Been thinking about Grogu a bit recently, and isn’t it weird that he can’t talk?
He seems to be developmentally around toddler age in Book of Boba Fett/Mando Season 3; he can walk, he can perform complex motor functions like jumping, flipping, and balancing on one leg, and he can effectively communicate with his assistive device. He is able to make noises—you can hear him making cooing sounds in his training montage with Luke—but he doesn’t ever try to speak, or even communicate verbally. We never see/hear him trying to form words, he doesn’t scream or cry, and he never babbles.
Which is fucking weird, for a baby. Babies are literally wired for language comprehension and learning; it’s one of the main things their brains do. Learning to communicate verbally is a vital stage of infancy/early childhood, and it starts only a few months after birth. Babies, infants, and toddlers, unless they have some kind of speech-language disorder or other disability, are constantly talking.
So Grogu should absolutely be talking throughout the Mandalorian, even if he’s just babbling. But Grogu’s not a Human child; while most of the species in Star Wars function more or less like Humans with superficial differences, we famously know nothing about his species, and thus can’t really assume that human standards apply.
And once you think about it, there’s good evidence that human standards around speech don’t apply. One of the only things we know about his species is that they struggle to speak normally. Both Yoda and Yaddle, the two members of his species that we’ve seen in canon, have an extremely distinctive speech disorder, consistently misordering words and phrases.
So, given this common difficulty and Grogu’s unusual lack of speech, it seems entirely plausible that the species as a whole might have language difficulties. Maybe their brains, unlike Human brains, just aren’t wired for verbal communication. They can do it, eventually, but it doesn’t come naturally to them.
However, it does seem like they might be wired for a different kind of communication: telepathy. Immediately upon meeting Luke and Ahsoka, two Jedi who are not telepaths and who don’t communicate using only the Force very often, Grogu is able to have full conversations with them. He’s not just relaying sensations or feelings, like we most commonly see with mind-to-mind communication in Star Wars, but actual words and sounds (see: him telling Ahsoka his name).
That’s not super common in Star Wars. Most Jedi don’t hold full conversations telepathically, yet Grogu’s able to converse like that extremely easily 30 years after the last time he could’ve conceivably talked to anyone in that manner. He seems naturally very good at mental communication, something that we can see from very early on in the series: one of the first things we see him do in Season 1 is use a primitive kind of Beast Control, a form of telepathic communication, to hold the Mudhorn in place (there’s definitely some telekinesis going on too, but he holds up his hand like Jedi do when communicating with animals, so I’m guessing he’s using both to keep it from moving).
Additionally, every single member of Grogu’s species is a Jedi/is Force-sensitive (and I believe this goes for Legends too, where there’s more of them), and extremely Force-sensitive at that. It seems quite likely that they would all be able to communicate through the Force, and given their difficulties with verbal speech, it’s probably their preferred form of communication.
That would also explain why Grogu, who at the time would’ve been developmentally a newborn (aka way younger than the 1-3 year olds the Jedi generally seem to adopt), was in the temple during Order 66. His species doesn’t seem to be very common, and the Jedi are the only other large culture that could communicate with him in his native mental language.
Because kids absolutely need some kind of language in order to develop normally, Grogu’s people might generally give their kids to the Order. This could be another reason Grogu is so slow to develop throughout the Mandalorian, and starts advancing much quicker after he interacts with Ahsoka and Luke: he’s been deprived of his natural language for most of his formative years.
Not sure how to end this, it’s just a thought that I had that kept on making more and more sense as I kept thinking about it
