospital. Given Michael can't speak nor understand French and all of his attempts to convince them he's not wounded fail, the poor guy keeps fleeing from the teachers almost all day long. Thankfully for Michael, Mark shows up in his mummy costume and (unwillingly) scares the teachers away, who run in terror after believing him to be a real monster. A frustrated Michael then decides to throw away his French book.
- Several of Sabaton's between-song stage jokes rely on this. The band are fluent in English, but it's a Running Gag that the only thing Joakim can reliably say in other languages (besides thanking the audience during the opening song) is "Another beer, please." The live album on the deluxe version of Heroes has several of these.
"For those of you who don't speak Swedish, welcome to the Sabaton Cruise, and in the future if you want to understand what I'm saying, you better fucking learn Swedish!"
- One of Tavin Pumarejo's comedic jibaro songs is about a Puerto Rican in New York City. He can't understand English and only knows how to say "yes". This leads to a lot of issues.
- Sesame Street: In the beginning of Episode 1497, Big Bird encounters a woman who only speaks Spanish; since he only knows some of the language, this results in him running back and forth from the brownstone to Hooper's Store and back, asking the substitute worker Mr. Ortiz to translate for him. The woman turns out to be Mr. Ortiz's sister who happened to be looking for him right outside.
- Musical Chicago: The film was based on the play and it follows the same plot: An innocent Hungarian woman who doesn't speak English is executed as she wasn't able to testify about her husband's murder. She was accused of it and found guilty.
- In Eurydice, once stripped of their memories, Eurydice and other shades cannot read, speak, or write; to the audience it comes off as indecipherable sound.
- In Bug Fables, the characters cannot communicate with Leafbugs due to the fact that Leafbugs don't speak Bugnish. Due to that, it's impossible to negotiate with them. When combined with the fact that they don't take kindly to outsiders visiting their home, every single encounter with them turns out to be violent.
- This forms the core of Chants of Sennaar. Each of the tower's various cultures has their own unique language and multilingualism is pretty much nonexistent so the player has to more or less learn everything from scratch each time they enter a new area. Fostering communication betwen them by translating their messages is also required to unlock the Golden Ending.
- Dice and the Tower of the Reanimator: Glorious Princess: Bambooblade attempts to negotiate with the first orc he sees, but the latter doesn't speak the same language, so they end up fighting anyways.
- In Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2, some characters speak Al Bhed, which the lead characters cannot understand at the beginning of the game. By collecting Al Bhed Primers, the player can decipher one letter of Al Bhed: since Al Bhed is a Cypher Language, complete proficiency can be achieved by collecting all twenty-six Primers.
- In For Honor, the Viking Runa takes a Samurai prisoner to interrogate him for information. When her ally Stigandr finds her later, the prisoner is dead. When he asks what the Samurai said, Runa just shrugs and admit she doesn't know Japanese.
- God of War (PS4): Jörmungandr the World Serpent speaks in an ancient language and is a bit sad that barely anyone alive can communicate with him. At the start, Mimir is one of the only characters that can speak with him. Atreus slowly learns his language and is able to speak with him near the end.
- In Harvest Moon 64 you cannot understand the Harvest Sprites until you befriend them. They speak their own language and have almost forgotten how to communicate with humans.
- ICO has the two protagonists speaking in different languages (both Conlangs), and unable to understand one another. They communicate mostly through gestures and wordless calls. Ico's speech is subtitled for the player's benefit, but Yorda's is written in strange pictograms, so it's unintelligible. The New Game Plus allows you to understand Yorda's speech as well.
- Knights of the Old Republic forces you to purchase HK-47, a Killer Robot who can double as a translator, before you can communicate with the Jawas and Sand People/Tusken Raiders on Tatooine.
- In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Link cannot understand Jabun as he speaks Old Hylian from the era of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, likely because it's implied, he's Lord Jabu-Jabu's descendant. In a New Game Plus, Link (or at least the player) can understand it, though you don't really learn very much.
- Most of the jokes during LocoCycle stem from the protagonist, an artificially-intelligent motorcycle called I.R.I.S. constantly misinterpreting the Spanish pleading of secondary protagonist Pablo, who is constantly getting dragged along with I.R.I.S. in the most painfully literal sense of the term.
- Language Barrier is one of the major gameplay themes in Long Gone Days. Since it is set in countries where English is not the primary or secondary language, you cannot understand what non-English speakers are saying until someone who speaks that language joins the party.
- Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: The language barrier is one of the most important elements of the game. You can't listen in on enemy chatter if you don't have a skilled linguist in that field to instantly translate messages into the appropriate language. You can't understand your own subordinates if English isn't one of the languages they know. You can't develop fatal symptoms from the deadly parasites that are nesting in your throat and replacing your vocal cords if you don't speak the language they respond to with mating and laying eggs in your lungs.
- Nier:
- The People of the Mask in the city of Facade speak a foreign language, which causes issues when the party visits the city since none of them can understand it. Fortunately, they meet a young girl who can speak a form of sign language that Weiss is able to recognize, so she helps them get by until Weiss gets enough of a handle on the language to speak it himself. From then on, it's implied he's interpreting all conversations between the people of Facade and Nier.
- The Shades speak a language that, to humans, sounds like animalistic growling, so it's not clear that they are even speaking at all. It's only on a second playthrough that the player is given subtitles for the Shades, revealing a very different side to many of the game's events. Kaine is able to understand the Shades, thanks to being possessed by one, but she's so full of hatred for them that she doesn't tell anyone what they're saying, even when that information could have prevented bloodshed.
- In No Man's Sky, you're thrusted into the universe with zero knowledge of the local language. You won't understand any of the language read or spoken to you at first. The game has four different languages and each word need to be learned via dialogue options or monoliths which instantly teach you a few words. You can also build a translator device, but even the fastest translators will have a small delay between translating each word.
- In the first part of Onimusha 3: Demon Siege, Samanosuke and Michelle in the 2004 France are on the same side, but since Samanosuke speaks Edo period Japanese and Michelle speaks French, they can't understand each other, hence Michelle treats him like a possible menace. Luckily, the local Exposition Fairy Ako casts a spell that allows them to understand each other.
- Outer Wilds:
- You venture out into space with a handy device that can translate the Nomai's curling script, though with suggestions that it's translating figures of speech like "bitten off a larger portion than I can consume" and "pulling my locomotive limb" literally because your species lacks such idioms. It also only works on Nomai script, so if you get into the Echoes of the Eye DLC and uncover a new language, the device is useless. You can talk to the guy who built it about getting an updated version, but...
Hal: Just give me... let's call it a hundred samples, some form of epigraphical codex, and six months, and I should have the vague gist of the sort of graphemes this new language is working with! Gosh, I can't wait to get started!
- On the Quantum Moon, you can encounter Solanum, the last living Nomai in the solar system. She doesn't understand your speech, while even if her species had a spoken language, you'd have no way of translating it. Solanum solves this by creating a set of six tiles - "Identify," "Explain," "You," "Me," "Quantum Moon," and "the Eye of the Universe" - which you can combine in pairs, at which point she uses a tool of her own to write her response on a handy surface for you to translate. If you pick "Identify" and "Me," she'll remark that she'd ask you many questions if she could understand you. Similarly, when you meet the Prisoner at the end of Echoes of the Eye, the two of you can only communicate by taking turns using a "vision torch" to effectively beam slideshows into each other's minds. This is all Subverted in the Golden Ending, where you and the aliens can converse without need for translators, likely due to the Eye of the Universe's influence.
- You venture out into space with a handy device that can translate the Nomai's curling script, though with suggestions that it's translating figures of speech like "bitten off a larger portion than I can consume" and "pulling my locomotive limb" literally because your species lacks such idioms. It also only works on Nomai script, so if you get into the Echoes of the Eye DLC and uncover a new language, the device is useless. You can talk to the guy who built it about getting an updated version, but...
- Unlike adaptations, in the Pokémon games regions can speak different languages. The original four regions are based off Japan and the characters speak Japanese, but people in Unova and Alola speak English and people in Kalos speak French. You'll occasionally see NPCs speak untranslated languages. In Pokémon X and Y a woman from Kanto tries to speak to the protagonist but cannot be understood, and Looker misunderstands her. Thankfully Emma speaks fluent Japanese.
- In Stardew Valley, we have the Dwarf, a secret character who runs a secret shop. The only language the Dwarf knows is their native language, Dwarvish. As such, the player character cannot understand them. In order to properly understand them, you need to donate all four Dwarf Scrolls to Gunther to get the Dwarvish Translation Guide. It's also worth noting that your relationship with the Dwarf will not go up if you try to give them gifts before you can understand them. They'll still accept the gifts, though.
