Speaking Simlish

By Felix's own admission, his Q*bert-ese is a little rusty.

*giggle* "Sul sul!"

— Opening video, The Sims/MySims games

The language of NPCs and other AI constructs in simulation games and some RPGs is often made up of nonsense sounds strung together like actual words. It's not a cypher, normal speech spoken backwards or anything like that, it is quite simply gibberish or "Simlish" as The Sims manual says.

This became especially popular in cartridge and floppy-based releases once fully voiced CD-ROM releases began showing up, as something of a compromise between the expression provided by voice acting and the enormous amount of storage required for it (not to mention that it can save quite a bit on the budget). Additionally, many older Japanese RPGs (as well as newer ones that eschew voice acting) use beeps of varying tones to convey the voices of characters when their dialog appears in the text box; a little girl would get a high pitched tone, an older man would get a low pitched tone, etc.

This is probably meant to suggest the NPCs are speaking in any and all languages at once, and save recording multiple voice tracks. The net effect of this isn't one of confusion but charm, as the tone comes to convey more than the words and they avoid the tedium of repeating the same lines over and over. Some games even have different voice sets for the Simlish, serving as audible Speech Bubbles (or tags to actual Speech Bubbles) to distinguish speakers.

Occasionally the developers will take the time to implement distinct English-sounding gibberish, Spanish-sounding gibberish, and so forth.

Compare Voice Grunting, which is somewhat similar, but not nearly as elaborate. Compare also As Long as It Sounds Foreign, where the language is implied to be a real-world language even though speakers of that language would not recognise it as such. Contrast Conlang, which has actual language structure as opposed to gibberish, though the two might overlap especially on non-essential conversations.

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Examples:

