Babel
by K. Stonham
first released 23rd July 2012
Between them, the Avengers can muddle along in just about any corner of the planet they end up in.
Tony speaks English. And Business. And Science! Which, no matter what certain of his teammates may think, are their own languages. (Clint may have, once or twice, accused Tony of making words up.) He is relatedly fluent in French, Japanese, and two dialects of Chinese. Tony also knows some Persian, but admitting that makes his face go curiously tight and blank. The others are smart enough to let the matter drop.
Natasha, of course, is completely bilingual in Russian and English. She had been a little unsure, once upon a time, if Steve would be off-put by her heritage. But Captain America had fallen into his icy sleep before the end of the world war and the beginning of the cold war; he had few prejudices against her birth nationality. During the course of her life and ops, she has become fluent in over half a dozen other languages. French, German, Swedish, Spanish, Hindi, Irish, and Urdu are her go-to tongues. She's always meant to pick up a few more, but never had the time.
Clint, on the other hand, doesn't specialize in language so much as dialect. His favorite is Cockney Rhyming Slang (some days he speaks in nothing else) because it drives everyone absolutely spare. He could be dropped anyplace in the English-speaking world, and within five minutes be completely invisible, talking like a local. SHIELD loved his talent for undercover work. Unfortunately for them, Clint hated it. Undercover ops bored him to tears, so he eventually wrangled a deal with Coulson to "never send me on one of those again and I'll stop talking in rhyming slang." After two weeks of non-stop Cockney, Coulson caved. Clint can get along in French, German, and Spanish, but never calls himself fluent; Natasha is better.
Steve grew up in 1930s Brooklyn. He has smatterings of everything from Yiddish to Greek. But his true fluency only came under duress. Every single operation he was part of in World War II, he made sure to pick up as much of the local speech as possible. Thus, his language is sometimes a little stilted, but he can keep up in French, Spanish, German, Portugese, Polish, Hungarian, and Norwegian. Natasha declares his Russian horrible, but spends hours talking with him anyway.
Bruce, on the other hand, is conversant in dialects and tongues that no one else has ever heard of. They read like a travelogue of his journeys: tiny hidden village dialects of South American Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Tibetan, Khmer, Hmong, Thai, Hindi, and Bengali. His vocabulary in each tends to an unsurprising medical bent. He's not fluent in any of them, but can survive a conversation. Like Clint, however, the longer he talks with someone, the more like them he sounds. Tony speculates his skill at blending in is what enabled him to dodge the US military for so long.
Thor, of course, has the AllSpeak. The rest of them declare this to be cheating. Bruce and Tony run experiments and eventually determine that Thor literally does not hear Natasha changing languages on him in mid-sentence. Nor does he realize that he's following suit. To Asgardians, all languages are one language. They figure out that Thor's speech is some variety of telepathy. Which, as some would put it, means the Asgardians are a level of evolution beyond humans. But then, anyone who's looked scientifically at their technology (and Tony has, oh how he has - Mjolnir is solid-state tech beyond his wettest dreams) knows that already.
For all the myriad languages they speak, however, and the beautiful multitude of insults they trade like party favors, the Avengers all have one thing to say.
Don't fuck with Earth.