- Sticky Business: In Plan With Me, Tim K. can't read Sanjay's letters because they're written in Hindi, so he takes his time to learn the language so he can understand him.
- In the opening parts of Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, Agent Wesley cautions B.J. Blazkowics to stay quiet: his disguise as a German soldier would be ruined if he tried speaking German, which he cannot do very well.
Kommandant Franz, aus Frankfurt...Guten Morgen...Guten Morgen...eh, fuck it.
- Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: Nathan Drake gets rescued in the Himalayas by a man named Tenzin. Though Tenzin understands Nathan's English perfectly well, he only speaks Tibetan, with no subtitles, so Nathan cannot understand him.
- World of Warcraft has a language barrier that prevents Alliance and Horde players from communicating in-game. At various points though, cross-faction communication has been possible. For example: at launch, the Forsaken actually had Common (the language of the Alliance) as their racial language. Which makes sense from a lore perspective, since the Forsaken were former Alliance members. In Legion, the Demon Hunter class was introduced. They can speak Demonic, whether they are Alliance or Horde: so they can communicate with each other. Battle For Azeroth introduces the Allied Race, Void Elves, on the Alliance side, who speak the same Elvish as the Blood Elves on the Horde, allowing for inter-faction communication. Lorewise, there is actually no reason for Alliance and Horde not to be able to speak cross-faction. In terms of gameplay though, there is a good reason: to prevent toxicity in PvP.
- The Japanese version of Yo-kai Watch 3 has Nate and his parents moving from Japan to America. Nate doesn't understand English but all the NPCs you speak to only speak English. Nate meets the youkai Peraperaion which allows people to speak any language.
- Analogue: A Hate Story features a variant: Everyone aboard the Mugunghwa can speak Korean, including the Pale Bride. However, the Pale Bride can only write in hangul (an alphabet exclusive to the Korean language), which becomes a huge problem because everyone else aboard the ship, including her adopted family, can only write in hanja (Korean language using Chinese characters). As a result, the Pale Bride is dismissed as illiterate. It's also the same reason her family calls her the "Pale Bride", because they can't read her real name, Hyun-ae, because it's written in hangul; all they have to go off of is the decorative inscription in hanja on her cryogenic sleep capsule, which reads as "Pale Bride".
- Shizune from Katawa Shoujo runs into this a lot. She's deaf and speaks in sign language, but most people don't know sign language. She usually has her best friend Misha around to translate but they can't always be together. She also carries a pen and memo pad just in case, but really hates being forced to communicate like that. In Shizune's arc, Hisao eventually learns sign language.
- In The Last Birdling, Bimonia and Vi have a tough time communicating at first because the latter doesn't seem to know how to say anything besides her own name. Reading the game's glossary reveals that in actuality, Snow Birdlings like Vi have their own language that they invented themselves, but they are forbidden from using this language around any other species.
- Missing Stars: St. Dymphna's is an international boarding school in Vienna that mainly consists of European students. Most speak English decently enough, but there are a lot of students (mostly French) who don't.
- In the backstory of Umineko: When They Cry, naval crews from Japan and Italy are stranded on a desert island during World War II. The only way they can come to a mutual understanding is because both crews have one individual capable of speaking English, which allows them some limited communication. These two interpreters are Kinzo Ushiromiya (for the Japanese) and Beatrice Castiglioni (for the Italians): they hook up some time later, which kicks off the story.
- Etra chan saw it!:
- In this episode
, as part of Azami's scheme to make Akane stop coming to Yuzuriha's house, she gets her husband John to pretend to be the tenant of the house who can only speak English, when he answers the door for Akane, she is unable to understand anything he says.
- Yuri and Akane
try to help John after seeing him unsuccessfully trying to ask people for help due to his inability to speak Japanese.
- In this episode
- While hololive was at first a solely Japanese vtubing agency, but once fans and talents from other countries (mostly from China, Indonesia and Anglophone countries) flocking in, this issue starts to surface. From the Japanese talent, only two (Akai Haato/Haachama and Kiryu Coco) can be said to be proficient in English (due to studying in English-speaking countries and coming from America, respectively) while the rest have minimal capabilities that some are trying to change through the use of apps and courses. The girls of the English branch are slightly better what with all of them having some level of Japanese proficiency, particularly Takanashi Kiara who is able to collaborate with any of her Japanese peers and even hosts a show whose purpose is to better connect the Japanese idols with the overseas fans. Most of the girls of the Indonesian branch (except for Moona and Kobo, but they are getting better) notably have no problem with this as they are fully capable of speaking both Japanese and English in addition to their native Bahasa Indonesia.