Action

• The Banjo-Kazooie games. The first game even has questions in its Pop Quiz asking the player what character makes which sound. However, the narrator for Nuts & Bolts does, briefly, talk in English. In fact, Nuts & Bolts was originally going to go with full-blown English voice acting (which was not considered viable on the Nintendo 64 due to limited cartridge space), but fan outrage over this suggestion caused them to stick with the Simlish for the final product. Its Spiritual Successor, Yooka-Laylee, continues the tradition.
• The earliest versions of Rayman 2: The Great Escape included "Raymanian" as the default speech setting, and other versions, even with full multi-language voiceovers, still let players switch back to the original voices. For all the simlish, the game does contain one actual word: Rayman yells "STOP!" in frustration at the bickering Teensies from the end of the first level. He also tends to say "Yeah!" and "Yahoo!" quite a bit when gaining new powers and the like.
  • Inverted with the PS1 and PS2 versions which feature full voice acting, though most people think that the voice acting doesn't make up for the extremely watered-down graphics (not to mention that the voice acting is mediocre at best) in the former version.
• Kingsley's Adventure has all the characters talking in nonsense babble.
• Star Fox series
  • The voice acting in the SNES Star Fox and Star Fox 2 consists mostly of "wing damage" sample chopped into gibberish. Later, although Star Fox 64 ditches this, the European version Lylat Wars offers the original "language" as an option in addition to English.
  • Star Fox Command lets you record your own voice for the game to distort into the gibberish that is spoken.
  • In Star Fox Adventures, there was actually a Cypher Language created with every word covered by Nintendo to the NPC variety ingame, namely "Dinosaur Language", or "Saurian" by the fandom. There is even a translator created by fan site Krystal Archive.
• Character speech in the Chibi-Robo! series typically sounds like snippets of old-timey radio shows that were chopped up and played in random order. The only major exception in the series is Drake Redcrest's theme, which is sung in full English / Japanese.
• E. Gadd from the Luigi's Mansion games speaks in vaguely Japanese-sounding gibberish, along with the occasional "Luigi" and "oya mā!"^note Literally means "oh my" in Japanese, is also E. Gadd's Japanese name
• Everyone save Mario in Super Mario Sunshine. Averted in the actual cutscenes, however, which had full voice acting.
  • This was brought back in Super Mario Odyssey, where every NPC (except for Peach, Pauline and Tiara) speaks like this.
• Done in Ōkami. Though of course it's based around Japanese.
• The Cultists and Fanatics in Blood speak a made-up language based on Latin and Sanskrit. It even has its own dictionary. Complete with formal and colloquial distinction.
  • The Fallen can be heard speaking some phrases of the Cultist language in Shogo: Mobile Armor Division. Whether this is a hint towards a connection between Blood and Shogo, just re-use of resources Monolith already had done, or an Armacham-style nod at a previous game is unknown (and liable to remain unknown, since there are no current plans to continue the Shogo or Blood stories).
• The Legend of Zelda games have primarily used Voice Grunting in console releases since The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (this still applies even to some degree in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild); however, this trope also shows up occasionally:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess introduces Midna, the first character in Zelda history to actually be fully voice acted... by speaking Simlish. The lines she "speaks" are chosen at random from a pool, so no specific text box goes with any specific line of Simlish; though the sounds she makes in cutscenes do always go with the same text box, the words and sounds still don't match up in any meaningful way. Additionally, some of Midna's dialogue is English scrambled up to make it sound like gibberish. Though all the other characters still use the old Voice Grunting style, Shad also has a very brief instance of this trope when he chants at a statue in the ancient Sky Language of the Oocca.
  • Though The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker primarily features Voice Grunting (plus a few short lines in English from the Shop Guru and Link), the King of Hyrule gets a few lines of Simlish near the end as he makes a wish on the Triforce, in a mumbly sort of way.
  • Fi in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword also speaks Japanese-sounding Simlish. Auto-Tuned Simlish, to be precise. Zelda also sings the game's theme tune in Simlish; her singing is actually fully voice acted, it's just that her actress is singing gibberish (correction: Hylian) in imitation of Simlish. Also, unlike Midna, Zelda's lines match up to her on-screen text; for example, "Matas" always matches up with Link's name.
• Klonoa for the PlayStation and its PS2 sequel. Amazingly, the voice acting is quite good for utter gibberish, and each role is played by a different actor.
  • Not only that, but there definitely seems to be a structure to the different languages that everyone uses. For example, Klonoa always pronounces his name "Klo'øa" (for those who can't recognize ø, imagine a vowel halfway between O and U with a hint of E) and a lot of his sentences are based off of Japanese, while Popka's speech appears to be various growls and barks.
  • The Wiimake of the first game even allows you to choose between coherent Japanese or English voice acting or Simlish voices. This might be due to Klonoa Heroes and the character's appearance in Namco x Capcom averting this trope in a break of tradition.
• Q*bert was an interesting example: although the arcade game made use of a speech synthesizer chip that was capable of pronouncing English words, the synthesized speech that was used in the game was pure Simlish. According to this anecdote by one of the developers, they initially tried to make the synthesizer produce actual words, but the result was so unintelligible (e.g., "bonus" came out sounding more like "bogus") that they finally just resorted to alien-sounding gibberish.
  • The film Wreck-It Ralph takes this to a whole new level, making it Q*Bert's official language with Fix-It Felix Jr. conversing with Q*Bert in "Q*Bertese".
• The singing Yoshis in Yoshi's Story for the Nintendo 64 sing in an indecipherable baby-talk-ish manner.
