Omniglot/Playing With

Basic Trope: A character is extremely (and often downright unrealistically) proficient in a wide variety of languages.

• Straight: Alice speaks thirty languages to a native level.
• Exaggerated: Alice speaks three hundred languages absolutely perfectly despite only having been exposed to them for half an hour.
• Downplayed: Alice speaks five languages fluently, though there are a few gaps in her knowledge.
• Justified: Alice has a brain implant that gives her excellent learning skills and memory.
  • A.L.I.C.E. is a robot designed to assist diplomats in a play set Twenty Minutes Into the Future.
• Inverted: Alice is monolingual in a society of omniglots.
• Subverted: Alice tries to use her skill with languages to negotiate with the bad guys, but it turns out that she doesn't speak their language as well as she thought, and she ends up insulting them by accident.
• Double Subverted: ...but the fact that she at least tried to learn their language convinces them that peace is possible after all.
  • The bad guys greet each other through insults.
• Parodied: It becomes a Running Gag that Alice "just happens" to speak a number of increasingly obscure languages, with her excuses for why she knows them getting more and more ridiculous.
• Deconstructed: Alice does indeed speak a lot of languages, but the study and constant practice required to learn and maintain them takes up just about all of her time, and what was once a fun hobby has turned into a stressful chore.
• Reconstructed: Alice speaks a lot of languages, and although the work required is huge, she finds that the things she can accomplish with it make all the sacrifice worthwhile.
• Zig Zagged: Alice speaks thirty languages... but not the one language that she needs right now... so she learns it in ten minutes... badly... only to find that the person she needs to talk to speaks her language perfectly anyway, being an example of this trope himself.
• Averted: Alice admits to being hopeless at languages.
• Enforced: The premise of the show has Alice visiting remote parts of a dozen obscure countries without a translator, so she pretty much has to be good at languages for the thing to work.
• Lampshaded: "Jeez, I must have been doing it wrong. I studied this language at university for years and still make mistakes, but here you are speaking it and thirty others perfectly just from hearing people chatting on the bus."
• Invoked: Alice's parents bombarded her with languages from an early age in an attempt to make sure she turned out this way.
• Exploited: Alice gets hired as a translator.
• Defied: Alice doesn't see any point in learning other languages, and declines to do so despite evidence that she'd be good at it.
• Discussed: "So unless you think you're some sort of cartoon super-genius and can magically learn Swahili by tomorrow morning, you're not going on that mission."
• Conversed: "Y'know, as a language student, it really annoys me when these shows have characters learn a new language in half an hour. Have the writers ever tried to learn a language?"

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