Does Not Speak Common

"Pablo does not speak any English, it seems. But he knows the language of baseball and knows it well. Simply put, this kid is good."

— Pablo Sanchez's character description, Backyard Baseball

A character whose dialogue is mostly in a language other than that of the work. Reasons may vary, the most likely being that they quite literally do not speak the language of the setting they're in... and yet, they have quite a lot to say. This may result in either a Language Barrier or Bilingual Dialogue depending on the situation. If Reality Has No Subtitles, it likely also invokes either The Unintelligible or Bilingual Bonus, depending on the language skills of the individual viewer.

A brief encounter with a foreign-language speaker generally doesn't qualify; rather, the character should have some prominence and take part in full conversations, with most or all of their lines being in a language the average audience member presumably doesn't know.

The trope title refers to the Common Tongue, meaning the default language of a setting, which Dungeons & Dragons abbreviates to simply Common.

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Examples:

Fan Works

Examples by author:

• In all of NoonboryKedabory's Punch-Out!! fanfics.^note Ma Fille and Shining and Sweet, A Berry Bad Idea, Hold Me, Fever Moon, Full Moons and Silver Spoons several boxers speak only their native language instead of English. In most instances, them speaking English is a major case of O.O.C. Is Serious Business.

Examples by title:

• The Mountain and the Wolf: While the Wolf speaks intelligibly, he only speaks the Westeros tongue because he was made an Omniglot by explicitly magical means. Anytime the Wolf speaks in a language that's made intelligible to the reader (such as Valyrian, Naath, or Dothraki), it's because there's a speaker of that language in earshot, whenever he's speaking to his crew it involves a pseudo-Norse language.
  • The Wolf's sorcerer speaks in a You No Take Candle way but is still able to make himself understood.
  • The rest of his crew don't speak it at all, which nearly leads to Tyrion getting killed because he's unable to make the crewmen understand the Wolf gave him permission to be onboard his ship (fortunately for Tyrion, the Wolf shows up shortly after).
  • Akkarulf (formerly Theon Greyjoy) doesn't understand the Norscans' language, allowing him to ask the Wolf what's going on in Westerosi/English.
  • Several Norscan berserkers are believed to yell angrily about corn when they're actually invoking the name of Khorne, the Blood God.
• With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: Kuzco primarily speaks Spanish, with Pacha translating for other Palace members. Similarly, Jebbie only speaks Korean, though in the fanfic she's a human and Youngmee can translate more directly than in canon, Geumsaegi's sister is deaf and has Oegwipali translate her sign language into speech for the group, and Red Son mentions that Demon Bull King neither speaks nor reads English.

Films — Animation

• Tuck and Roll in A Bug's Life speak an unidentified language; Disney sources tend to identify them as Hungarian, but their dialogue is total gibberish, and they spend most of the film blissfully unaware of what's happening around them.
• In Cars, Guido only speaks Italian, seemingly out of personal preference, as he can understand what's going on around him and holds Bilingual Dialogue conversations with fellow Italian Luigi.
• Bomb Voyage, a briefly-seen supervillain in The Incredibles, only speaks French, to the point of exclaiming "Monsieur Incroyable!" when confronted by Mr. Incredible.^note Which veers into Gratuitous French territory because the French version of the movie, instead of translating the name and title literally, uses Indestructible instead.
• In Klaus (2019), Margu speaks only in Saami.
• Wreck-It Ralph has many characters across dozens of video games. Those that can speak, speak English ... except for Q*bert, who speaks a gibberish language that's accompanied by Speech Bubbles filled with Grawlixes. Fix-It Felix can understand Q*bert's speech, identifying it as Q*bertese, though he admits he's a little rusty at it, and even deigns to address Q*bert in his own language.

