When a character or group needs to be portrayed as foreign, primitive, or inferior in intellect, or perhaps just childlike, yet still intelligible and able to communicate, the language of these characters is spoken as a grammatically abhorrent mess. Characters could be speaking a mutilated version of the language they learned from another culture, or a butchered version of their own language, or simply a language so "primitive" it appears from an outside perspective to lack complexity. This trope is Older Than Print, going all the way back to Chaucer.
If the work is taking on a superior versus inferior viewpoint, the superior beings might use Spock Speak or Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe to contrast the barbarism of the other group. The inferior race is often shown speaking pidgin English and omitting articles, auxiliary verbs, possessive pronouns, and sometimes prepositions. The speakers often refer to themselves in third person. It is quite similar to Hulk Speak, though even non-combatants can or will use it. In some cases, it is a form of Aliens Speaking English, in which the creatures have their own language and speak English as a very poorly learned secondary language.
This trope comes from two sources. First, English as a language has very little inflection, meaning words don't change their forms to cover case, tense, grammatical gender, etc. very much if at all. Instead, English requires a lot of small auxiliary words to convey the same information which other languages do in much fewer but more complex words. At the same time, you don't need these auxiliary words to make a comprehensible sentence (hence the adage, "English is an easy language to speak badly.") This leads to the second source: pidgin languages,
which are highly simplified languages used by groups without a common language to communicate. Pidgins are stripped down to the absolute bare minimum of grammar needed to get one's point across, to make them easier to learn; some common English idioms like "long time no see", "sorry, no go" or "no X, no Y" are presumed to have their origin in the Chinese-English pidgin that emerged when the United Kingdom started commercial relationships with China.note
There's actually a scientific term for this kind of speech pattern: agrammatic speech.
The Trope Namer is World of Warcraft, where kobolds, who wear candles on their heads to light their way in the mines, say this when attacked by a player character.
Supertrope to the more racial Asian Speekee Engrish and Tonto Talk, and like them sometimes Truth in Television, although also like them it can sometimes also be considered offensive or politically incorrect if used poorly. Compare Hulk Speak and Strange-Syntax Speaker. If the character can speak proper language, but nevertheless chooses to speak like this for some reason, it's Elective Broken Language. If the speaker is otherwise very capable in their own language, then it is Eloquent in My Native Tongue. A softer version of this trope is Poirot Speak where characters who speak a language quite fluently will occasionally insert syntax errors or bad grammar to remind the viewer that they are indeed foreigners. Unrelated to You Can't Get Ye Flask, except in sense that we suck compared to computer overlords.
Example subpages:
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Other examples:
- Demonstrated by Massacration, a Brazilian Affectionate Parody of metal bands. "Far away/across the sea/Master never grow/Now the way/Against the fear/Master will is sure."
- Jonathan Coulton's song Code Monkey is done entirely in this style, being sung from the perspective of an actual monkey.
- From the Dethklok song "Face Fisted", lines like these:
I am be dangerous now
Not me hurt
When stairs fell down
Me pushed by you
Me hit head
Me nose broke
Soon you be dead - Mark Heard's "How to Grow Up Big and Strong" (later covered by Rich Mullins) is like this throughout the song. "Strong man strangle universe/He drown the stars" and so forth.
- In one B.C. strip, the Italian Anno Domini and the Amerind Conahonty converse in this way. When asked how they can understand each other, coming as they do from different parts of the world, they explain, "Is universal language. Is broken English."
- The crocodiles in Pearls Before Swine mostly talk like this to convey their lack of intelligence.
- Artur from Big Nate, hailing from Belarus, speaks in this manner. All the girls at P.S. 38 find this adorable.
- In Williams' Taxi pinball game, "Gorbie" (Mikhail Gorbachev) talks like this.
- "Boris" (a caricature of Boris Yelsin) does the same thing in Diner.
- The antagonist of Gorgar talks like this. Justified in that he has a vocabulary of seven words.
Gorgar: "Me... got... you!"
- Done by the attacking aliens of Firepower, coming this with Machine Monotone.
"Fire - Power - Destroy - You"
- Yoshihiro Tajiri English sentences tend to be either overly simplistic or rudeness of the Cluster F-Bomb variety. It's played with however in that these almost always impress just because so few people know he can even speak English at all. Ditto his ECW rival Super Crazy.
- Lin Bairon in Tajiri's SMASH and Wrestling New Classic promotions. She spoke English with a lot of confidence and enthusiasm, displaying excellent pronunciation, a decent vocabulary and terrible grammar.
- Subverted in Mongrels. Nelson uses this to try to communicate with Rob the chimpanzee when he first meets him. Rob assumes that Nelson normally talks like that and responds in the same way, until they realise their mistake and switch to normal English.
- Cookie Monster from Sesame Street usually talks this way, referring to himself as "me".
- In The Dark Crystal, the otherwise well-spoken Skeksis Chamberlain speaks this way during his encounter with the Gelflings. In the original cut of the film, this would have been the only scene in the film in which a Skeksis actually speaks English, before it was changed to make their speech always understandable. The moment therefore makes little sense unless you assume that either Translation Convention is in effect for all other scenes featuring the Skeksis, or else that the Chamberlain is using Obfuscating Stupidity to unsuccessfully put the Gelflings at ease.
- In The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, the Chamblerlain has these speech patterns at all times now, even when among his fellow Skeksis. Considering how smarmy and manipulative he is, the Obfuscating Stupidity answer is likely now canon.
