Any noun can have "magic" applied to it, even non-physical nouns. Like "sound". In this case, it's sounds that are used for communication, that carry some magical effect when spoken.
If specific utterances produce unique magical effects, then it's a Words Can Break My Bones-type Language of Magic, but if all utterances in the language share the same supernatural effect, then it's this trope.
May overlap with Black Speech, a language literally made to sound evil, where the effects of speaking it might make it appear evil too, and if it does overlap with that, then it's likely also a Brown Note, for when the sensory input, in this case hearing the supernatural language, causes pain and/or suffering.
Language of Truth is a subtrope, where all utterances are magically mandated to be truthful to the speaker.
Compare with Language Equals Thought, where language has a profound but In-Universe non-magical effect on the speaker.
This trope could also apply to written or Signed Language with the proper change in terminology. Not to be confused with Starfish Language, which isn't supernatural, just really weird.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- X-Men: Bei the Blood Moon, introduced in X of Swords, has the mutant power of the "Doom Note", which combines this with Make Some Noise. Her voice is powerful enough to level mountains, but also lets her be understood by anyone by acting as the platonic idea of the concept of language. Ironically enough, the exception to this is Cypher, whose own mutant power makes him the Omniglot. And since the Doom Note isn't technically a language, the two powers cancel each other out and the two can only communicate with body language, written messages, or interpreters.
Fan Works
- Dueling Keyboards: "Discography": the Black Speech of the Pit [of Tartarus] afflicts listeners with mental ailments, which is apparently worse the magically talented the listener is:
["]Actually a lovely language when you hear it recorded; it's only when spoken live that it makes you writhe on the ground and speak in tongues. Octavia frowned for a moment. "Apparently that sort of thing gets worse when the listener has stronger magic.["]
Film — Live-Action
- In Arrival: Learning the Heptapods' language gives people Louise Banks the Psychic Powers-type ability to remember things that haven't happened yet, including the birth and death of her daughter.
- Played for Laughs in Little Nicky, wherein the titular character is the youngest Spawn of Satan. Although he normally speaks in a non-threatening nasally voice, he talks in his sleep, inevitably demonically. Listening to it induces manic paranoia in his roommate and drives animals crazy. Seemed to be pleasant to a pair of stoner death metal fans, however.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring has Gandalf read the inscription on the One Ring in Black Speech. His voice becomes inhumanly deep, resonant and guttural, and the sunlight dims as he speaks. Frodo and the elven nobility recoil in pain as they hear it.
Literature
- The Daevabad Trilogy: The Geziri tribe of djinn have a language that only they can learn — not even the Nahid tribe's Translator Microbes can make it comprehensible to outsiders.
- Looming Gaia: Only nymphs are capable of speaking and understanding Gaia's Tongue. To all other species, it just sounds like nature.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Black Speech of Mordor is a brutal-sounding language that incorporates some of its creator Sauron's power and malice. When Gandalf recites the Ring-inscription at the Council of Elrond, his voice becomes harsh and cruel, the sky darkens, and the Earth trembles.
- Peter Pan (and by extension Disney Fairies): The speech of fairies is unintelligible bell tinkles to humans.
- Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: The Druid language can't be remembered by non-druids.
- The Stormlight Archive: The Nine, who rule the Fused with the direct patronage of the god Odium, confer with each other in a singing language that Odium allows only them to understand. It's opaque even to an Envoy's Translator Microbes.
- "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang: Linguist Dr. Louise Banks learns a mind-screw Starfish Language that conceptualizes time differently than any human language does. Through it, she learns that her future daughter will die in a climbing accident at age 25.
- Stranger in a Strange Land: Any human who truly masters the Martian language, as Valentine Michael Smith did, gains access to Psychic Powers.
- The Vanishing by Bentley Little: When a part-human monster-descendant speaks the Black Speech, the sounds make plants grow.
Live-Action TV
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Sauron uses the Black Speech to mind control a warg. His otherwise smooth voice changes to a more raspy and baritonal tone.
Tabletop Games
- Ars Magica: Spirits are immaterial and imperceptible to the five senses, so they communicate through Silent Speech, a preternatural synaesthesia that somehow conveys the spirit's meaning.
- Chronicles of Darkness:
- Mage: The Awakening: The Atlantean Language of Magic is metaphysically broken somehow — Muggles can't even perceive it, hearing garbled nonsense or nothing at all, and mages can only learn enough to use in spellcasting.
- Demons of the Inferno speak Dragon's Tongue, an inhuman glossolalia that somehow conveys meaning despite having no consistent vocabulary or phonology. It can't be deciphered by outsiders, only deliberately taught — usually via Demonic Possession.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Basic D&D and AD&D 1st Edition give each Character Alignment a corresponding language that can only be spoken or understood by people of that alignment. If someone changes alignment, they spontaneously forget the old one and learn the new one.
- 3rd Edition: Words of Creation and the Dark Speech are the languages of quintessential Good and Evil. They can only be learned by people of a matching Character Alignment; anyone untrained who tries to speak them is struck dead.
