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There are only two languages in the world: “Human” and “Animal”. While humans and other obviously sapient creatures (such as Ridiculously Human Robots and, yes, Funny Animals) are always portrayed as having many different languages even within the same racial ethnicity (except in space), all animals speak the same language, regardless of species.
Sometimes the trope only applies one way: the animals can understand the human language, but not vice versa, like in Garfield. In some other situations, very young children can understand animals, apparently meaning that Baby Talk counts as a type of "Animal". "Animal" is also always just as complex and good at specific details, abstract concepts, and proper nouns as any given human language. It's even got articles like "the" and "a", though that is arguably Translation Convention.
Turned into an animal? Friend To All Living Things? Found a Babel Fish or simply became The Doctor Dolittle? You can now speak to all living things, from whales to paramecium (plants usually excepted). Is this a work about Talking Animals? In that case, all of them will share some kind of crazy common tongue (except the ones that aren't cute enough, sometimes), even if they can't talk, they will still all be able to communicate equally well to disparate species as with their own kin.
Made particularly strange when the Translation Convention is in effect around humans: when perspective shifts to the humans, the Real Life (and completely dissimilar) vocalizations of the species involved will be heard, but then when it switches to the perspective of any animal, everything will become intelligible with no Bilingual Dialogue problems at all, as the same language.
Often results in Carnivore Confusion.
Examples
Anime
- A strange variant of this occurs in Pokemon. All the different species of Pokémon (usually) talk only using parts of their own names, but they can still understand every other species. Meowth, who is one of the few Pokemon which speak human language (he taught himself to impress a female), sometimes acts as a translator. Interestingly the Pokemon appear to understand humans easily, so much so that Meowth is never shown to speak “Pokemon” talk even when he isn't in the company of humans.
- This was taken to ridiculous heights in the second movie, when Pikachu communicated with Zapdos through an arc of electricity, and Meowth was able to translate just by watching.
- Attack of the Giant Pokemon was the only known Pokemon episode to actually provide subtitles to the best of this troper's knowledge. Also, this principle is void in the Mystery Dungeon series.
- Interestingly, the Japanese version of the episode featured not subtitles, but Japanese voice-acting. Meaning that Meowth would fit right it.
- Actually, the Japanese version had them with subtitles too, but some dubs, for whatever reason, had them speaking their language.
- Tony Tony Chopper of One Piece is a reindeer granted human intelligence by a magic fruit. Not only can he speak, but he can also translate between 'human' and 'animal'
Comic Books
- Aquaman is famous for having the embarassingly lame superpower of talking to fish. While he can communicate telepathically with any sea creature, his powers are useless on land animals, suggesting at least two incompatible dialects of Animal Talk.
- Subverted in recent series by having him able to affect the parts of the mammal brain that predate land life— to a limited degree— suggesting the separation is merely a psychological block. Of course, given the recent Cosmic Retcon, and the general lack of research of most writers at DC these days, who knows if that's still canon.
- Moot point anyway, since he got turned into a squid monster and replaced with a lookalike.
Film
- Walt Disney's 101 Dalmatians exhibits this trope, as does the original novel on which it's based.
- For the most part, Dumbo seems to follow this trope, as animals of all species can communicate, as well as understand what the humans are saying. However, at one point Timothy Mouse is able to whisper intelligibly into the ringmaster's ear as he sleeps. Either Timothy is special, animals just pretend they can't speak when humans are around (which you'd think would be an even bigger claim to fame than a flying elephant if one ever spoke up), or the fact that the man was asleep meant he only heard the mouse subconsciously.
- However, later on Timothy becomes Dumbo's agent and is seen signing a contract for him. This raises even more questions about human knowledge of animal sapience in the Dumbo universe.
- Also shown in the first Ice Age movie, where all animals understand each other, but “humans can't talk”.
- In Lady and the Tramp, the dog characters cannot converse with apes as they are too close to humans in nature.
- Reversed in Ratatouille: Remy the rat can understand humans and has even taught himself to read but must use physical gestures to communicate with them. Also, he was never shown to communicate with any other animal, other than his rat family.
- In Happy Feet, most animals speak to each other, even most predators, but humans cannot understand. Unless one happens to be a penguin that can communicate via tap-dance.
- Used weirdly in All Dogs Go To Heaven as well. Dogs can only communicate with other dogs, and the orphan girl Anne-Marie, is able to speak to all animals. (This is made explicit when it's clear that Anne-Marie is being exploited by Carface -and later by Charlie, before his Heel Face Turn- to bet on animal races, since she can inform him who will win.) This is held pretty consistent throughout the film... except when it isn't (i.e., King Gator and Charlie's big Disney Acid Sequence duet.)
- It's not much of a duet, since the alligator is doing all the singing, and there is little sign that Charlie is understanding any of it.
- Though he does eventually start singing along.
- Disney's Tarzan. The animated series subverts this, though. Jane has been taught to speak to gorillas and elephants, but she simply cannot communicate with any other non-human animal. She also cannot understand when Tarzan is speaking to a different animal. Tarzan, apparently, is just multilingual.
- On Madagascar, there are a couple of scenes where Alex the lion tries to talk to the humans. All they hear is roaring, and are understandably horrified.
- In Bolt', animals can talk with one another, but not to humans.
- A variation is used in the sequels to The Land Before Time, where there are apparently two dinosaur languages, one used by the T. rex characters (and possibly other "Sharpteeth") and one used by everyone else.
- An odd exception to the rule is Chomper, the baby 'Sharptooth' who (presumably) learned to speak the 'conventional' dinosaur language and the exclusive 'Sharptooth' language (shown when translating his parents language to Littlefoot).
- In Bionicle Nuju learns bird language. There is also kikinalo language and Visorak language.