- All the puppets in Oobi talk this way.
- Our Miss Brooks: The episode "Bartering with Chief Thundercloud" has the eponymous chief and his wife speak in this matter. Miss Brooks is flattered by Mrs. Thudercloud's compliment, however.
- Mrs. Thundercloud: Miss Brooks, she very pretty!
- The Goon Show occasionally had "primitive" characters (Africans, Arabs, Red Indians, etc), who were usually played by the show's resident (black) singer Ray Ellington. Any Unfortunate Implications of this were partly subverted by Ellington's character clearly being more intelligent than any of the white characters. And it was the 1950s...
- Parodied in a 1949 Bob & Ray skit featuring Pronto, sidekick to the Lone Agent:
Pronto (Bob): Ug. Lone, that be completely impossible. You would be implicating me in crime, in which I can have no hand.
Lone (Ray): Huh? Is this Pronto speaking?
Pronto: Ug.
Lone: Where'd you get the education?
Pronto: Me go Harvard. Me Boston brave.
- The Bob Lassiter Show had sketches of Dingo Boy, (voice of a then unknown Adam Carolla) who searched the land in order to "Find man who killed parents".
- In one of her standup acts, Margaret Cho once joked that an advantage to being of Asian descent in the United States while going out to bars was that, when getting hit on by a guy in whom you are totally uninterested, you can state in You No Take Candle that you don't speak English.
- Tabletop RPG Land of Og, and its more playable successor Og: Unearthed Edition, limits its caveman characters to only a few words while speaking in character. Each character has a different set of words they can use, such as "You", "Rock", "Stick", "Thing", "Hairy", "Bang", "Go", and "Verisimilitude".
- This is played straight within the BattleTech universe. The Clans, in their fanatical devotion to restoring the ancient Star League, speak strictly in Star League Standard English (with some new terminology and shorthand as needed to reflect their unique culture, but never contractions). Conversely, they consider the mishmashing of languages used by the Successor States and the mediocre quality of their English as further proof of their descent into barbarism.
- Although according to The Powers That Be, Star League Standard English sounds like Valley Girl-speak.
- Also, most of the Successor States use English as a secondary language and use a different language or languages as their primary one, such as German (the Lyran Commonwealth/Lyran Alliance), French (the Federated Suns), Mandarin (the Capellan Confederation), or Swedenese (a creole language of Swedish and Japanese used in the Free Rasalhague Republic). Despite this, all the characters in the novels speak perfectly understandable English with few notable accents or grammar problems.
- Poetry For Neanderthals forces the players to speak like this when describing something by making them use only one-syllable words.
- Warhammer 40,000 Orks can use a bastardized version of Low Gothic (known as English in the millennium we live in) aside from their original language which is mostly guttural yells with a glyph writing system. Their grammar is likewise bastardized.
- Ace Attorney:
- Machi Tobaye from Apollo Justice: justified in that his knowledge of English is rudimentary. Him not speaking English prior to Apollo proving he knew it in court was probably equally because parsing it was inconvenient.
- Played straight with Zinc Lablanc from Investigations.
Lablanc: Ah, you are pulling the sheep over our eyes.
- Averted with the entire population of Khura'in in Spirit of Justice. They all speak English rather fluently, despite being a foreign nation which still actively uses its own cultural language and writing system. This is partly explained by a heavy dependence on tourism, though that doesn't necessarily explain why everyone is fluent.
- Amnesia: Memories: The Good Ending for Kent has his Japanese voice actor say, "I'm sorry for waiting" in English. Since he was the second person to arrive at their meeting place, what he meant was he was sorry for making the heroine wait. The localized version fixed the mangled English sentence.
- Last Chance in Xollywood: At times Uz the stunt coordinator seems to talk like this (and is also a Malaproper), because the universal translator isn't really good at translating her dialect. This causes her some grief, since people usually already look down on her for being from Zoberon: a backwater, war-mongering, "fifth-rate" planet.
- Missing Stars takes place in a school in Vienna. Due to its international nature, most students speak in English. Those that don't either speak German or, to a lesser degree, French. Sofiya, unfortunately, cannot speak German and is still learning English. She and her sister Natalya speak English this way.
- "Confucius say, he who no take candle not very bright."
- In Chris Jericho's autobiography, he mentions that while he worked in Japan, he couldn't really speak the language and a couple of the friends he made there couldn't really speak English. However, he said that because he was fluent in "broken English" that he could still communicate; asking his friends "Would you like to go to the music store with me?" wouldn't work, but saying, "Maybe you me go CD shop?" would.
- A Furby will talk like this when speaking English.
- Amazing Amanda will sometimes talk like this.
Amanda: "No hugs for Amanda? Amanda sad"
- This list of translation fails results in this.
"Slip and fall down carefully!"
- This video is mostly in correct English, but falls into You No Take Candle sometimes.
"My peepee is escaping!""We ran, but not able."
- Toki Pona, a minimalist Conlang, has only 120 words in it, and concepts must be expressed by compounding those words, so as a result, overly-direct translations can easily cause this trope. "Jan sona" translates to "teacher", but literally translates as "knowledge-person", "ilo moku" can mean fork, spoon, knife, etc. but literally translates as "food tool", and so on for basically everything that can't be described using a single word.
- Hey. Long time no see.
