Basic Trope: Characters use a language they know but a third party does not, in order to exclude them from the conversation.
- Straight: Alice, Bob, and Claire all speak the Common Tongue. Alice and Bob switch to another language that Claire does not speak to prevent her from understanding them.
- Exaggerated: Alice and Bob have most of their conversations in languages chosen to prevent present company from understanding.
- Downplayed:
- Alice and Bob talk a little in Language B in the middle of a conversation that is otherwise entirely in Language A.
- Alice and Bob speak to each other in a language few other people know, and this makes their conversation feel private, even though there's no third party around to hear it.
- Justified: Alice and Bob are foreigners in Claire's home country, where Language A is the official language, and they don't speak Language A very well, find it frustrating, and see no reason to speak it unless they must. The fact that they don't want Claire to understand them is only a bonus.
- Inverted:
- Alice and Bob know that Claire is listening in and deliberately feed her false information. So they speak in Language A.
- While Alice and Bob usually talk to each other in Language B, because Claire is here and they want to include her, they speak in Language A.
- Subverted:
- Claire also knows Language B and understands the conversations that Alice and Bob wanted to keep secret from her.
- Claire thinks Alice and Bob are speaking Language B to hide something from her, but it turns out they were speaking it for a different reason.
- Double Subverted:
- Claire doesn't know Language B well enough to understand the conversation fully.
- Alice and Bob speak in a dialect wherein Claire is inexperienced, to the same effect.
- Alice and Bob then switch to Language C, which she doesn't know.
- Parodied: Language B is simply Language A with "comedy acksent forreen."
- Zig-Zagged: Claire knows Language B. She can't understand all of it, but she can infer that Alice and Bob are discussing something about her and is hurt by it, assuming it is negative. As a result, she is completely blindsided when Alice and Bob reveal that they discussed the possibility of teaching her Language B. Only it is because they intend to include her in conversations they have about other people in public.
- Averted: Alice and Bob don't speak in Language B.
- Enforced: The show is trying to attract a large international audience.
- Lampshaded:Alice: We can't let Claire find out about this, Bob.Bob: It's a good thing she doesn't know Language B, Alice!Claire: I don't know what "mierda" means, but considering how much emphasis you put into it and how you looked at me when you said it, I am going to assume it was not a nice word, dudes.
- Invoked: Alice and Bob take classes in a language they know Claire does not speak.
- Exploited: Language B is the official language of a country hostile to Bob and Alice's own, and their government hires them as spies.
- Defied: Although Alice and Bob can speak Language B, they stick to Language A because they don't want to act like they are keeping secrets from Claire.
- Discussed: "There go Alice and Bob jabbering away in Language B."
- Conversed: "If they're going to use a Gratuitous Foreign Language, they could at least give subtitles for the benefit of viewers who don't speak it."
- Implied: Alice and Bob speak less comprehensibly when Claire is around than at other times.
- Deconstructed: It does not takes any amount of time for Claire to figure out that Alice and Bob are using their knowledge of another language as a kind of secret code to talk about her, and it does nothing to remove certain elements that are easy to understand regardless of language (like giving her a Death Glare) or, worse yet, Claire does not knows the entire language but she certainly knows the foul language (anybody who has seen Scarface (1983) knows that "pendejo" and "coño" are Spanish insults) and can guesstimate if they are being used to insult her.
- Played for Laughs: Alice and Bob tell each other jokes in Language B.
- Played for Drama: Aunt Alice and Dr. Bob need to discuss Mama's condition without frightening Denise.
I'm sure the people talking in that language I don't know are discussing Hiding Behind the Language Barrier.
