Never Learned to Talk

This is when a character never learned how to speak. This can be due to being Younger Than They Look, deafness, a curse, an intellectual disability, or simply not having anything to say. Could also be the result of a person having little or no human contact growing up, possibly as the result of being Raised By Animals (such a character is often still a child) or having a particularly extreme case of Parental Neglect.

Often the case for a Cute Mute. Sometimes a silent character may learn to speak quite suddenly. If the character does not know how to speak as a result of being deaf, expect them to use sign language. This character might double as The Unintelligible if they only communicate with certain sounds. In some cases, the character understands speech just fine, and just has trouble reproducing it.

Someone who doesn't speak because they are physically incapable of speech is The Speechless; someone who chooses not to speak is Elective Mute; someone who is implied to speak but never does so onscreen is The Voiceless.

Note that this is in-universe; if the work is about Nearly Normal Animals who can talk to each other, and one of the animal characters can't even talk to other animals (e.g Ed the Hyena from The Lion King), then it's not this trope. If animals hear a human character speaking a human language but humans hear the character making animal noises, it is this trope.

Not to be confused with Dumb Struck, which is when characters are unable to speak due to trauma they've suffered.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Beastars: Louis the anthropomorphic red deer never learned how to talk while he was growing up in the Black Market because he was supposed to be bought by a predator as food. However, he did eventually learn how to talk after he was adopted by the head of Horns Conglomerate, Oguma.
• Chobits: Chii the Ridiculously Human Robot is introduced as a Cute Mute who can only say "Chii", though she learns to speak soon enough. Later subverted when it's revealed that she'd only forgotten how to speak after her memories were wiped; in her past as Elda, she could speak.
• Elegant Yokai Apartment Life: Kuri the ghost child should be old enough to speak, but never learned because his mother never spoke to him when he was alive. The other residents of the Yōkai Apartment do talk to him, but he doesn't seem to be able to learn how now that he is a ghost.
• Pokémon: Secrets of the Jungle: Koko is shown speaking in English around the clan of Zarude, but this is only because of the Translation Convention. When he's around other humans, he only says, "Zarude". This is because he was raised by Zarude, but he learns to speak more English later on.

Comic Books

• The DCU: Two characters suffer from this trope, along with Never Learned to Read, due to the differing environments that they grew up in.
  • Batgirl: Cassandra Cain was taught to read body language as a child, not verbal language, so her father could mold her into the perfect assassin.
  • Sovereign Seven: A strange case involving Network. She and her family are entirely telepathic, a mark of royalty in her world. As such, however, she never learned to speak and Never Learned to Read, or anything else for that matter. She is only able to do those things by using her psychic powers to piggyback off of the abilities of the people around her, and lives in mortal terror of being made "head-blind". When her abilities fail towards the end of the series, she's little better than an infant.

Fan Works

• Pokémpanions: In "Mon in the Moon", Mewtwo mentions that he didn't learn to speak until he was about five due to the fact that his parents had abandoned him in the woods before he had opened his eyes for the first time. He later learned to speak from overhearing Carnivine and Carla's conversations at night, but he didn't speak in proper grammar. Mewtwo's speech improved after he went to school, however.

Film — Animated

• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: It’s implied that this might be the reason for Dopey being mute.
  Snow White: And you're...
  Happy: Happy, ma'am, that's me! And this here's Dopey. He don't talk none.
  Snow White: You mean he can't talk?
  Happy: [laughing] We don't know! He's never tried!
• Tarzan: The animals hear Tarzan speak perfect English, but this is because he Speaks Fluent Animal. Humans can't hear him speak English and just hear him making ape noises. Tarzan eventually learns how to talk to humans.