- Princess: The Hopeful: The Royal Tongue of the Hopeful is the single most information-dense language in existence, using magic to cram more meaning into each syllable than the sounds should be able to hold to the point where even a simple "thank you for helping" would translate into a more mundane language as several paragraphs on the virtues of teamwork and how the Princess is pleased to work alongside the adressee. As a result, only those with a connection to the Light (Princesses, Queens, Beacons, Sworn, and Shinigami) can learn to speak or understand the Royal Tongue, and even they can only understand it spoken live - it is unintelligible when recorded. While it can be used to communicate in the same way as a mundane language (assuming you don't mind speaking in Purple Prose), it can also be used to augment Hopeful magic: a Princess can boost her roll to activate a Charm by first spending a turn giving a speech in the Royal Tongue about the Charm she is about to use and why she feels the need to use it.
- Warhammer 40,000: Enuncia is a pre-human language that appears in books written by Dan Abnett for the game. It can be used to control daemons and heretic engines, but the supernatural bit is how it can damage opponents and the user as well, with outcomes from bleeding from the mouth to cranial rupturing.
Video Games
- In Fallen London, Sunless Sea, and Sunless Skies, the Language of Magic called the Correspondence is the spoken law of the star-gods that enforce reality. In addition to its more orderly applications, it's associated with light and fire — plaques inscribed with its sigils tend to ignite ferociously; it's spoken with a tongue of flame that can become dangerously literal; and even thinking about it can cause burns.
- Final Fantasy XIV:
- The language of dragons is inherently magical and can be understood by any race regardless of familiarity with it. The songs the dragons sing with their roars are laced with magicks and can create powerful spells nigh-instantly, such as Hraesvelgr's Diamond Storm. Lastly, the songs of elder dragons have a Compelling Voice effect on their descendants and even unrelated scalekin that urges them to follow the elder dragon's intent. The song of a great wyrm can even shock some tempered dragons back to sanity, as shown when Tiamat roars to her tempered children, summoning several wyverns to carry the party to the final part of Paglth'an.
- The language of the Amaurotine people can also be understood by any race despite it being a Starfish Language of droning, alien tones. In this way, the shades of Emet-Selch illusory Amaurot can converse with the Scions who were born almost 12,000 years after the Sundering.
- The Secret World: The demonic tongue and languages touched by the Filth. Not only do they sound immensely disturbing, but they often have potentially dangerous consequences for mortals who make the mistake of listening too closely: the demonic tongue can't even be spoken by humans without first ritualistically mutilating your tongue, and translating some of the nastier threats into English runs the risk of boiling the bowels of anyone in earshot; meanwhile, people infected by the Filth can sing hymns that kill small birds and other animals in range, and a few can even reproduce the Filth as graffiti capable of infecting humans by sight alone.
- Warframe has the Voidtongue, a language originating in the Void, were it is used by the various natives. It was discovered by a scientist studying the Void, and the words and phrases of this language can even become physical objects, and be used for what can best be described as magic. Nine of the words of this language have been translated in universe, and each one doubles both as an entire stanza, and as a term for a concept, with eight of the known words being translated as Void, Truth, Chaos, Order, Light, Decay, Form and Time. These eight, together with a ninth word which is only translated as a stanza and can copy other the effects of the other eight words, can also be used to cut the immortality of undying entities, and also convert or free them.
Webcomics
- Last Res0rt: The Tone language of the Celeste uses this as a vehicle for their Compelling Voice, but...Tone itself is completely silent, only audible to the Celeste themselves and any individuals with the appropriate level of resistance.
- Phantomarine: The Gods' Tongue is a language that can only be spoken by immortals, though the spirits of the dead can understand but not speak it. It's also used
to Bless food so that it can nourish ghosts.
Web Original
- SCP Foundation:
- SCP-3027, a language that's sapient and can instantaneously change the meaning of its words to manipulate people, as if every user of the language is using just one big fluctuating Personal Dictionary. As explained by a speaker, 3027-1:
SCP-3027-1: Right. One person, let's say it's a political leader where SCP-3027 is spoken, gives a rousing speech about something. Right?
Dr. Akesson: Right.
SCP-3027-1: It doesn't even matter what that person says. SCP-3027 changes its meaning for a little bit, and everyone in the crowd hears something like "the Indo-Europeans are invading our homeland, we have to drive them out." And it's a really great, convincing speech. So they go to war. - SCP-5734 is an "Un-verb", a constructed word which means both "to gift" and "to poison" (a pun off of the fact that in German, the word for "poison" is Gift), is incapable of being conjugated, and knowing what the word means and hearing it causes nouns to become conflated with one another; for instance, saying "I (SCP-5734) the apple to you" results in people perceiving the words 'I', 'apple', and 'you' as the same concept.
- The Pickman-Blank 001 proposal at one point explains the fundamental particles that make up language, both written and spoken, in order to explain how 'cryptomancy' and 'quantum linguaphysics' or, as the two fields are later called, 'memetics' work in the setting, meaning that they've sort of explained away the supernatural. But it's still classified as anomalous, a.k.a against mainstream science.
- SCP-3027
Western Animation
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: Lord Pain can speak in a Black Speech which is forbidden for mortal ears. Despite sounding like silly and incomprehensible gibberish, it causes a canary to lose its feathers, a fish to die, its tank to fill with decay, and Billy to ooze some kind of green goo from his ear and fall unconscious.