An animated image of the human brain with Broca’s area highlighted. Source: Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 2.1 JP.

“I am Groot” are the only words the tree creature, Groot, can say. Though he understands what’s said to him and responds appropriately those three words in that order are the only things he’s capable of saying.

We all know Groot from the Marvel movies, The Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame. What many don’t know is that there is (or was) a real life analogue to Groot. I don’t mean a tree like creature, I mean there was a man who could understand everything said to him but was extremely limited in his responses. Specifically, the only phrase he was capable of was_, “Tan_”.

According to Marvel lore, (I’m citing from Wikipedia here):

Groot is a Flora colossus from Planet X, the capital of the branch worlds. The Flora colossi are tree-like beings whose language is almost impossible to understand due to the stiffness of their larynxes, causing their speech to sound like they are repeating the phrase “I am Groot”.

The human equivalent was Louis Victor Leborgne. Here’s how linguist Andrea Moro describes him in his 2008 book The Boundaries of Babel:

In 1811, Monsieur Leborgne arrived at the Bicêtre Hospital in Paris. He was a twenty-one-year-old man who exhibited an unusual linguistic problem: Whenever he was asked a question, he would always answer by saying one syllable twice, tan tan, in conjunction with quite varied intonation and expressive gestures.

As all Avengers’ (movie) fans know, “whenever Groot is saying the trademark ‘I am Groot!’ he has actually been saying a number of things, and his varying inflections of the sentence are the equivalent of words and sentences.” (source: Wikipedia again).

End notes

  1. I wasn’t able to discover if Groot’s creators (Stan Lee, Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby) were aware of Tan’s existence.
  2. The consequences of Leborgne’s condition were better investigated when, in 1861, Paul Broca found him. You can read about it in Broca’s Wikipedia page under the section “Broca’s Area”.
  3. If you want to read more about language and neuroscience, Andrea Moro’s The Boundaries of Babel is a great book. The 2nd edition came out in 2015. Link to the publisher: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/boundaries-babel-second-edition.
  4. This blog post in the magazine Scientific American is a good summary on the neuroscience side of things. Link: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/the-man-who-couldnt-speakand-how-he-revolutionized-psychology/.