• de Blob for Wii does this; you can occasionally make out important words like character and place names, but everything else is just nonsense that vaguely sounds like the on-screen subtitles.
• This shows up in a few Sega games, such as Jet Set Radio Future and Sonic Unleashed, where most of the characters communicate in moans, laughter, and one-word sentences when not participating in cutscenes.
• Beyond Good & Evil - Most of the lyrics to the vocal songs are Simlish-esque nonsense. According to the composer, he drew inspiration from languages such as English, Hungarian, and French for his "Simlish." Exceptions are the song "Spanish Bar/Fun and Mini-Games" is in actual Spanish, and "Akuda Bar Propaganda" uses Bulgarian.
• The characters in Mushroom Men use this kind of speech. While different character types have distinct voices, they are somewhat affected by what they're saying: A character saying "Welcome!" and a character with the same voice saying "Thank you!" will sound different.
• Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, with amusingly over-the-top British mannerisms. The cool part is each character gets their own set of grunts and random words to string together, from Lady D's super-deep smoker's lung coughing to Hatsworth's own Stock British Phrases. "Good Show!"
• Super Monkey Ball 2 has this in the (often puzzling and always insane) Story Mode. The monkeys speak in variations of "Uki" (which is Japanese monkey onomotapoetia, similar to "ooh-ooh" in English), and the bad guy Dr. Bad-Boon speaks in a backward masked voice, except for when saying characters' names or sometimes when laughing.
• Mondo Medicals and Mondo Agency feature support characters who talk in gibberish (actually backward and heavily edited English), with captions that are only slightly closer to real English.
• Battlefield Heroes has the Royal and National soldier characters speaking in a few mangled words ("Hullo ! / Haloo !") and various grunts, all with a National Stereotypes Funetik Aksent.
• The Croc series on the original PlayStation is another nostalgic example. The first game had little to no dialogue, but still used grunts and random gibberish when applicable. The sequel went full on Banjo-style and had a proper script complete with simlish readings for most characters, apart from Swap Meet Pete who just rambles the same five or so syllables drunkenly.
• The LEGO Adaptation Games did this, sometimes even with the original actors reprising their roles, up until LEGO Batman 2: DC Superheroes, which featured traditional voice acting, as does every game after it.
• Done entirely for laughs in Magicka. Every line is recorded individually, but spoken in a combination of English, Swedish, and Gibberish. The result sounds something like the Swedish Chef from The Muppet Show, with lines like "Beware the forest's guardian, Jormungandr!" becoming "Hoop-a-doop-a-derpity-derp-a-Yoor-moon-gon-derrrrrr!"
• In Twinsen's Odyssey, the residents of the planet Zeelich have a Simlish language. It is even subtitled, although the subtitles sometimes don't match the spoken text. During the game you are forced into picking up a "translator" item that will turn their speech into English.
• The vocals in "After The Drop" from Medal of Honor: Frontline appear to be in pseudo-Dutch Simlish, as opposed to "Arnhem", which has real Dutch lyrics.
• The characters in E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy all speak fictional language. Looter voices sound vaguely Russian, but slurred because looters are perpetually drunk. Almost all of the in-game writings are in English though.
• The humans of Asura's Wrath speak some kind of Gibberish that generally goes untranslated, but is understood by the demigods.
• The narrator in the cutscenes of Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit uses a kind of "Habba-dabba-dabbu" style gibberish that sounds like he's underwater. All other characters either speak through text or sound bites.
• The languages spoken in every game of the Team ICO Series skirt the line between Simlish and a conlang. The languages are mostly gibberish designed more for their sound than anything (Yorda's language sounds vaguely French, Ico's sounds vaguely Korean, and Wander's meant to be speaking an ancient version of Ico's), but there's also some direct word mapping - 'nonomori' means 'thank you', for example.
• The characters in Gravity Rush all speak vaguely French-sounding gibberish.
• The characters in Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons speak an incomprehensible dialect but one key thing to note is that the brothers do actually have names (which you can hear if you press the "interact" button for either bother when they're separated).
• Shadow of the Wool Ball: While the enemies' banter is generally coherent speech, the Big Bad's taunts from the viewscreens are incomprehensible gibberish, though subtitled in proper English. Similarly, the Doom-referencing marine kitties from Episode 2's secret level talk in gibberish.
• While all the dialog in A Hat in Time is fully voice-acted (with the exception of the protagonist, who usually sticks to Voice Grunting and Saying Sound Effects Out Loud), there is a purchaseable Badge that turns all dialog into Banjo Kazooie-style gibberish.
• Hollow Knight has the characters speaking a little bit whenever a dialog box comes up, which usually carries the tone of what they say and occasionally some of the same sounds. They also do this for any battle cries they may have, with memorable examples being Hornet's Kiai and the Dung Defender's unleashed hamminess.
• In Yoku's Island Express, the inhabitants of the island speak in squiggly nonsense noises that are translated by text captions.
• In Overcooked!, the Onion King speaks in low-voiced, slightly dignified-sounding mumble. The chefs speak in higher-pitched, more angry-sounding mumble.
• All of the characters who have speaking roles in Balan Wonderworld always talk in gibberish, even when Balan is doing his Rhymes on a Dime in the opening cutscene. The songs at the end of each world are like this as well (unless you collect all the Balan statues for them, in which the songs will be in English instead).
• Fur Fighters for the Dreamcast is in simlish, as are the Windows and iOS ports; the PS2 port got full voice acting instead.
• Island Saver: All of the NPCs speak this way. Of particular note is Kiwi the parrot, who is voiced with stock parrot squawks instead of gibberish sounds like the other characters.
• Despite the original PS1 version having full English voice acting, Pac-Man World Re-PAC wound up ditching the spoken dialogue and instead had all the characters speak in a gibberish language.