Films — Live-Action

• Inverted in Caveman; Nook, a supporting character from a faraway land, is the only character in the film who does speak a language the audience can understand, speaking English while the rest of the cast speak the caveman language of the film's invention.
• In Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai the title character maintains a friendship with ice cream man Raymond, who only speaks French, despite neither of them speaking the other's main language. (Ghost Dog's is English, despite his Foreign Culture Fetish for Japan.)
• The Hobbit:
  • Azog and Bolg, the trilogy's main Orc antagonists, have all of their dialogue in Black Speech.
  • Bifur appears to have a brain injury that renders him only able to speak in archaic Dwarvish.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe uses Aliens Speaking English with nary a Hand Wave in sight. For pure Rule of Scary purposes, Cull Obsidian's few lines in Avengers: Infinity War are in an alien language, most of them in a brief exchange of Bilingual Dialogue with his adoptive brother Ebony Maw.
• Midway (2019): The Japanese destroyer Captain who apprehends Gaido and O'Flaherty only speaks Japanese during his brief screentime, with none of his lines subtitled. Instead, he has his Translator Buddy, one of the ship's lower-ranking officers, question the two men for him.
• Pandorum: Among the cast which are survivors of a space crash hailing from different countries, while all the major characters are capable of speaking English, The Big Guy, Manh, speaks only unsubtitled Vietnamese.
• Quick Change: While trying to escape after robbing a bank in New York, Grimm, Phyllis, and Loomis catch a ride from a cab driver who speaks ZERO English and can't even tell where they're trying to get to. When they evade the police on a bus, the driver tries telling the cops and gets cuffed and beaten for his trouble (when Da Chief told them to get an interpreter, the cops thought he said "interrogator"). Tony Shalhoub plays the driver in his first movie role, and spoke in gibberish he made up.
• Any character in Star Wars who speaks Huttese natively tends to speak it exclusively, despite understanding the Basic-speakers around them with no technological assistance and, unlike Wookiees or Astromech droids, nothing physically preventing them from pronouncing Basic. Basic-speakers who understand Huttese usually engage Huttese-speakers in Bilingual Dialogue rather than switching to Huttese themselves.

Literature

• Shankar of Q & A speaks in a Cypher Language that can be decoded.

Live-Action TV

• Jane the Virgin: Jane's grandmother Alba, a Venezuelan immigrant, speaks exclusively in Spanish. Since she's mostly seen speaking to her immediate family or other Hispanic people, it's not usually a problem. Everyone except Rogelio almost always responds to her in English, resulting in Bilingual Dialogue (with captions for the audience's benefit). It's later clarified that she can speak English, and occasionally will do so, but simply prefers to speak her native language when she can.
• Lost:
  • Jin and Sun, at least temporarily. When the plane first crashed, the pair of them were isolated from the other survivors due to not speaking English and none of the other survivors knowing Korean. The fact that Sun speaks flawless English was one of the show's first plot twists, while Jin transitioned from this to The Quiet One as he learned enough English to understand the others but not to voice his own thoughts, with the Time Skip rendering him fluent. Notably, flashbacks in Sun and Jin centered episodes are entirely in Korean, while all other flashbacks taking place in non-English-speaking settings employ Switch to English, as, unlike other characters, their command of language is plot-relevant, helped by their actors actually being fluent, unlike those of the Arabic- or Latin-speaking characters.
  • Dogen, a minor antagonist appearing early in Season 6, speaks only Japanese. When Hurley realizes he's using a Completely Unnecessary Translator, Dogen admits, in English, that he simply finds speaking English to be distasteful.
• In Sesame Street, Ovejita the lamb only speaks Spanish.

Theatre

• In Chicago, one of the Murderesses, Katalin Hunyak, doesn't speak English, apart from the statement of "not guilty" and occasional mention of "Uncle Sam". Mama can interpret for her lawyer, but the lawyer is too apathetic to put up a good case, leaving Hunyak completely unable to speak on her own behalf, and she ends up being hanged. Her storyline — being completely innocent, confused as to why she finds herself among the Six Merry Murderesses, and confident that she will receive justice under the American system — is relegated to a Bilingual Bonus, as it's expressed entirely in Hungarian.
• In Treasure Island (2014), one of the pirates is from South America and apparently speaks no English, instead chattering incomprehensibly in a foreign language. In his final scene, he reveals to Jim that he can speak fluent English, but considers it a "very ugly language" and prefers not to use it unless he has to.

