Featured image for The Language of Monsters in 5e

The Language of Monsters in 5e

2 min read

A parsed survey of 799 5e monster stat blocks reveals which tongues appear most, from Common and Draconic to Telepathy and obscure oddities.

Many monsters in 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons list a language in their stat block. Aside from its ability to hurl insults in combat, sharing a language can open options for lore or negtiation during play. But which languages to most monsters speak and understand? This isn't an easy question to answer because DnD does not provide their monster stat blocks in an easily parsable format. So I found The Great DnD 5e Monster Spreadsheet online, cleaned up the data and began to parse out some of the the answers.

As an aside, it's the digital age, can we put up some resources that are parsable to cut down on the hand editing.

What follows is a table with the resulting number of stat blocks where the listed language appears. I have excluded listing for any language, or all languages as that is beside the point. Perhaps not relevant, but I found it interesting that a number of creature stat blocks listed Telepathy as a language, so I left that in. Also, there are a number of languages I didn't know existed at all such as Ice Toad. This includes 799 stat blocks from all the official books released so far. These were hand entered so there are some errors but I have tried to clean those up as best I can.

Language by Stat Block Count#

Language# Stat Blocks
Abyssal74
Aquan19
Auran17
Blink Dog1
Bothii1
Bullywug1
Celestial5
Common214
Creator14
Deep Speech23
Draconic78
Druidic4
Dwarvish17
Elvish38
Giant33
Giant Eagle1
Giant Elk1
Giant Owl1
Gith9
Gnoll9
Gnomish2
Goblin12
Grell1
Grung3
Ice Toad2
Ignan17
Infernal45
Kruthik3
Modron6
Olman2
Orc11
Otyugh1
Primordial5
Sahuagin3
Slaad6
Sphinx2
Sylvan30
Telepathy95
Terran16
Thayan3
Thieves’ Cant3
Thri-Kreen1
Tlincalli1
Troglodyte2
Umber Hulk1
Undercommon54
Vegepygmy2
Winter Wolf1
Worg1
Yeti2
Yikaria2