- Oh Noah, a PBS Kids webseries intended to teach basic Spanish vocabulary to children, has Noah's mishaps, and the vocabulary to teach, result from his inability to understand Spanish from others while living with his grandmother.
- Red vs. Blue:
- Red Team has Lopez the robot, who only speaks (bad) Spanish due to Sarge not discharging built-up static before installing his speech chip. None of the other team members speak Spanish. Only Donut took four years of high school Spanish, and Grif's sister seems to have some amount of Spanish education. However, Lopez is quick to shut both of them up when they try to speak Spanish to him, or at least plead others do so while Donut says stock phrases to him. Lopez understands everyone else just fine and speaking Spanish TO Lopez doesn't accomplish anything.
- The aliens speak in "honks" and "blargs", making them unintelligible to humans, but can understand the humans just fine.
- When they first went to Acme Looniversity, Jakko and Sekoila of Zany To The Max spoke only Finnish. There would've been one of these (although one-sided; they understood English perfectly) if they didn't hold up signs as translation.
- Beyond the End: No one knows sign language and Hal is mute. While he can communicate through his chest at the start, he later loses this ability.
- Follower:
- The chio appear to have great difficulty learning English.
- Averted between the chio themselves, who have a language they appear to be born knowing.
- Gunnerkrigg Court. Gamma speaks Polish and only knows a few words of English, and she's a student at the predominantly-English Court. She has a Psychic Link with Zimmy, so the two of them can communicate (even though Zimmy doesn't know Polish). Zimmy acts as Gamma's (not always accurate) translator.
- In one Harbourmaster storyline, "Pulp
", Zefonith successfully clones with (almost) all his memories a frozen corpse of a twentieth-century American mountain climber ... who doesn't speak Standard. And Zefonith doesn't speak English.
- Played for Laughs in an episode of Scandinavia and the World. Sweden and Norway are laughing at how Denmark is The Unintelligible since his language is similar to theirs in writing but not in pronunciation. It then turns out that Denmark, logically enough, finds the other two equally incomprehensible, much to their shocks.
- Stand Still, Stay Silent has a quite complex situation regarding its main cast. The five languages spoken are Icelandic, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Finnish. Finnish is very different from all other four. Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are in theory mutually understandablenote . Icelandic is a distant enough relative of these three to not be mutually understandable with them, but also happens to be the in-universe Common Tongue. Concerning the actual cast, there is:
- Two Finnish cousins, one speaking only Finnish, one who took both Swedish and Icelandic as second languages. The latter can understand Norwegian, but has trouble with the strong Danish accent.
- A Swede who can only speak his own language, can understand Norwegian but has trouble with the Danish accent as well. No Icelandic or Finnish.
- A Norwegian who can understand both Swedish and Danish despite the accent. No Icelandic or Finnish either.
- A Dane who took Icelandic as a second language and can understand both Norwegian and Swedish, but not Finnish.
- They eventually pick up an Icelandic stowaway who only knows his own language and can talk only with the two people who took it as a second language.
- This is averted for Mission Control, where everyone speaks some Icelandic and downplayed during radio communications that involve some members of the main cast.
- Gradually getting subverted as the comic goes on. Reynir still speaks only Icelandic, but seems capable of communicating with the others through gesturing. Emil and Lalli are taking step to learn each other's languages, though the process is slow. While Lalli can barely write an understandable sentence in Swedish, Emil has become good enough to hold short conversations.
- Reynir, Onni and Lalli (and occasionally Emil) can avert this trope when they meet in the Dream Land, where language is irrelevant. Reynir was even surprised at Onni's poor Icelandic when they first talked in real life.
- In That Deaf Guy, it's the barrier between English and ASL. The main characters are bilingual, but other people, often , and often hilariously, are not.
- Unsounded: While everyone whose primary language is Tainish also speaks Continental well enough to be understood Uaid's control panel is all in Tainish, which causes trouble when Jivi comes to rescue the Qugileys using Uaid as he can't read the controls. He does save them, but Uaid gets badly damaged.
- White Rooms: Andre and Ed don't understand Ivan, who only speaks Russian, and Ivan seems to only understand some of what Andre and Ed say. Fortunately Rits is able to communicate with Ivan.
