I have a question about languages and our (WoL) abilty to understand them *Spolier*

[Archchancellor]

Ok so doing the side quests in Labyrinthos we meet a small troll called Shaggles that we can understand because of 2 things working together. 1 We have the Echo and 2 Shaggles is intelligent. 1 and 2 work together here and on other species (Dragons and the other beast tribes) and other people from other lands.

So here is the thing. In a other place which I wont name cos spoliers. There is a sidequest where a researcher ask us to communicate with a mandgragora. We can not understand them.

So question is why? They can clearly have a language that they use to communicate with each other. Why can we not understand them.

[Rosenstrauch]

During the Omega raid questline, Alpha communicates entirely through gestures and unintelligible Chocobo noises. We are unable to understand him. But by the end of the questline, he spontaneously begins to speak in a manner only the player can understand. The characters present attribute this to Alpha being blessed with a soul for his efforts, though whether or not this is actually the case is not, afaik, explicit.

So, without having done either of the questlines you're mentioning, I can only speculate. But I think the key difference here is that the Trolls possess souls of their own, while the Mandragoras do not.

EDIT: I have begun the Troll quest. This is irrelevant to the thread, but... man, getting struck by the uncomfortable knowledge that these Trolls are treated as wild animals or a zoo curiosity, while they are in fact sapient but lack the capacity for "Spoken" language hit me harder than I expected. And the initial confrontation, saving this tiny Troll from the bigger "wild" ones, reminds me of a story I'd heard about a domesticated panda being released into the wild, only to wind up dead after a fight with wild pandas. If not for the whimsical writing, this would probably be pretty dark.

[Jojoya]

I think I just did the quest you mentioned.

We don't know that they're using an actual language. The researcher is only studying them to determine if they are actually sentient. The sounds they make to communicate may be analogous to a dog's bark, which we also would not be able to understand via the Echo.

It might also have something to do with Mandragoras being vegetables, not animals.

[Cleretic]

I assume that it's because the Mandragoras aren't actually communicating so much as just shouting. Similar to how we can't understand wild animals; we can understand language, but 'growling' normally isn't language.