Basic Trope: A character is extremely (and often downright unrealistically) proficient in a wide variety of languages.
- Straight: Alice speaks thirty languages to a native level.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice speaks three hundred languages absolutely perfectly, despite only having been exposed to them for thirty minutes.
- Alice can speak and write all languages (including machine/programming languages) flawlessly without exception in the multiverse, regardless of their complexity.
- Downplayed:
- Alice speaks a dozen languages fluently, though there are a few gaps in her knowledge.
- Alice is a Cunning Linguist and is multilingual, but not to an unrealistic or unusual extent (for someone of their origin).
- Alice is literate in an improbable number of languages, but her pronunciation and accent makes holding a conversation laborious even if she can keep up with the spoken language at all.
- Justified:
- Alice has a brain implant that gives her excellent learning skills and memory.
- Alice is really A.L.I.C.E., a robot designed to assist diplomats in a play set 20 Minutes into the Future.
- Alice is immortal. It's easy to learn every language when you have, literally, all the time in the world.
- Alice is an angel or other emissary from God and can speak in tongues.
- Alice has Translator Microbes.
- Alice is a higher-dimensional being where time is irrelevant. Because of this, from the moment she is first exposed to any language, she will automatically and instantaneously speak it flawlessly, beyond time.
- Alice is telepathic.
- Alice has the ability to understand every language instinctively.
- Inverted:
- Alice is unilingual in a society of omniglots.
- Alice doesn't know a single language and can't communicate.
- Alice can fluently speak every language known to man except the one used in her hometown, which she can't speak a single word of.
- Alice only speaks one language, but anyone who hears her can understand it.
- Subverted: Alice tries to use her skill with languages to negotiate with the bad guys, but it turns out that she doesn't speak their language as well as she thought, and she ends up insulting them by accident.
- Double Subverted:
- ...But the fact that she at least tried to learn their language convinces them that peace is possible after all.
- The bad guys greet each other through insults.
- Parodied:
- It becomes a Running Gag that Alice "just happens" to speak a number of increasingly obscure languages, with her excuses for why she knows them getting more and more ridiculous.
- Somebody sets off a whole load of Angrish-laden nonsense, and Alice points out they called themselves a giant purple elephant who dances in ten different languages within one sentence.
- Alice can speak over a dozen languages, just not the one most of her companions regularly use.
- Literally every single word Alice speaks in any given sentence comes from a different language.
- Tthe immortal Alice, speaks hundreds of dead languages fluently, but with live languages she'd be lucky to reach You No Take Candle level of competency (after twenty years).
- Zig-Zagged: Alice speaks thirty languages ... but not the one language that she needs right now ... so she learns it in ten minutes ... badly ... only to find that Christophe, to whom she needs to talk, speaks her language perfectly anyway, being an example of this trope himself.
- Averted:
- Alice admits to being hopeless at languages.
- Except for her native English, Alice only knows a little Spanish that she remembers from school.
- Enforced: The premise of the show has Alice visiting remote parts of a dozen obscure countries without a translator, so she pretty much has to be good at languages for the thing to work.
- Lampshaded: "Jeez, I must have been doing it wrong. I studied this language at university for years and still make mistakes, but here you are speaking it and thirty others perfectly just from hearing people chatting on the bus."
- Invoked: Alice's parents bombarded her with languages from an early age in an attempt to make sure she turned out this way.
- Exploited:
- Alice gets hired as a translator.
- Alice gets hired as a spy against people who would otherwise be Hiding Behind the Language Barrier.
- Defied: Alice sees no point in learning other languages, and declines to do so despite evidence that she'd be good at it.
- Discussed: "So, unless you think you're some sort of cartoon super-genius and can magically learn Swahili by tomorrow morning, you're not going on that mission."
- Conversed: "Y'know, as a language student, it really annoys me when these shows have characters learn a new language in half an hour. Have the writers ever tried to learn a language?"
- Implied: Alice enjoys cultural festivals more than most and is part of almost every Five-Token Band in the area.
- Deconstructed:
- Alice does indeed speak many languages, but the study and constant practice required to learn and maintain them takes up just about all her time, and what was once a fun hobby has turned into a stressful chore.
- Because she can speak many or all languages, languages aren't new to Alice anymore or at least as exciting to her.
- In the case of an immortal Alice she learned the languages slowly over time — and said languages often evolve quite a bit over millennia. Depending on the number of times she learned it she can merely sound old-fashioned, suffer from Antiquated Linguistics, or if learned across several different time periods winding up with a bizarre equivalent of Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe. Anyone except for experts in the language across history assume she is crazy and deliberately speaking an old form of the language badly.
- Reconstructed: Alice speaks a lot of languages, and although the work required is huge, she finds that the things she can accomplish with it make all the sacrifice worthwhile.
- Played for Laughs: Alice and Bob are at the movies, watching a film with Ominous Latin Chanting in it. Alice starts giggling because she knows Latin and they are saying something really silly and outright hilarious in Latin.
- Played for Drama: Alice is excluded from group activities because her erstwhile friends can't stand her talking to herself in other languages.
- Played for Horror: Alice uses her fluency in the Black Speech to summon an Eldritch Abomination.
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