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[Kazuko Rizza]

One popular use of this character is the Silent Snarker: While they never have any lines, they are highly facially expressive and used for many a Reaction Shot, Facepalm, or visual This Is Gonna Suck. They may even insult other characters in ways they can't understand.

One form of He Who Must Not Be Heard. Contrast also The Voiceless, who can talk, but just does not whenever we are watching. See also Heroic Mime, Cute Mute and Silent Antagonist. Compare The Unintelligible and Intelligible Unintelligible. If they never speak, but they sing during a musical number, then they are The Singing Mute. May use a Voice for the Voiceless or Mouth of Sauron. Not to be confused with a character who Never Learned to Talk; The Speechless is physically incapable of speech.

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• Claude the Cat: Ironically, the cat is the only one to speak unless you count the one PSA where his owner screams.
• Nipper & Gramophone's Christmas Tales: Neither Nipper nor Gramophone speak a single word, unless we count Gramophone's yodeling in "The Sound of Music" and hiccups in "The Hangover".

Comic Strips

• Sphinx from Dick Tracy. He destroyed his voice when he accidentally drank a glass of poison he intended for a friend of his.
• Big Stoop from Terry and the Pirates. The Dragon Lady had his tongue torn out when they were children.

Manhua

• Rosaland of Cyber Weapon Z never speaks on-panel. Since she is half-panther, half-human, her muteness may come from this. But she is no Cute Mute, she is not harmless enough for that.

Myths & Religion

• There are exceptions, but the default premise is that Golems cannot talk. This is because in Aramaic and Hebrew, the words "soul" and "speech" are intricately connected and since a golem doesn't have a soul, as a consequence it doesn't have a voice.

Puppet Shows

• Molly from The Big Comfy Couch. Definitely fits this trope because she is a doll. She can, however, communicate through cartoon speech bubbles, as well as nod or shake her head to yes-no questions.
• Although her parents Mr. and Mrs. C can talk, Chica from The Chica Show and The Sunny Side Up Show only communicates through squeaking, so she definitely fits this trope.
• Pili Fantasy: War of Dragons: Yeh Hsiao-chai, by virtue of cutting out his own tongue as part of his trying to understand how "the sound of a single hand clapping" and gaining the martial art of nothingnes.
• There are some speechless characters on Sesame Street:
• The Honkers, cute furry monsters of diverse colors that don't speak, but communicate (and make music) by using their nose to honk the horns on their head.
• Linda (portrayed by deaf actor Linda Bove) doesn't speak at all because she is deaf, but she can communicate by using sign-language.
• Sully (portrayed by Richard Hunt) is Biff's silent friend and partner in hard construction work. Sully also does well at playing the piano.
• M'Goats from Sprout Control Room.

Roleplay

• Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
• Ivan has a genetic condition that interferes with the neurons in the speech-producing area of his brain, making speech difficult for him. He compensates by either Talking with Signs or using ASL.
• Jessica is capable of using her Compelling Voice to command others to temporarily shut up, which she does to Michal when he annoys her and the school nurse after she's inflicted with severe burns and is rather justifiably screaming about it. Zia's telepathy allows her a peek into Michal's mind during this time, which reveals that he wants to speak but finds himself physically unable to.
• Katheryn's power transformed her into a sentient mass of ink. As she no longer has vocal cords, she can't speak and instead communicates by forming her ink into words.
• Ziz, a drone created by Ivy, is incapable of verbal speech, and instead communicates by projecting words onto any available surface.
• In Dino Attack RPG, the Brickspider Bot was not originally programmed with speech. It learned how to program itself with speech by studying the remains of PBB, but it only programmed one of its heads with speech, so when that head was destroyed by Rex, the Brickspider Bot was forced to use a replacement head that did not have speech programming. As such, it could only communicate by hooking itself up to Cyber-Bully and speaking through his mouth, or by tapping its foot in Morse code.
• Ace, the mask-wearing Implacable Man of Ruby Quest, never utters a word. When we eventually see him without his mask, it becomes clear why: he no longer has anything even remotely resembling facial features.
• You Have Become Your Avatar: Heartless Sora Brahian can't speak because this form couldn't speak in the Kingdom Hearts canon, until the Grief Seed is used on him, turning him into Roxas Brahian.

