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 |
|---|---|
| Abyssal | 74 |
| Aquan | 19 |
| Auran | 17 |
| Blink Dog | 1 |
| Bothii | 1 |
| Bullywug | 1 |
| Celestial | 5 |
| Common | 214 |
| Creator | 14 |
| Deep Speech | 23 |
| Draconic | 78 |
| Druidic | 4 |
| Dwarvish | 17 |
| Elvish | 38 |
| Giant | 33 |
| Giant Eagle | 1 |
| Giant Elk | 1 |
| Giant Owl | 1 |
| Gith | 9 |
| Gnoll | 9 |
| Gnomish | 2 |
| Goblin | 12 |
| Grell | 1 |
| Grung | 3 |
| Ice Toad | 2 |
| Ignan | 17 |
| Infernal | 45 |
| Kruthik | 3 |
| Modron | 6 |
| Olman | 2 |
| Orc | 11 |
| Otyugh | 1 |
| Primordial | 5 |
| Sahuagin | 3 |
| Slaad | 6 |
| Sphinx | 2 |
| Sylvan | 30 |
| Telepathy | 95 |
| Terran | 16 |
| Thayan | 3 |
| Thieves’ Cant | 3 |
| Thri-Kreen | 1 |
| Tlincalli | 1 |
| Troglodyte | 2 |
| Umber Hulk | 1 |
| Undercommon | 54 |
| Vegepygmy | 2 |
| Winter Wolf | 1 |
| Worg | 1 |
| Yeti | 2 |
| Yikaria | 2 |