- Inverted in Enchanted, Animals can clearly communicate amongst each other AND to other "human" characters in Andalasia, but once we cross into the "real world" of New York, this ability ceases.
- Played Painfully striaght in many 2000's kids movies
Literature
- The book Watership Down, never content to leave an animal trope as it finds it, has its rabbits speak Lapine amongst themselves. Local creatures share a crude woodland vernacular (referred as "hedgerow lingua franca"), but other ones have to be taught; these are represented by broken language, strong accents and unintelligibility of simple concepts such as Lapine's "silflay" or Keehar's 'Gullish' "sea" to other species.
- Kind of messed around in Richard Adam's later book, The Plague Dogs, where apparently all animals can talk to each other (a caged rabbit clearly requests to "be left to die in peace") but animals cannot talk to humans. However, the titular dogs have trouble understanding the Tod, a fox whose animal speak is translated into a particularly hard-to-understand English dialect.
- In Xanth, each species of animals, plants and inanimate objects has its own language. Interestingly, for instance language of the dragons is related to the language of snakes, and centaurs can in theory converse with pegasi. Also, some beings might have magical gifts to be able to talk the languages of other species, like Grundy.
- Averted in Dick King-Smith's The Fox Busters, which takes the Watership Down subversion a step further; it includes the mutually incomprehensible languages of Vulpine, Hennish and Rodent, but no lingua franca.
- In the first Dinotopia book, it is explicitly stated that different genre of animals speak different languages. There is one lingua franca that is understood by a few species, including humans and Protoceratopsians. The thing is, whether you are able to understand this language or not depends seemingly on your biological classification. Fortunately, James Gurney seems to have outright dumped this in later books (exactly how it was supposed to work was never clear).
- One of Allan Dean Foster's Dinotopia novels had a human-and-stegosaurian nomadic community where, despite the stegosaurians and all other dinosaurs being as intelligent as humans (it's part of the setting) and the community having existed for years, the dinosaurs and humans could not understand what the other species was saying. Agggh!
- In Animal Farm, the animals all understand each others' different noises, but the humans and animals don't seem to understand each other. This changes toward the end of the story, where the pigs learn the human's language.
- Either played with or subverted in Tamora Pierce's Wild Mage series, where all the animals could talk to each other with relative ease, but it was implied that each species has its own distinct dialect.
- Averted somewhat in Garry Kilworth's House of Tribes. The different classes of animals speak different languages; mouse speech is rendered into English as the main characters are mice, feline speech is "translated" into French and canine becomes Japanese. The mouse Little Prince does pick up canine speech from being kept as a pet in a house also containing dogs, and a fox displays some very basic knowledge of mouse-speak.
- Kilworth also plays with this in The Foxes of First Dark, where it's fox-speak (and dog-speak; the two species share a common language) rendered as English, feline as French, and so on; human speech is described as sounding like barks and growls. Vulpine also features regional dialects: Camio, a North American fox, is described as having a different accent than the rest of the foxes, who are all native to Great Britain; he also has different names for some vulpine concepts (longtrekker as opposed to rangfar to describe a fox who has journeyed far from home, etc.).
Live Action TV
- Played with in Sabrina The Teenage Witch: trying to reason with a giant dinosaur that more than slightly resembles Godzilla, Sabrina tries Japanese. As it turns out, the dinosaur actually speaks French (a reference to then recent US Godzilla movie).
Tabletop Games
- Usually averted in Dungeons And Dragons:
- Played mostly straight with the Speak With Animals spell which allows the caster to communicate with any animal, but it doesn't last long and is really no more linguistically unusual than the Tongues spell, which allows speaking any language.
- The animal companions of druids and rangers have no special communication abilities apart from an empathic link to their masters.
- A sorcerer or wizard's familiar can speak with animals and translate for its master, but the communication only works with animals of its own kind.
- A paladin's mount can magically command animals of its own kind, but it doesn't extend to all animals.
- Lycanthropes can communicate with animals in a way normal humans can't, but only with their own kind.
Videogames
- The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess — as a wolf, Link can talk to any friendly animal.
- Both averted and played straight in Okami. Although the protagonist is a wolf, she can't talk to 99% of the animals present in the game, including most of the dogs. However, she can talk to the 8 Satomi Warriors, which are canines, when none of the human nor humanoid characters can. Additionally, she can understand the language of humans (and the various other races of the game), but she herself cannot speak and only her companion Issun and his grandfather seem to be able to understand her.
- The fact she can understand everything is explaned quite simply by the fact that Amaterasu is the sun goddess, in the form of a wolf.
- The Poncles are heavily implied to be able to talk to every animal, so it's not only Issun and his grandfather who can understand her.
- Present in the Tekken series. Yes, Tekken. That's what happens when you have
one three five six actual animals (plus King and King II, who seem to prefer snarls and roars over their native Spanish). Here, though, it seems that everyone retains their language (or something they've picked up) and just understand each other: Paul (English) and Kuma II (bear) trading insults, Raven (English) and Heihachi (Japanese) discussing storyline, and so on.
- All animals in Animal Crossing speak 'Animalese', represented as a form of Simlish made of distorted and sped up pieces of English words that match the speech bubbles when they talk.
- In the first major twist of Crusader of Centy, the protagonist is rendered capable of talking to animals and monsters... and incapable of understanding human speech. Half the game goes by before he becomes bilingual.
Webcomics
- Reversed in the webcomic Little Dee: The title character, a human preschooler, can't talk but her animal guardians, as well as every other animal they encounter around the world, all speak English.
- Subverted in Order Of The Stick: When Vaarsuvius is turned into a lizard, he/she is surprised a black dragon can understand his/her speech. This is because the dragon actually studied Lizard, because his mother told him "it was important to study other cultures".
Western Animation
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