Video Games

• Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: In the "Dawn of Ragnarok" DLC, Tyra the dwarf doesn't speak the shared language of the Aesir and Vanir. This is represented by her speaking Welsh, and the subtitles just rendering that as "unintelligible".
• Backyard Sports: Pablo Sanchez may be The Ace of all the players, but in most games, he can only speak Spanish, while the others speak English.
  • An Easter Egg in Baseball reveals that English is his first language, having learned Spanish in school and choosing to use it exclusively, meaning he's been invoking it all along.
  • In the GameCube version of Football, he can speak English and occasionally uses Gratuitous Spanish.
• Cyberpunk 2077: Saburo Arasaka refuses to speak anything but Japanese on principle, as he despises everything foreign. He can get away with it because he is the CEO of the world's largest MegaCorp, so whenever he speaks, it's everyone else's darn business to get it translated.
• EXTRAPOWER: Attack of Darkforce: Everyone in the EXTRAPOWER universe is capable of understanding each other, regardless if they're a human from any continent on Earth or one of many space aliens or demons. The excepttion is Nimon, the resident fish man, who speaks exclusively in variations of Puho!! and requires translation... from other fish people.
• The Al Bhed in Final Fantasy X have their own language (actually a cipher that the player can learn to translate over time). Among major Al Bhed characters, Rikku and Cid can speak the main Spiran language just fine, and Rin can speak it with a strong accent, but Rikku's brother (who is actually named Brother) speaks exclusively Al Bhed through the entire game, save one line that he forces out near the end of the game. By the sequel, Brother has been practicing the Spiran language and uses it freely — though he's not up to Rin's level, much less his sister and father's.
• The Fire Emblem games Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn have several Laguz characters who use an ancient language and struggle with the modern one, most notably Leanne and Volug.
• In Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Darth Nihilus speaks a strange, unintelligible language unlike the rest of the characters, who speak Galactic Basic.
• In Punch-Out!!, every opponent speaks exclusively in their native language, so only Disco Kid, Super Macho Man, Mr. Sandman (American), Bear Hugger (Canadian), and Aran Ryan (Irish) speak English.
• Wong Sheng Tai from Saints Row speaks only Mandarin with a translator, giving the player character a list of people. The translator tells the player character that the people on the list are to be spoken to and not harmed. Then Wong shoots the translator in the leg and tells the player character in perfect English the people on the list are to be killed.
• Meredy in Tales of Eternia is a member of the main Player Party who literally Came from the Sky from another planet. She speaks Melnics, which was the Common Tongue of both planets several thousands of years ago, and continues to be the main language on her planet, but on the planet she lands on, it was only reserved for liturgical purposes. Until the rest of the party gets the Orz Earrings after several dungeons, nobody knows what she's speaking.

Web Animation

• In gen:LOCK, Kazu only speaks Japanese. Augmented Reality provides in-universe subtitles and is so ubiquitous that the fact that one of the five main characters participates in all conversations in a completely different language passes entirely without comment.
• Doll in Murder Drones speaks only in Russian (or English, in the Russian dub). No character brings attention to this, and everyone can understand her without issue. This is justified by most of the cast being robots who are multilingual as part of their programming; specifically, the "Maintenancing Insane Daughter Unit" instruction manual used as a sight gag in "The Promening" highlights English, French, and Russian.
• Lopez in Red vs. Blue is an android who, due to a faulty language circuit, can only speak in broken Spanish. None of his teammates understand any amount of Spanish, resulting in much frustration.