Puzzle

• Kuru Kuru Kururin: Voices in Kururin Squash! during cutscenes are done with a high pitched gibberish sound similiar to what Splatoon would have.

RPG

• The Opera House scene in Final Fantasy VI conveys the tragic tale of Maria and Draco through MIDI instruments "Vocal Oohs" and "Chorus Aahs".
• The eponymous brothers in the Mario & Luigi series "talk" using vaguely Italian gibberish, though there were a few one-word exceptions, such as when they call each other by name. In the first game, this is a running gag. E. Gadd from Luigi's Mansion brings over his own brand of Simlish to Superstar Saga and Partners in Time.
• While Galactic Basic is fully voiced, all other languages in both Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 are Simlish through and through. They are no less expressive than the English-language voice acting, but the same voice files are reused over and over. KotOR players have the phrase "Jata bata wanna needy bo" seared indelibly into their brains from sheer force of repetition.
• Subverted, kind of, in Jade Empire, where the Asian-sounding gibberish Tho Fan is actually a real constructed language. However, every line of Tho Fan in the game is actually some form of cow joke, with no bearing to what's actually being said in the subtitles.
• The expansion Mask of the Betrayer, for Neverwinter Nights 2, has Optional Party Member One-of-Many as a dark variant: a construct and conglomerate of dead souls inhabiting a spirit shell that other party members will openly describe as an abomination against all things. Its speech is described as a call of the dead that any mortal creature can understand, and expressed as sibilant gibberish in a digitally processed, high-pitched whisper. Depending on its mood, it can sound conversational, excited/gleeful, irritated, exclamatory, and even a variant with something like cackling laughter, but it never uses recognisable words.
• While the Dudbear race in Legend of Mana probably has a bigger vocabulary than what is taught to you, you still manage to complete That One Sidequest with something like seven words.
• Wizard101 uses this with any cards that talk - the leprechaun, the imp, etc.
• Little King's Story combines words and fragments from multiple languages to create its own odd language of nonsense, with one or two words actually used in context in English. Not surprisingly, these words are "King" and..."Moo."
• In World of Warcraft, languages that the listener doesn't understand are obfuscated into Simlish by semi-randomly replacing words with words taken from that language's (very limited) dictionary.
• Golden Sun... Sort of. The text-clicking has different pitches depending on the character, so woman and children get higher-pitched "clicking". If you listen closely, there's even changes in timing and inflection to mimic speech patterns, though it's still only tweaked Game Boy beeps. Similar techniques are used in other Camelot Software Planning games, such as Mario Tennis and Mario Golf for the Game Boy Color; the earliest examples of their usage of this actually goes as far back as Shining in the Darkness and Shining Force.
• The Hamtaro Game Boy series is a partial example: all of the hamsters converse in English, but they also have several cutsey-sounding keywords (and your quest is to find them all).
• Monster Hunter:
  • The voice acting takes the form of Simlish or Voice Grunting. The only actual line of dialogue is the "SO TASTY!" sound clip that plays when successfully cooking a Well-Done Steak.
  • Monster Hunter: World breaks the tradition by introducing actual fully-voiced dialogue, though you are free to instead set voices to traditional gibberish, called "Monster Hunter Language", if you want.
  • Monster Hunter: Stories uses Monster Hunter Language in its cutscenes, but care was put into making it sound consistent. If a character repeats or questions what was just said, you can often hear the same "words" being used.
• Every character in Various Daylife speaks in Voice Grunting.
• A few bosses in Warframe speak using unintelligible lines that can be understood only through subtitles. These include Corpus robots, Lephantis, Phorid, Lieutenant Lech Kril (which becomes a bit hilarious when he teams up on Ceres with Captain Vor, who has intelligible lines) and the Corpus sergeant on Phobos, who uses standard Corpus crewmen lines, which are actually in Cypher Language ("Tot pke Yotkuy!" is actually "For the Corpus!"). This at least gives an opportunity for some Mad Libs Dialogue using your username, your warframe and your clan's name.
• At one point in Anachronox, Boots has to impersonate a scientific genius in order to board the Brain Train to a science planet. Since his Robot Buddy PAL-18 previously downloaded an entire encyclopedia of scientific knowledge, they fake the whole thing by having Boots pretend to speak an incredibly rare language that the Brain Bouncer doesn't know, while Pal acts as a "translator". Said language is, of course, complete nonsense. There's even a whole dialogue tree for it, so you can mix it up.