- In The Wretched Ones
, Charlie and his sister, Kazuko, start a fight in Japanese while playing a multiplayer video game with Yayne, who does not speak the language. However, she is somehow able to recognize the word 'Motherfucker' from one of Kazuko's lines. At the same time, while Charlie is playing the game, John is talking to his brother on the phone in French. He does this so that Charlie would not understand that he is talking about him behind his back.
- In Yokoka's Quest, each of the 12 elements has its own language associated with it, in addition to the humans who speak regular English. Different characters know and learn different languages, with some only able to speak and/or understand a particular language, without learning how to read/write it, leading to frequent language barriers.
- AFK: The orcs can't speak to other races in the game, so the people who become these don't understand each other's languages either.
- The Autobiography of Jane Eyre: It appears that Susanna Maria Ramirez Gonzalez, a maid at Mr Rochester's house, doesn't speak very good English. Subverted in "Q&A 2" when Jane finds out she speaks perfect English, but prefers to speak only Spanish in front of Grace Poole because Grace is too intense and Susanna is clever enough to know she shouldn't get involved in the weird stuff that might be happening in the house.
- Kontrola: Natalia's mom brings her Italian boyfriend for Christmas. Since he doesn't speak Polish but knows English other people use it with him sometimes.
- Animaniacs: Squit of the Goodfeathers had this problem once in "West Side Pigeons". Since he doesn't understand the Godpigeon's gibberish (and Bobby and Pesto weren't around to translate), Squit completely misinterprets the Godpigeon, thinking his love interest, Carloota, is in trouble.
- In the Bluey episode "Camping", Bluey meets a boy her age named Jean-Luc, who only speaks French (the official website clarifies that he's from Quebec). While they manage to become good friends despite neither of them being able to speak the other's language, this trope causes conflict when Jean-Luc tries to tell Bluey that he and his family are leaving the campsite the next day but Bluey doesn't understand him. This leaves her heartbroken when he seemingly vanishes without saying goodbye.
- Dora the Explorer: Certain characters, such as Tico the Squirrel, Senor Tucan and Baby Blue Bird, only speak Spanish, prompting Dora to teach the viewer the Spanish word of the day to communicate with them.
- Cleopatra in Space: Immediately after Cleo is sent to the future, she doesn't understand Brian and Akila's futuristic language at all. Translator Microbes qucikly fix this though.
- Bubi Bear of The Hair Bear Bunch happens to speak Tarulian, the tongue of the inhabitants of a planet on which the bears and keepers Peevly and Botch land in a rocket ship (episode "No Space Like Home"). The dialogue starts off appointing Hair Bear as the planet's new ruler, but Bubi's ensuing dialogue tells the Tarulians that Peevly is their Earth leader. Hair is ejected as ruler in favor of Peevly.
- He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983): In "The Time Corridor", He-Man, Man-at-Arms, and Orko need to travel back to ancient Eternia to stop Skeletor who traveled back as well. Before sending them through time, the Sorceress warns them that the people of the past speak a completely different language. Sure enough, when they arrive, they are confronted by a tribe and they can't understand each other. Fortunately, Orko successfully performs a translator spell.
- King of the Hill: In "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow", Kahn's Laotian nephew pulls up in front of Dale's house and asks him in Laotian if he's in Arlen. However, he pronounces "Arlen" as "Ay-len" (Truth in Television, as the Laotian language doesn't have an equivalent to the letter "R" sound), which makes Dale think he's identified himself as an alien.
- In Littlest Pet Shop (2012), Blythe can talk to animals, but in the episode "Tongue Tied", she runs into a ferret who only speaks Korean. She needed the help of her Korean friend to understand her.
- My Adventures with Superman: When Clark Kent finally decides to open his spaceship, it activates a hologram of Jor-El. Unfortunately, Jor-El only speaks in Kryptonian, preventing Clark from understanding him. Jor-El uses an Exposition Beam to show him images of Krypton, but Clark is still missing a lot of context.
- In an episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot, Jenny lost her English disc and ends up only speaking Japanese. No one around her knows Japanese and Jenny tries charades as way to "speak".
- The Lion Guard: In the subplot of "Can't Wait to be Queen", Simba is to attend a funeral for Aminifu the elephant where he has to present a speech, during which he must say a phrase in Elephantese, a language he completely has zero knowledge over. He ends up messing up the phrase when it's his turn, but the elephants didn't mind at all.