Webcomics

• Housepets! has Sofia, the camel assistant to the human Thomas who speaks only in Arabic. Despite this, Thomas only responds in English, and the two seem to have no trouble understanding each other. When we next see Sofia after a timeskip and several years living in a zoo, she seems to be making an effort in learning English, but still speaks in You No Take Candle broken sentences.
  Sofia: Domas, I am stand right over here. And we not have coffee, we are camel.

Web Videos

• In Lele Pons's sitcom Amigos, Hannah Stocking's character speaks entirely in Spanish, seemingly to make up for being the Token White in the otherwise Latino cast and generally being a Cloudcuckoolander. Her Spanish is rudimentary and atrociously accented, but she makes few enough mistakes that the rest of the cast can generally understand her, though they stick to speaking English.

Western Animation

• Lady Rainicorn of Adventure Time only speaks Korean, with a few noteworthy exceptions such as the Wham Line "I am pregnant!"
• Toshi from American Dad! only speaks Japanese out of pride for his home country. His friends cannot understand him and merely make assumptions about what he is saying.
• Bluey: In "Camping", Bluey meets a Labrador named Jean-Luc who only speaks French, though they still manage to play with each other despite the language barrier. This ends up being Played for Drama when Jean-Luc can't tell Bluey that he's leaving the campsite the next day. However, in the Time Skip ending, the teenage Jean-Luc says "Hello, Bluey" in English.
• Among the bilingual cast of Dora the Explorer, Tico the squirrel is the only central cast member who exclusively speaks Spanish. A few other recurring characters, such as Señor Tucán, plus any number of one-shot characters, also require Dora's conversation and the audience's shouted instructions to switch to Spanish.
• Ruffled Feather of Go Go Gophers speaks only in his peculiar, frenetic dialect. He conducts Bilingual Dialogue with Chief Running Board, who speaks in Tonto Talk, and understands everything the settlers say in great detail, but any other character who hears Ruffled Feather's speech has to ask for a translation.
• Higglytown Heroes: In "Say What?", the new girl at the kids' school can only speak Spanish, which Wayne has difficulty with when trying to ask her to play with him. The hero for the episode is a translator who helps him speak the girl's language and translates for her.
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012): In "Tongue Tied", Jebbie the ferret only speaks Korean, which causes some confusion for Blythe, who can't understand what she's saying. It takes Blythe getting Youngmee to translate her speech to find out that Jebbie's been separated from her owner.
• The background breezies are the only sapient characters in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic who don't speak "English", instead speaking a gibberish language. Seabreeze, the only breezie who speaks the common language, translates for them.
• Played with in Primal (2019).
  • The Season 1 finale introduces a human character named Mira, with the implication that she will become a part of the main cast, or at the very least a prominent recurring character. Mira speaks entirely in untranslated, unsubtitled Arabic. The twist is that Mira is so far the only character in the series that has demonstrated the ability to verbally communicate at all. All other characters simply grunt, roar, or outright do not vocalize. As such, she's the closest the series comes to averting The Unintelligible.
  • Celts and Vikings have been encountered in Season 2, and likewise their dialogue has not been in English. It seems to be a quirk of humans in this universe to speak as little as possible — Mira has indeed become a main character but spoken only once in Season 2 — so a few other cultures have appeared without speaking a word. As a result, the fact that main character Spear's use of language is thus far limited to Mira's name has not posed a problem to him.
• Papi from The Proud Family. All of his lines are in Spanish, as he never really participates in conversations, just heckles them.
• The Secret Show has The World Leader, who only ever speaks in an Ancient Aztec language, and as such, her husband appears at her speeches to play the role of her interpreter.
• In both Teen Titans (2003) and its Spin-Off Teen Titans Go!, Más y Menos only speak Spanish. At one point in the original, Control Freak temporarily makes them speak English by using his remote on them.
• Young Justice (2010): Season 2 introduces a group of teenage Superfriends Expies called the Runaways. One of them, Asami Koizumi, speaks entirely in Japanese, occasionally saying English words when she's repeating what someone else said.

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