Film — Live-Action

• Bride of Frankenstein: The Monster talks once the blind hermit teaches him how to speak, implying he didn't know how to rather than being physically unable to. Justified since he was only a few days old.
• The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: Kaspar, at the time he was discovered, is a Wild Child who spent his entire life locked up in a tower and never being spoken to. As a result he can't speak at all.
• Four Weddings and a Funeral: Charle's deaf brother David does not speak at all, instead communicating through sign language.
• The Living Wake: According to K. Roth, his best friend Mills didn't know how to speak when they first met, so he gifted him a dictionary. By the time of the film, Mills is quite verbose and eloquent, so clearly it helped.
• Music (2021): The title character, Music, (Maddie Ziegler) is a non-verbal autistic, and as such is able to say very little other than "Make your eggs", "Go to bed" and "braid your hair". At the end of the movie, Music utters "Don't go" when Music's half-sister Zu contemplates sending her to a special needs group home and also sings a duet with Zu at Ebo's ex-wife's wedding in the final scene.
• Temple Grandin: Despite her mother's best efforts, the autistic Temple never said a single word for the first four years of her life. She learned to speak later on in her life, though.
• The Wild Child: Victor was abandoned as a young child, grew up feral, and has no language at all by the time he's found. He eventually learns to make a sound approximating "lait."

Literature

• Belgariad: The little boy, Errand/Eriond, is initially only capable of only saying the word "Errand", which is why the party takes to calling him that. It's explained that when Zedar found him, all he said was "I have an errand for you, boy"; Errand repeated the one word and followed him. Over the next two books, he learns more words, but he can only say one-word sentences. After the Time Skip between the Belgariad and the Malloreon, he learns how to speak properly. In the Malloreon his real name is revealed to be Eriond; he explains that he picked up the word 'Errand' from Zedar because it sounded familiar to him.
• Dolphin Boy: The six-year-old Dibs has never spoken a word, but can mimic a wide variety of other sounds, including dolphin speech. He eventually learns how to say "Dib-dib" by teaching the dolphin Baby Blue to mimic the sound. By the end of the book, he's picked up a small variety of simple words.
• Into The Broken Lands: Downplayed by Nonee in the Flashback B-Plot. Created as a Human Weapon and then left chained in a basement for decades, no one ever spoke with her, and she developed the language skills of a toddler through observation. When Arianna strikes up a rapport with her, she learns very quickly.
• The Jungle Book: In the original novel, Mowgli, due to being raised by animals, could speak in Animal Talk, but had to be taught English when he returned to the "man village".
• P-Ray of Magruders Curiosity Cabinet is a subversion - his name comes from the only word he has been known to say. As it turns out, he isn't mute - he's Turkish and doesn't speak a word of English. "Pire" is Turkish for his favourite animal, a flea. He keeps the name, though.
• Me, Who Dove into the Heart of the World: The autistic child Karen has been so severely neglected that by age nine she communicates only in grunts. Isabelle takes her in and teaches her to speak, starting with the pronouns "Me" and "You." Karen learns to read at the same time she learns to talk, so Isabelle sticks labels on everything in the house and has the staff wear name tags showing their job titles. Soon Karen talks nonstop, gleefully reciting lists of nouns and things she heard on the radio.
• Leda from The Purple Cloud is a Wild Child who spent her first twenty years locked alone in a large cellar. When she escapes, she can only babble. Adam finds her and teaches her to read and write English, and she eventually becomes fluent, although she still has a Speech Impediment that prevents her from pronouncing her Rs.
• Tarzan: The title character taught himself English from some books his birth parents had, but didn't know how to speak it. In fact when he first meets other white people, they assume he's a different man from the Tarzan who wrote the warning sign outside his parents' cabin because he can't understand their speech.

