Inexplicable Language Fluency

"Who are you? How can I understand you?!"

— Howard Moon, The Mighty Boosh

The sad truth is, you won't understand a language upon hearing or even seeing it for the first time. You may not remember, but you didn't even understand English upon seeing it for the first time. Language is learned and not instinctual. If you've ever been to a non-English-speaking country or if you're not a native English speaker, you already know this.

In fiction, however, characters often understand a language they've never seen or heard before. In some works this is treated as perfectly normal, while in others, only one character has the ability to understand a language they've never seen or heard before.

Inexplicably Speaks Fluent Alien is a subtrope. Compare Bilingual Backfire, Cunning Linguist, Suddenly Bilingual, Suddenly Fluent in Gibberish, and Translator Microbes. Contrast Language Barrier. Often the case for a character who Speaks Fluent Animal. May result in Bilingual Dialogue if conventional translation isn't used. If somebody's fluency in every language is explained they may be an Omniglot instead. Can result from Genetic Memory.

See Separated by a Common Language for when the individuals do speak the same language, but the same words have entirely different meanings in their respective dialects or countries.

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Examples

Comic Books

• Ultimate Fantastic Four:
  • Downplayed. Namor demonstrates this trope after spending nine thousand years of being sealed inside a sarcophagus prison. Being from an ancient civilization of Atlantis that predates the modern English language, he initially has no idea what his new captors are saying when they find him. However, thanks to his psionic powers he proves to be a frighteningly fast learner and is able to learn English within an hour to understand modern American English and casually deliver threats and demands.
  • Happens again when the Four meets the Silver Surfer who is able to understand English perfectly the instant he arrives to Earth for the first time. He justifies this by stating can decipher electromagnetic signals in the air to learn alien tongues in seconds.

Fan Works

• Infinity Train: Seeker of Crocus: Kaito is somehow able to read Aztec glyphs just by looking at it. This is probably due to his covenant with Agares, as one of Agares' ability is to let his conjurer read and understand different languages.
• The Mountain and the Wolf: The Wolf demonstrates the ability to speak not just the language of Westeros (even with a Brief Accent Imitation) but also of the Dothraki, Valyrian, the giants' language, and animals and babies. In actual fact it's a power the Chaos Gods have bestowed on him, but that isn't figured out for a while.

Films — Animation

• In Atlantis: The Lost Empire the Atlanteans are able to fluently communicate with the explorers from the surface in English and French. This is handwaved as their own language being a precursor to all other languages.
• Finding Nemo: Dory understands English. The fish in the tank understand English because they've been hearing humans all their life, but there's no reason for Dory to understand English. Subverted in that Finding Dory reveals she was raised in a marine life institute in California.
• Pocahontas: English explorer John Smith meets the alluring Pocahontas of the Powhatan tribe. Smith doesn't know her language, nor she his. That is, until Pocahontas takes a breath of magic wind. Suddenly, her English is better than his.
• Space Chimps: The aliens and chimps understand each other, despite that the chimps have just arrived on their planet. In the sequel Zartog also understands the humans, despite having just arrived on Earth.
• Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron: Spirit, despite not having had any human contact before his capture, understands what the human characters are saying.
• Tarzan: When Jane talks to a baby baboon, he understands her.

Films — Live-Action

• No Time to Die: James Bond's 5-year-old daughter, Mathilde, understands English even though her mother Madeleine speaks to her in French and all the media she consumes is in French.
• Downplayed in Phenomenon. After a UFO encounter, George gains a form of superintelligence where he can learn complicated tasks and subjects quickly, to the point where he's able to fluently speak Portuguese after reading an English-to-Portuguese dictionary for twenty minutes.
• Titanic (1997): Jack and the Swedish men understand each other well enough that Olaf is able to bet his tickets for all Jack and Fabrizio's money.

Literature

• Cooking With Wild Game lampshades the trope. One of the few supernatural parts of the setting is that Asuta can understand its inhabitants' language perfectly. Nobody knows why, nor do they ever find out.
• Fablehaven: After receiving magic from fairies, Kendra gains the ability to interpret their language intuitively despite never actually learning it.
• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH: The animals can understand humans and each other, but can't talk to humans. This leads to a bit of Fridge Logic as to where exactly all these animals picked up English (justified for the rats, as they were taught it in the lab, but not for any of the others), and whether they can understand other human languages automatically as well.
• The Shivers (M. D. Spenser) novella, "One Foot in the Grave", is set in France, where the American protagonist moves to the French countryside because of her father's job. She meets a French boy her age (approximately 10) and they can somehow converse perfectly, an unexplained plot hole a review in Goodreads rants about.