- Razzberry Jazzberry Jam: In “Music Is Universal”, the Jazzberries have to deal with a pair of alien castanets (for context, every character in the show is a musical instrument) who speak only in clicking noises, although the way they react after hearing the Jazzberries talk implies that the barrier only goes one-way- that is, the aliens can understand English but are physically incapable of making the sounds required to speak it.
- The Simpsons:
- In "Lost Our Lisa", Lisa is lost in Springfield's Russian district and tries to ask two men who are playing chess for some help. They actually try to help her, except the aggressive way they speak in Russian scares her off.
Lisa: Excuse me, could you tell me how to get to the museum?Man #1: (shouting in Russian) My pleasure. It's six blocks that way.(Lisa runs away)Man #1: (shouting in Russian) Hey, she went the wrong way.Man #2: (in Russian) Checkmate. (the other man throws the chess board to the ground)Man #1: (shouting in Russian) Good game. How about another?
- In "Viva Ned Flanders", Comic Book Guy, who tells the car wash attendant to be careful with his "hilarious bumper stickers" that read "I Brake for Klingons" and "My Other Vehicle is the Millennium Falcon", which he especially likes because he said it was given to him by a Harrison Ford look-alike... only for the attendant to vacuum them off anyway, as he doesn't understand English.
- In "Simpson Safari", Homer enrages a hippo and the Simpsons must flee on a raft going down a river and thus lose their tour guide Kitenge. In the jungle, they encounter two ominous sounding tribesmen and Homer tries to hit them with a spear. However, they were actually saying very nice things, at least according to the subtitles.
- In "The Italian Bob", Homer is vexed that people in Italy don't speak English.
Homer: Americana? What the hell could that mean? Why can't you people learn to speak my language? I learned to eat your food!
- In "Lost Our Lisa", Lisa is lost in Springfield's Russian district and tries to ask two men who are playing chess for some help. They actually try to help her, except the aggressive way they speak in Russian scares her off.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars has two clone troopers, Waxer and Boil, coming across a little Twi'lek orphan, named Numa. Once they earn her trust, she starts calling them "nerra". But the two clones only speak Basic, and have no idea what it means. After taking care of her, and reuniting with Obi-Wan, they finally learn what she's been calling them: "brother". Aww.
- Teen Titans (2003):
- Más and Menos are the only characters in the show who only speak Spanish (save for the one time when Control Freak was able to set their language setting to English). As a result, none of the other characters ever really know what they're saying, which proves to be an obstacle when most of the Titans in the world have been abducted by the Brotherhood of Evil, Menos included, and Beast Boy has to lead Más and the other remaining Titans in a rescue mission.
- This also comes up in the flashback episode "Go!", when Starfire arrives on Earth after having escaped a Gordanian slave ship with her handcuffs still on. She can only speak an alien language, so no one can understand her when she asks for help in getting the cuffs off or anything else she's been shouting in frustration, so she starts just smashing the cuffs into buildings and cars to try to break them — which makes the other four newly arrived Titans think that she's just trying to destroy the city. Eventually Robin realizes what's going on and picks the lock on the handcuffs, freeing her, and she uses a Magic Kiss on him to learn English.
- The Magic Kiss makes its return in Teen Titans: Trouble in Tokyo when none of the Titans can speak or read Japanese, which poses a slight problem since they're in Japan to track down a villain. Starfire kisses a Japanese boy to assimilate the language, which is when she explains that Tamaraneans are able to learn languages through lip contact, but the rest of the Titans have no such luck. When Beast Boy tries to flirt with some Japanese girls, they call him an Otaku, but he doesn't understand what that means and just assumes they are calling him cute. Later, he assumes that a girl is sweet-talking him, while she's really saying stuff like, "Prepare to Die!" and is completely caught off guard when she tries to kill him.
- Played for both drama and laughs in the What's New, Scooby-Doo? episode "It's All Greek To Scooby", where Fred encounters a scary looking local and, misunderstanding his Greek language via his Greek translation book, assumes he's placing a curse on them, so the gang spends the episode trying to avoid him whenever he appears- which happens to be quite frequently, as the local is very persistent. At the end of the episode's chase sequence, with the gang now very annoyed at the local for not leaving them alone, another character who is more fluent in Greek reveals the local was never trying to place a curse on them and was actually trying to return Daphne's purse.
- Young Justice (2010) notes that when Adam Strange first went to Rann, he was unable to properly communicate with Sardath and Alanna in anything but charades. Likewise, the Krolotean language is so alien that even telepathy can't translate it very well.