Racing

• LEGO Racers 2 also had this, this also allowed them to put player's name in the dialogue without any problems. It gets even funnier when you hold down the fast forward button, increasing the speed and pitch.

Simulation and Strategy

• In Project Hospital, hospital staff and patients mutter and murmur as they talk to each other.
• The Sims, of course. It became so famous that artists such as Barenaked Ladies, Paramore, Lily Allen, Pixie Lott, Gaelic Storm, The Flaming Lips, Depeche Mode and Anthrax have recorded Simlish versions of one of their songs. The Ting Tings went one further and actually recorded one of their songs on their debut album entirely in Simlish.
  • The Sims 2 onwards introduce Simlish texts. Initially, they look like Zodiac signs or Greek letters but as the expansions (and later, The Sims 3 and The Sims 4) shows more of it, it "evolves" into something that looks vaguely like Arabic or Japanese. While they mostly mean nothing, some of them are substitution ciphers for real alphabets. Several Simlish fanmade fonts exists and they are often used by creators that make "sim-realistic" custom content, often with a Cypher Language method.
  • Little bits of Simlish are taken from real languages, to make it sound universal. Will Wright has said that if you think you hear your Sim saying something that sounds like your native language, it probably is.
    • However, all the sounds found in Simlish (with the exception of perhaps an alveolar trill, the rolled R of Spanish) are also found in English. This is especially true of the Simlish vowel system, which has the five bajillion vowel sounds (complete with diphthongization!) of American English, a number which is rather uncommon.
    • there's also consonant palatalization (think French "l" vs English "l" ), although it's difficult to tell if it's phonemic.
    • When a witch sim does magic they'll say 'Worf'. Apparently, Star Trek: The Next Generation plays a part in Sim Magic.
  • An older than Sim example: the Cocteau Twins' songs were mostly Simlish/gibberish, with a few English or Gaelic words thrown in.
  • In the Game Boy Advance titles, if your sim has become moody (from because he's too deprived off social contacts or entertainment), he will say something that sounds like he's dropping the F-bomb, which is rather appropriate in hindsight.
  • Oddly enough, for being the Trope Namer, Simlish has been around long enough that it's actually developed into something of a conlang (constructed language). Some key phrases have shown up: "sul sul" ('hello'), "badeesh" or "vadeesh" ('thank you'), "dag dag" ('goodbye'), "nooboo" ('baby') and "flart"/"florn"/"flarn" (ummm....).
• SimCopter featured a variety of Simlish that sounded like English being spoken with teeth clenched and through the nose. If you listen to the intonations carefully, you can hear what they're trying to say.
  "Nng hmm?! HMM!" ("Oh yeah?! Yeah!")
• Similarly, the races of Spore speak like this from Tribal Stage and beyond, the voice clips in Civilization Stage and Space Stage reflecting their ethos - a military faction in Civ stage will sound like Americans. An economic faction will sound like snooty women, and a religious nation will sound like monks or priests. This continues into the space stage, where there are several dialects of simlish depending on archetype.
  • There are solid Simlish dialects for other races Described here, but Your race speaks 3 randomly selected simlish accents for each colony
  • And then there's Steve, who speaks plain English, leading to speculation that he is the last human or something.
• The original Age of Empires used Simlish in the early ages, possibly because for some of the civilizations featured, we only have a vague idea what the language would actually have sounded like. Thus your generics would utter "phrases" such as "rogan", "wololo" "erectus", "ovuss", "yuri", "almouze", "somus", wheregus", "abadacus" etc.
• Animal Crossing uses this, with the added bonus that it's created by using samples from FM synthesizers distorting the words in the text box by making the sound of each letter and overlapping the sounds partially. In the options, you can leave them speaking this "language" ("Animalese"), switch it to "Bebebese", which is the standard RPG blips, or just make it silent.
  • Each of the games also has its own variant on this synthesizer. The Nintendo GameCube game uses a slower-paced synthesizer that's actually fairly comprehensible (your Gyroid assistant is almost understandable, as is mail-lady Pelly). The Wii game, City Folk/Let's Go to the City, uses a faster-paced one that scrambles the sounds more, so it sounds more Simlish-esque and is less understandable. New Leaf and New Horizons read all English words as if it were Japanese romaji ("Hi" is pronounced "he"). Wild World, though, is pure gibberish. (At least in the English versions, due to the technical limitations of the DS not being able to support an English text-to-speech system.)
  • Playing the game in Spanish makes Animalese fairly understandable.
  • Apparently averted in the Japanese versions of the games - they actually properly match the Japanese glyph to its sound, resulting in monotonous-sounding speech. This is possible because each Japanese kana glyph neatly maps to a sound, punctuation notwithstanding.
• Sid Meier's Pirates!: Hearing your crew sing sea-chanties in Pirate Simlish is pretty amusing.
  • There's also a slight variation between the accents of characters belonging to different nations. It's subtle, but you can tell when you're speaking to a Frenchman or a Spaniard just by listening to their Simlish.
• Startopia, with one set of nonsense for each alien race. There's a recognizable "yes", "no" and "maybe", as well as a longer string that plays under any multi-word dialog.
• Evil Genius, with the exception of P.A.T.R.I.O.T. agents, your henchmen, your Diabolical Mastermind, and his "MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!".
• Sacrifice creates incantations when spells are cast by stringing random Latin and pseudo-Latin words together.
• Civilization Revolution:
  • The NPCs speak Simlish. The leaders' Simlish actually sounds a great like their actual language. Bismarck speaks German-sounding gibberish, Caesar speaks faux-Latin, and so on. Alexander the Great sounds (and looks) like a Southern California surfer dude. The advisors speak in more of a generic Simlish.
  • The Science Advisor goes "Hooray, hooray, hooray!" though.
• The Creatures series of computer games use a variation of this, with each typed word converted into a spoken Nornish word. There's actually a sort of mini-language in it when it's typed... but most of what you hear is, in fact, gibberish.
• iCarly 2: iJoin the Click has most NPCs talking in reversed sounding gibberish, except for major characters, which utilize full voice acting.
• Pikmin:
  • Pikmin 2: All spoken dialogue in (though the President and Olimar and Louie's spaceship are the only ones that say anything other than their own names) is in Simlish. Olimar and Louie's names are still intelligible when said, though.
  • Pikmin 3: The characters all speak in vaguely Japanese-sounding gibberish, with a few recognizable words (character names, "Pikmin", "captain", "chip", their ship "Drake") appearing every now and then.
• Republic: The Revolution, despite ostensibly being a politics game (in reality, an involved version of Rock/Scissors/Paper) has all characters speaking a form of Simlish that still manages to sound Slavic.
• The Movies uses it for all film dialogue, but its is repetitive to the point of annoyance. In post-production, it was possible to either remove it, subtitle it, or overdub it yourself, and the game would make a half-attempt to lip-sync the characters for you.
• In XCOM 2, ADVENT soldiers speak in a language that sounds like garbled gibberish. Sometimes you can make out what seem like coherent words or phrases; there are a few subtitled videos floating around that attempt to make sense of their barks, with varying degrees of success.
• Worms 4. During Campaign Mode, all worms would talk Simlish. Actually, it's just a set of "Me!"'s. During battles, however, the worms' voices were defined by their team's speechbank. On a side note, there IS a speechbank that has them speak the "Me!"'s.
• Ghost Master, with the exception of the word "artifacts" (in certain locations, "artifacts and weapons") coming up from time to time.
  • Polish dub (sic!) used nonsense Polish phrases instead. Apart from "Artifacts and weapons" mentioned above, there are some hysterically funny ones, like "Attack the beaver?!", "I eat a sneaker", a very affectionate "Move, bull!", "Shut ya clapper!" or "This is farce!".
• Crazy Dave in the Plants vs. Zombies series speaks in weird-sounding gibberish.
• The only dialogue players ever hear in No Man's Sky is electronic-sounding gibberish being broadcast through the onboard radio of their ship, with different intonations depending on where they happen to be.
• Empire Earth: in the second and third eras, units spout random syllables ("Daota. Esto. Talas! Pote? Imoigo.") whenever they speak except hero units, who speak in accented English. Which is better than the prehistoric era, where everyone just grunts.
• In Tomodachi Life, whenever the player observes Miis talking to each other at Mii Apartments, Mii Homes or any of the hangout locations, they use a "whoop whoop whoop" sound effect when talking. They also use a flapping sound effect whenever they laugh, a high-pitched sliding sound when yawning, and a chipping sound when they sneeze.
  • Same goes for its spin-off app Miitomo. When a Mii's friend comes to visit or vice versa, they use an unintelligible gibberish (similar to Simlish) as they talk. Averted when they talk to you.
  • Miitopia, too. The primary difference is that Miis always speak in the unintelligible gibberish rather than just when they're speaking to each other.
• Everyone except The Narrator in Pit People speaks in subtitled gibberish.
• Homeworld series: Nonessential radio/comm voiceovers in cutscenes were probably recorded in English originally, but have been heavily modulated and distorted to the point that they're basically Simlish. It's especially noticeable in the scene of Vaygr bombers approaching Chimera Station in Homeworld 2. Utterly averted for all other unit chatter outside of cutscenes though; everything is fairly clear (though occasionally drowned out by gunfire or explosions).

