Can you use a Companion stat increase to raise your Companion's Intelligence to 3, allowing it to understand your language?
Yes, but you have to have it put a skill point into Linguistics, which allows it to understand (but not speak) one language.
tip: consider letting it understand a relatively obscure language you know. If it understands Common, your enemies can hit it with some nasty language-dependent spells.
Slightly off tangent, but another thing most players don't realize is that if you can somehow get an animal (most commonly, familiars) to have 12 Intelligence or higher, animals can inherently learn to speak languages.
Slightly off tangent, but another thing most players don't realize is that if you can somehow get an animal (most commonly, familiars) to have 12 Intelligence or higher, animals can inherently learn to speak languages.
Don't believe this is generally true. Only creatures that are capable of human-style speech (ravens, thrushes, etc.) can speak a language. After all, why would an int 12 dinosaur be able to speak Common, while a druid wild-shaped into a dinosaur with int 16 would not be able to speak Common?
In the blog post Seraphimpunk posted, it states "While a very intelligent dolphin might be taught to understand Common, there's no way for him speak it."
Don't believe this is generally true. Only creatures that are capable of human-style speech (ravens, thrushes, etc.) can speak a language. After all, why would an int 12 dinosaur be able to speak Common, while a druid wild-shaped into a dinosaur with int 16 would not be able to speak Common?
In the blog post Seraphimpunk posted, it states "While a very intelligent dolphin might be taught to understand Common, there's no way for him speak it."
Ugh missed that blog post. :( A witch in the last adventure I ran had an owl familiar with 12 INT and she asked me if the owl could speak a language... I couldn't find anything in the rules stating otherwise, so I allowed it. Seems kind of important...
Now that I look at the rules for Intelligence, Animals, and Magical Beasts, I can see how it SORT of alludes to this... but I've never found anything explicit. Yay for obscure blog posts solving mysteries... -_-
Sinatar i think you mean "can't inherently" . At least thats what the familiar entry itself says about familiars.
I haven't found anything in the familiar entry that says they can't learn languages inherently (and by inherently, I mean through having a high enough Intelligence).
I've looked everywhere... the Witch's Familiar entry tells you to look at Arcane Bond. Arcane Bond tells you to look at the Familiars entry. And nothing in the Familiars entry (I've seen) says anything about them learning a language.
The only thing I've found RAW that even alludes to this is the entry for Magical Beasts where it says: "in which case the creature knows at least one language, but can’t necessarily speak."
Which STILL doesn't necessarily mean that a magical beast with a high enouch intelligence can't SPEAK languages. However, that statement in the blog you posted DOES confirm it... and again, I think it belongs in the rules, not a random blog post.