Live-Action TV

• 'Allo 'Allo!: Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians can talk to each other. This is never explained.
• Babylon 5: Played with in "Lines of Communication"; at what is supposedly First Contact between the Minbari and Drakh, the Drakh unexpectedly demonstrate fluency in the Minbari language. Soon enough, one of the Minbari delegation reveals himself as The Mole who's been in secret contact with the Drakh all along.
• Carnivàle: During the fireball show, Samson secretly passes an old Crusader fob up to the stage during Lodz's psychometry act. When Lodz touches it, he's struck by visions of a holy war and begins chanting "In hoc signo vinces!" Ben, an uneducated farmboy, surprises Samson by translating even though he doesn't even recognize the language is Latin:
  Ben Hawkins: By this sign we conquer... by this sign we conquer...
• One episode of How I Met Your Mother reveals Ted can speak ASL. It never comes up again after the gag where Ted tips off a woman that Barney is trying to sleep with her by pretending Ted is his deaf brother.
• Zig-zagged in Friends. "The One Where Ross Can't Flirt" has Phoebe speaking with Joey's Italian grandmother, with Phoebe seeming as surprised about this as Joey. But in an earlier episode, Rachel's former lover Paulo calls her "bellissima" and she doesn't understand.
  Joey: Wow, Phoebs, you speak Italian?
  Phoebe: Apparently.
• Llan-ar-goll-en: In "Dirgelwch y Llyfr Coll", Prys and Barti speak to each other in Swahili. It seems incredibly unlikely that Prys would be fluent in that language, and Barti only speaks in unintelligible grunts with individual words thrown in. The other characters barely react to this.
• Warrior (2019): It turns out Ah Sahm can talk to white people and was just pretending he couldn't. He's the only Chinese character who can, and it's never explained why.

Video Games

• Final Fantasy XIV:
  • In Heavensward, the Warrior and Alphinaud are startled by how they can understand the great wyrm Hraesvelgr, who only speaks the language of dragons. They learn that while other races may not speak the dragon's language, the inherent power and magic in a dragon's song essentially beams meaning directly into the hearer's mind.
  • The Scions are shocked in Shadowbringers when they meet Emet-Selch's recreation of the lost city of Amaurot, the home of the Benevolent Precursor race. Although the ancient version of mankind spoke only in a Starfish Language of droning tones, the Scions born millennia after the world was sundered find that they're able to discern meaning from it.
• Knights of the Old Republic has a subversion. Yes, your character understands plenty of languages, but there isn't anyone who should understand the language of the Abusive Precursors. Turns out you'd been there before and learned the language, but just forgotten the whole thing between Malak's backstab and whatever the Jedi did to "rebuild" you.
• Rakenzarn Tales: When the protagonist finds the titular book, he's able to read it despite the language being completely unknown to him.

Western Animation

• Josie and the Pussycats: In Outer Space has Melody encounter an alien creature she names Bleep. Melody and Bleep seem to understand each other just fine.
• The Simpsons:
  • Despite his general lack of intelligence, several episodes have Homer suddenly demonstrating fluency in a foreign language with little to no explanation. In one case even speaking Penguin.
    Brad: Wake up, Homer, those Powersauce bars are just junk! They're made of apple cores and Chinese newspapers!
    Homer: (squinting at bar) Hey, Deng Xiaoping died.
  • In "Treehouse of Horror V", when Homer is sent back in time to a prehistoric era, and has to avoid stepping on anything to change the future, he ends up swatting a mosquito then asks for reassurance that it won't change the future. He is understood despite being in an era before English existed, since a sloth behind him shrugs and grunts as if to say "I don't know."
• In Total Drama, some wild animals—especially squirrels—can understand humans.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Adora is able to instinctively read the language of the First Ones. Other characters can learn to decipher it, but Adora can just glance at a text and know what it says. While she's eventually revealed to be the last remaining member of the First Ones race, the last time she potentially had contact with any of them was as an infant (and even that's just a guess), so it's not as if they could have taught her.
• What If?: Kahhori (pronounced "Ka-HOR-tee") is a native Mohawk woman who initially only speaks the Mohawk language. But by the end of her first appearance, she is also somehow able to speak Spanish to speak with Queen Isabella of Spain. In her second appearance, she also somehow learned to speak English.

Real Life

• This trope can be Truth in Television for speakers of different languages which are considered mutually intelligible, usually from languages from the same family (e.g. Spanish and Italian). Even without speaking the other language, they can understand each other just fine.

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