Other Games

• Barn Finders: All the dialogue in the game is shown via text boxes. The noises the characters make when they speak is utter gibberish.
• Guitar Hero III hardly has any dialogue, but what dialogue exists is in simlish. Averted in the tutorials, where there is full, legible voice acting.
  • Guitar Hero II, however, had audible calls for an encore, and the final level has the crowd explicitly calling for "Free Bird".
• Everyone who is dead in Killer7 speaks in a vaguely English-sounding language with a computerized tone of voice. At some points in the game, you can tell what gibberish is supposed to mean what (In The Name of Harman...). This is because in Japan, ghosts speak straight-up Gratuitous English. For the English version, the voices were run through distortion filters.
• The main characters of LocoRoco sing cheerful, vaguely Japanese-sounding gibberish to the level's background music. In the sequel, the villains do it, too!
• This goes back as far as a Trivial Pursuit game for the Amstrad CPC, where a little character asked you the question in Simlish (and for those who found him annoying, he could be disabled).
• All residents of Chulip (except for the Silent Protagonist) speak vaguely Japanese-sounding Simlish.
• While the cutscenes are fully voiced, in normal gameplay, the characters in Insecticide sound like this.
• The inhabitants of the World of Goo cutscenes speak in Simlish, with captions overhead.
• The Ace Attorney characters use the standard RPG blips mentioned above. In the fully voiced ad for "Rise From the Ashes", Maya and Phoenix mutter under their breath using these blips about Edgeworth's pink GBA, to which he indignantly shouts at them to stop it.
• The adorable walking eyeballs in Patapon speak in vague-sounding syllables and sing the names of the drums you acquire over the course of the game as you play them.
  • The Patapon themselves speak in Japanese (for instance, if you make a mistake, they'll mutter "Kono yarou!" which means essentially "What an idiot!"), but it's hard to get the gist of it.
• The Gobliiins series is an interesting example. In close-ups of the characters and some cutscenes, real English is used, but until one of the characters or cutscenes translates it for the gamers, all that's heard is Simlish, or whatever weird language the Goblins speak. Each character seems to have a vocabulary limited to one or two words, which are epeated over and over again in different intervals, or simply a couple of fixed syllables whose order is constantly rearranged. Examples include "Oyma toyma! Oy-ma! Ma toy!" and "Tobor. Tob-tobor tobor."
• LittleBigPlanet has this for a lot of the voices you can assign to "Magic Mouths", the things used to generate speech bubbles. An example being the mad scientist voice.
• Tekken uses this trope for the speaking of non-human characters (at least the ones that actually talk) starting in Tekken 4. The Jack robots grunt, Kuma and Panda growl, and Mokojin the puppet uses clicky clack noises. And King and Armor King, despite being human, both speak in jaguar growls (that are somehow perfectly understandable to everyone else).
• The shopkeeper in An Untitled Story speaks in a language that can best be transcribed as "bleh blehbleh blaab blab."
• Overlord Badman in Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do to Deserve This? (and its sequels) speaks in randomly stringed syllables that vary with his mood.
• The Maestro in Wii Music, Sebastian Tute, speaks some kind of musical gibberish
• Ditto with Wii Party's MC (Party Phil).
• Katamari Damacy: The King of All Cosmos speaks in record scratches that increase or decrease in pitch and speed depending on his mood. He does have an actual speaking voice, however, which can only be heard at certain times:
  • He sings along to the credits music in We Love Katamari, and speaks to the newborn Prince of All Cosmos in The Stinger.
  • If you manage to roll him up, he'll proclaim "IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL, WOW!" in fully voiced Gratuitous English.
• Don't Starve: All of the characters speak in instrumental notes. The pitch and instrument varies between characters. For example, Wendy speaks as an alto flute, Wolfgang is a tuba, and Maxwell is a pump organ.
• This how the police chief mostly speaks in the arcade game APB: All Points Bulletin. The important parts of his lines have actual words, though:
  "...nice work Officer Bob. Well done!"
  "...put a tail on him, and apprehend him!"
• In Dyscourse the characters speak gibberish with the appropriate emotional tones whenever dialogue is displayed.
• In Nuclear Throne, the characters speak a fictional language called Trashtalk. It does have a few consistent vocabulary and it's noted there are different dialects for it.
• The characters in Splatoon speak (and sing) Simlish in a way quite similar to Ōkami, though they also have their own written Conlang, some of which can be translated.
• The speaking characters in Spirits & Spells are entirely unintelligible but what they're saying can usually be read in speech bubbles.
• Grand Theft Auto 2: Aside from the radio which is fully in English (or Engrish for a certain radio station), when an NPC speaks, usually in a telephone, it's audible in a sped-up, unintelligible language.
• Investi-Gator: The Case of the Big Crime: Each character has their own voice sounds that play as their dialogue appears as text.
• Zombie Claus: When you call up your relatives, the conversation is pretty much gibberish.
• Friday Night Funkin': Every character's "singing" is incomprehensible noises with some actual words thrown in here and there. Boyfriend has high-pitched scat-singing that mimics the lines of other characters, Daddy Dearest has Tom Jones-style crooning, Skid and Pump have autotuned laughter, Pico has robotic-sounding radio chatter, Mommy Mearest has a popstar-esque voice that sounds a little like Boyfriend, only at a slightly higher pitch, Senpai (and Spirit) has bit-crushed voice samples one would hear in DOS games, and Tankman uses a tuned variant of his normal speaking voice. The two characters who use a recognizable language the whole song through are Girlfriend and Monster, who respectively talk and sing in English.
• In the hybrd sports game/VN Pyre, all the characters in the VN segments speak a constructed language. By comparing the language to the text boxes, some repeated words can be discerned. English is reserved for the Lemony Narrator in the game segments and one character in a VN scene using telepathy.

