#answer: Only to shepard whom no one will notice has gone missing/dead. because honestly no one should be drinking tupari. it will kill you

[shepcdr]

so i lied and i'm NOT done writing the "shepard and languages" headcanon because i decided like an idiot that i should write drabbles to go along with it. which is undoubtedly going to take me a thousand years — but dropping a lil bit from what i was working on earlier today!!!!

anyway, i think the first alien that shepard ever meets on earth is a turian, and purely by coincidence; the shitty city/megatropolis he grew up in is not a tourist destination, for many reasons. few aliens ever came through. this little turian boy and his mum probably got off at the wrong stop...

anyway. for alien squadmates. think about shepard picking up little random words over the years through watching/listening to news broadcasts, advertisements, radio. think about them just chilling when suddenly this human opens his mouth and unmistakably starts making the closest sound to some alien language that a human can. think about being councillor sparatus and shepard getting fed up in me1 and hurling what is undeniably an untranslatable turian expletive at you—

anyway, because i don't know when i'll finish writing it... shepard has rudimentary to basic speaking/conversational ability in a smattering of earth languages because of the melting pot of an area he grew up, and exposure to a lot of languages in his time with the Tenth Street Reds (many of them are multilingual). he is not a grammatical expert by any means, and any conversations he's having in anything other than English are usually a little broken, but the important thing is that he understands and can communicate. and he is actually decent at replicating most alien language sounds (though to the trained ear, it might sound crude, but that's the limitations of the human body/voice). knows some amount of alien vocabulary, most notably in turian/batarian/vorcha for some fuck all reason — probably from watching vids with stupid vorcha villains/evil minion type characters.

most notably, he understands prothean after his encounter with the beacon and exposure to the cipher. we don't really have an idea of what the prothean language sounds like exactly (since the collectors are heavily genetically modified and seem to have insect-like traits that protheans don't normally have. which May include a vast change in language/communication — but who tf knows, that's just my game theory), but i am leaning on him being able to replicate the sounds of whatever the prothean language to some decent extent... whatever that language originally sounded like. yes. this means he can speak prothean at javik. (and will be doing so. surprise mfer! but it is such a shame that mass effect never fully plays around with the implications of what the prothean beacon/cipher has done to shepard and their brain/dna, so i will be taking care of that!!)

tldr: the series in which we explore interactions with foreign human and alien languages when you don't come equipped with a translator, and contemplate questions like "should you give a 6-year-old a tupari®"