Tabletop Games

• The "Cannot Speak" disadvantage in GURPS turns your character into this. Interestingly you can combine it with the Voice advantage, just because you can't form words doesn't mean the sounds can't please.
• Many of the villains in Sentinels of the Multiverse are at least somewhat talkative, and several, most notably Ermine, won't shut up. Progeny, on the other hand, is utterly silent: its flavour text is mostly other people talking about it, and unlike every other villain in the digital version, it doesn't get any dialogue on the starting screen, not even against its nemesis, KNYFE.
• In Warhammer: Age of Sigmar the elite Tzaangor known as Skyfires are utterly silent, barred from speech by Tzeentch, the Chaos God of magic, as the price for seeing the future.

Theatre

• Susan the Silent in Finian's Rainbow, who communicated through interpretive dance.
• Gymnasia in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. A Speechless hailing from an entire "Island of Silent Women", Love Interest to the incompetent Pseudolus. However, being Gymnasia in many productions a tall, leatherclad amazon, busty and with a definite dominatrix streak in her, muteness may not be their best, or more defining trait.
• In the opera Life With An Idiot by Alfred Schnittke, the Idiot can only utter a single sound "Ech", but he does so with much expressive flair.
• Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker.
• Kattrin Haupt in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. Her mother is inconsistent on whether she was born mute or whether she was traumatised into silence (or, from the way it's hinted at, possibly had an injury to her mouth) as a small child. Goes beyond Cute Mute into an outright Woobie.
• King Sextimus in Once Upon a Mattress cannot speak due to an ancient curse. He is highly capable in mime, which even allows him to take part in a few musical numbers. Towards the end, the curse is broken and he regains his speech.

Web Animation

• Most of the cast of Adam Phillips' Brackenwood; only one, the Auld Sage, has ever actually spoken. Besides him, there's only three likely candidates we've been introduced to who even have the capacity: Bingbong, in whom nature compensated his great physical strength with the IQ of a pigeon, Lemonee Wee, who hasn't really had a lot of screen time (but may be the unidentified narrator of "Last of the Dashkin"), and Bitey, who Phillips assures us can talk, but doesn't because he spends most of his time around animals who can't talk back, and thus doesn't see the point.
• In Eric Schwartz's animations, Flip the Frog (being based on a silent movie character) never speaks. That's doesn't matter though, because his girlfriend Clarisse has such acute hearing that she can hear him nod. On the phone!
• The Most Popular Girls in School: Because she's only a young baby (as for now), Brittnay Margeurite fits this trope.
• Xochiquetzal in No Evil traded her voice away as part of a deal to save the world from the Black Ick. She communicates using sign language (useful given that her brother traded his hearing in the same incident) and works magic through a mandolin. She also has an extremely expressive face, which is used to full effect in, for example, "Welcome to Mictlan".
• Although he rarely spoke before anyway, Maine of Red vs. Blue truly becomes The Speechless after being shot repeatedly in the throat. He can still make grunts and growls that others occasionally are able to interpret, but by and large he can only communicate by way of his AI, Sigma.
• RWBY: Neo is unable to speak, communicating through silent gestures, text messages, and body language (including fighting), although she can make non-verbal sounds, such as grunting in pain or giggling. However, her status as this wasn't made explicit until Volume 6, wherein Cinder tries to make a deal with her and an irritated Neo (once they're done fighting) points to her throat. The canon novel RWBY: Roman Holiday reveals that she has had speech issues since birth, and her parents were extremely intolerant of it. The first person she ever met who was able to communicate with her was Roman Torchwick. While in the Ever After during Volume 9, her Semblance evolves to allow her to create clones that can speak. They act as her voice, reflecting her thoughts and feelings as she breaks down Ruby. While she relies most heavily on a clone of Roman to speak for her, she does also use the clones of people Ruby cared about but couldn't save (Pyrrha, Penny, and Ozpin), and former allies (Lionheart, Clover, and Ironwood). Once the Curious Cat possesses her, it's able to speak through her even though she naturally could not.
• Melony from SMG4 started out as this. In her first appearances, she was an innanimate watermelon and therefore couldn't speak. Ultimately downplayed after "Mario's Mask of Madness, where she ends up gaining a humanoid body after the Fierce Deity Mask is put on her, to which she then becomes The Voiceless since she only makes various voice grunts.
• Wuggums from Wendell & Wuggums only grunts and barks like a real dog.

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