Non-Video Game Example

Animation

• In Lamput, the characters speak Simlish as opposed to a real language.
• In Qumi-Qumi, this makes up the language of the tribes, known as Tarabar. They have their own words that parallel real-life ones for certain situations, and also pepper their speech with English at various times.

Asian Animation

• Most of the songs in Macross Plus are complete gibberish. It may or may not be the language of the alien Zentraedi people.
• Oddbods has any dialogue replaced with gibberish and grunts that portray actions, making it easy to understand what is going on without any dialogue. The show has a heavy foreign spread in broadcasting thanks to this.
• In Pleasant Goat Fun Class: Animals & Plants episode 3, two penguins (the larger one is actually Wolffy) speak in completely random noises. They happen to use different kinds of random noises, which is why they can't understand each other.
• Zelly Go: The dialogue consists of nothing but gibberish. The show has a heavy foreign spread in broadcasting thanks to this.

Comedy

• Performer Andy Kaufman invented a comedy character called Foreign Man, from the island of Caspiar, who spoke in a gibberish of his own invention interspersed with broken English. Later, he evolved the character into Latka Gravas for the sitcom Taxi.

Fan Works

• A Crown of Stars: Avaloni is the official idiom of Empire of Avalon. Some few words are known and used every so often, and they sound mostly as gibberish.

Films

• In Aladdin: The Return of Jafar Abis Mal ends up undergoing this trope when Jafar, in his genie form attempts to demand to return him to Agrabah at once (namely due to being intimidated by Jafar's genie form), thus forcing Jafar to assume his human form so Abis Mal could at least give a coherent response to his demand.
• Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away: Most of the characters speak in Cirqish.
• In The Court Jester, when Danny Kaye has to show his skill with languages, he recites strings of gibberish that manage to sound exactly like French, Italian and German.
• The Adorable Evil Minions in Despicable Me speak in mostly gibberish.
• Charlie Chaplin's fake German in The Great Dictator.
• The Hudsucker Proxy: There's one instance where Norville claims to have studied Finnish and engages in a short discussion with a Mr. Finlandsson - not a single word of Finnish is actually spoken, but a rather Swedish-sounding string of nonsense, and the film plays this as if Barnes said something highly offensive to Mr. Finlandsson.
• In Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Spamalot, the (Artists Formerly Known as the) Knights who say Ni speak in gibberish, except for their leader.

Literature

• Oracle of Tao while not technically "speaking" (since it's a book), the text includes Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, and Sanskrit text as well as English. In some places, Chinese is mixed with Japanese, or language is typed using Google Translate one word at a time outside of grammatical order.
  • And one of the other languages is supposedly written as though Sanskrit but sounds like Hebrew (and Aramaic, and other languages). So it's basically Speaking Simlish by Informed Attribute.
• The Yellow Bag: The Umbrella can only talk in an extremely long-winded and grammatically impossible language. Alfonso can somehow understand her.
  The Umbrella: Bzzzztctctctdrrrrtdtd)967854326666?? ??!!!iuiuiuiuiuugdtgdtgbzzzzxzxzyxztaaa,,,,... ta?bzzzz.
  Raquel: What did she say?
  Alfonso: "Ow."

Live-Action TV

• In The League of Gentlemen, Papa Lazarou speaks to his "wife" in a foreign language. She later reveals that she has been kidnapped, and she has no idea what he is saying, and can only respond with gibberish. Papa Lazarou doesn't seem to notice.
  • Other characters have spoken complete gibberish at Papa Lazarou, and he can understand what they're trying to say.
• When the cast plays Foreign Film Dub on Whose Line Is It Anyway?. Though sometimes this is averted.

Music

• The "lyrics" to all of Music/Adiemus's music are all just pleasing vocal sounds that sound vaguely like some African language.
• Italian singer Adriano Celentano's 1972 song "Prisencolinensinainciusol" is written in gibberish intended to evoke what American English sounds like to people who don't understand a word of it.
• They Might Be Giants meets Nirvana Meets Speaking Simlish. Hilarity Ensued
  • They were later contracted by Maxis to do a Simlish version of Take Out The Trash
• The Stupendium: Parodied in "Nook, Line, and Sinker." Nook starts out speaking in his Simlish sounds from Animal Crossing (which the singer achieves by doing a sort of burbling sound) before suddenly coughing and speaking in English.
  Tom Nook: (Simlish sounds, followed by coughing) Sorry. Where was I?

Puppet Shows

• The Swedish Chef, of The Muppet Show.
  • As well as Beaker: "MEEMEEMEEP!"
• The Two-Headed Monster on Sesame Street. He can often sound out some English words, usually relating to the subject the segment is teaching, but other times it's mostly gibberish.
  • One recurring segment from the early seasons of Sesame Street featured thirty dots lining up in timing with the background music. A variant of this shows a little dot talking to one of the dots in this Simlish language, and another shows the dots meeting up with the squares, one of the dots conversing to one of the squares in the same gibberish as before.

Theater

• One of the key ideas of the Commedia dell'Arte is "Grummelot" (or "Grammelot", depending on who you're talking to), where the characters speak complete gibberish, this is due to Italian laws passed during the 1500's which banned actors from saying certain things in public (Commedia is traditionally performed in marketplaces).

