This article was originally published November 28th, 2022, and has been updated to reflect the new monsters that have been added to the D&D 5e cannon and more information about using Deep Speech in your game.
What is Deep Speech?
According to the 5e Player’s Handbook, p123, Deep Speech is the language spoken by mind flayers and beholders. That’s it, that’s all the information we get on this language. What else can we glean from the official sources about this language.
First, speaking more broadly, deep speech is the language of aberrations. Start spawn, neogi, psurlons, aboleth, and other beholderkin are speakers of this language. Most of these things have a mouth, and many of the ones that don’t either can only understand the language or are telepathic.
The current player’s handbook also lists no script for this language. The 4e Forgotten Realms Players Guide states that the Drow were the first to document this language. This is as a result of their close proximity to the mind flayers in the Underdark.
I like to think that, given the body plans of creatures that speak this language it must involve a larger amount of gesture than most languages we think of. Tentacles and extra limbs are the norm for aberrations. The also tend to have rather unusual mouth-parts.
The hardest part of speaking Deep isn’t all the hissing and gurgling. It’s all the gestures meant to be made with tentacles. Bony human fingers just weren’t made to coil and squiggle like the tentacles of a mind flayer or a star spawn…
-Voivode Kohoutek
Who Speaks Deep Speech?
Deep Speech: Taking an Exotic Language
Deep speech is listed as an exotic language. This means that the Dungeon Master’s (DM’s) permission is required before a player can take the language as a starting language. The issue with taking an exotic language is that it may not fit well into the campaign setting. Maybe there are no creatures from the far realm, and so the language will be useless. It may also be that the Far Realm creatures will be central to the plot, and the DM needs to maintain as much mystery as possible or plans for the players to learn deep speech later.
If player do take an exotic language, they should consider including how they learned it in their backstory. It is a very unusual ability that will raise questions when it is used. Deep Speech specifically relates to the Far Realm, which has a corrupting influence on creatures of the Prime Material Plane. This could be fun to play with as part of the way a PC behaves.
What’s Next?
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