Live-Action TV

• Game of Thrones: Hodor is only able to say his own name possibly due to an intellectual disability. It's eventually revealed to be severe trauma induced by a time travel incident - "Hodor" is a corruption of "Hold the door!"
• Sesame Street: Linda the librarian can't talk because she's been deaf all her life. As such, she communicates with sign language.
• Speechless: As the title indicates, as a result of being born with cerebral palsy eldest child J.J. is nonspeaking and is only able to communicate with an AAC (alternative and augmented communication device) and spells out words and sentences with a laser pointer.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Riva in the episode "Loud as a Whisper" is deaf due to a congenital defect among the nobles of his planet. He has a group of interpreters who are telepathically linked to him, but otherwise can only communicate through sign language.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: Characters with the flaw "Feral Upbringing" start without Language skills or any other knowledge of human society.

Video Games

• Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance: Soren reveals in his B Support with Ike, that neither of his previous two caretakers actually taught him how to speak, a fact his younger self didn’t realize until he first interacted with civilization, at the age of six after his second caretaker died leaving him alone. Interestingly, he did note that he understood what people were saying and even notes that he could read and write better than most villagers, but this was likely due to his second caretaker teaching him to read and write for the purpose of having him keep alive his magical knowledge, and both of his caretakers probably enjoyed having him not talk back while they spewed verbal insults.

Web Animation

• Sonic In X Minutes: In the Sonic Generations video, it's explained that the reason Classic Sonic is completely silent is that he jumped out of the window of the hospital when he was a newborn baby and ended up on his own in the wilderness, thus his parents never taught him how to speak. Oddly enough, he can still understand other people when they talk to him.
• Story Booth: Mandy from "My Life with CP (Cerebral Palsy)" only speaks in mumbles due to her cerebral palsy, so her mother has to translate her story for her.

Websites

• YouTube: Somebody for Nobody is a short film about a man who never learned how to walk and a woman who never learned how to talk, due to curses bestowed upon them as infants.

Western Animation

• Scooby-Doo: Downplayed. It's implied that the reason Scooby can't talk clearly is because he never learned how rather than being physically unable to.
  [Scooby and Shaggy encounter a sign reading "RHIRD REVEL: ROTS of RUCK"]
  Scooby: "Third level - lots of luck."
  Shaggy: Like, what did you say, Scoob?
  Scooby: RI don't row, Raggy.
• The Simpsons: Maggie Simpsons, of course this could be justified as she is only ever shown as a baby (and is able to speak when she's older, though it always happens offscreen), is sometimes implied to be developmentally behind even for her young age. Marge worries about it in "Lisa's First Word" (though Maggie does say her first word in that episode, nobody else hears it), and in "The Great Wife Hope," Marge's friends gossip about her lack of speech and speculate that it's the result of her witnessing something traumatic in their house. It's of particular note since Maggie is a very Brainy Baby, apparently fully comprehending what everybody else says and occasionally shown to be able to read and write with ease.
• South Park: Wheelchair using student Timmy Burch is never heard speaking much other than his name and other words such as "Livin' a lie" "Jimmy, Gobbles and octonauts". This is most likely due to his intellectual disability.
• We Bare Bears: In the episodes that take place when the bears are kids, younger Ice Bear is almost completely silent and communicates via body language. In "The Island", little Grizzly mentions that they should really teach him to speak. He does speak as an adult(?), albeit not a whole lot.
• The Wild Thornberrys:
  • Donnie only speaks gibberish due to the fact that he was raised by orangutans shortly after his parents were killed by poachers.
  • In "Two's Company", Donnie comes across his Distaff Counterpart; a nameless young girl who was raised by jaguars. Just like him, she only speaks in incoherent babbling, presumably because she's had no human parents to raise her.
• Xavier Riddle and the Secret Museum: Helen Keller in "I Am Helen Keller" can't speak due to her deafness, so her teacher Anne Sullivan tries to teach her words via sign language. At the end, she learns to say her dog Belle's name.

Real Life

• Genie is a pseudonymous feral child who was imprisoned by her abusive father since infancy, never interacting with the outside world. Because of this, she never acquired any language skills as a kid, and when she was eventually discovered and freed at the age of 13, she had no first language. Linguists working to fix this could only achieve limited results, which quickly reversed following further abuse in foster care.

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