Web Animation

• AstroLOLogy: The characters can speak and occasionally sing, it just comes out as indistinct babbling. The closest things to English ever spoken are in "Cat About You" when Leo lets out a coherent "Meow" and in "Stealing Back the Show" when an unseen announcer says what sounds like Leo and Cancer's names, albeit slurred.
• Puppycat in Bee and Puppycat is an Intelligible Unintelligible voiced by a Synthetic Voice Actor. Fortunately he comes with subtitles.
• Happy Tree Friends generally uses this, though it's occasionally possible to make out jumbled English words and phrases.
• In the Homestar Runner short "Characters from Yonder Website", this is the way the titular characters speak.
• The animated video "Dog of Wisdom" by Joe Gran has dogs communicating in a series of "ha"s and "ba"s.

Web Videos

• In Filthy Frank any character who isn't speaking English is doing this. Or, in Safari Man's case, Japanese. Frank (presumably) provides captions for us to understand the others. * The short film Skwerl does this to the English language, turning it into Simlish-style gibberish in order to demonstrate what it sounds like if you don't speak the language. While a few words and snippets (especially the Precision F-Strike towards the end) might make sense, the rest is otherwise complete nonsense. Appropriately enough, several comments on the video reference The Sims.
• YouTube Poops will often feature gibberish sentences. These can simply be sentences played in reverse, or they can be sentences chopped up into short soundbites and reassembled in a random order. The latter also qualifies as Motor Mouth.
  • One example of the Motor Mouth Simlish is found in this poop named YTP: OOPS MY UNIVERSE CRASHED, SUPER WHY CAN'T SAVE US NOW.

Webcomics

• In Fite!, most of the speech bubbles are filled with made-up symbols. If you pay attention, there's more than one language of "Simlish" (Lucco's is more angular, while Guz's is more squiggly), and you can recognize a few symbols (like the characters' names).

Western Animation

• In Adventure Time episode "All the Little People", the little people speak entirely in Simlish. Fittingly, the entire episode can be interpreted as a parody of The Sims.
• The first two seasons of Æon Flux were designed to have no dialogue, so in the rare cases where a character was shown speaking, it was always in nonsense syllables. On rare occasions, this also appears in the third season, which does have intelligible dialogue.
• In Angry Birds Toons, Angry Birds Stella, Piggy Tales, and many other animated series and trailers based on the Angry Birds franchise (not counting The Angry Birds Movie series), both the birds and pigs speak exclusively in gibberish.^note  However, some phrases can be linked to words or feelings, such as "ainah" meaning "egg", "picoo" for "pig", or "Oy oy oy!" being an exclamation of shock.
• The titular character in Bernard speaks in low gibberish that sounds like bear growls.
• In Boy & the World, both the dialogue and the visible signage are entirely comprised of gibberish.
• In Family Guy, Peter Griffin grows a mustache and subsequently believes he can speak Italian because of it. However, he only produces a series of "beepity boppities" strung together like a child's attempt at a made-up language. The Italian butcher he "speaks" with is not amused.
• Futz!: While only one of the characters actually talks, when he does, it's always in unintelligible gibberish.
• Dorothy Ann's book in the Magic School Bus episode "Plays Ball" reads something like "aokOGHKdpsop pipDhuPO pq sdohi phipi shjMcKlzn Gialok mvosl baseball powtk vmXbl Vkld KJ A Sshj".
• Everyone in Mr. Bean: The Animated Series usually talked this way, until it was revived in 2015 and everyone started speaking in complete sentences, including Bean. (In the original live-action series, Mr Bean would sometimes talk like this, and sometimes actually speak, depending on what was funnier. The overall effect was that the socially awkward Bean suffered from selective mutism.)
• Mister Go: Similar to Pingu (see below), the characters here all speak in random gibberish, albeit occasionally throwing in some English words (like "OK") or in other languages referring to whatever they're doing at the time.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Breezies in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic speak a Scandinavian-sounding Simlish. Fluttershy can understand them, though, and Seabreeze can speak Ponish.
  • Like in Friendship is Magic, the Breezies in My Little Pony: Make Your Mark speak in high-pitched gibberish, but they're actually speaking too fast for ponies to understand, so Zipp uses her phone's translator on them.
• Any dialogue in Oggy and the Cockroaches, seeing as it's mainly a Mime and Music-Only Cartoon. This also helps broadcast the series very easily in foreign countries.
• All dialog spoken by the off-screen adults in any Peanuts cartoon sounds like a trombone with a mute.
• All characters in the German and Swiss co-produced Pingu talk this way; their gibberish is officially referred to as "Penguinese." This makes it easier to air the show in various international countries without having to dub it in another language’s.
• In the episode "Jack and the Scotsman Pt. 1" of Samurai Jack, the head bounty hunter is an anthropomorphic hog dressed like a state trooper who barks incoherently and rapidly in a Deep South accent.
• The Farmer in Shaun the Sheep "talks" in random vowel sounds, as do other human characters when they appear.
• Those Scurvy Rascals: All the characters in the series speak in utter gibberish, with the occasional word thrown in for context. The one known exception is the island tribe of old men, who start speaking in plain, understandable English after the pirates leave.

Real Life

• In his autobiography, Nobel-winning physicist and all-around oddball Richard Feynman relates his adventures speaking nonsense that sounded like Italian, including reading imaginary poetry at his daughter's school. This is actually one of the less-weird amusements he devised.

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