Question

Can Pokemon only say their name or are they named after the only thing they can say? Is there an accurate answer for this.

Comments

I like to think that Pokeman ARE talking, but humans just have a mental block that prevents them from understanding it. Certain Pokemon, like psychic types, or Meowth, among others, can break through this mental block.

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I would also like to take this opportunity to call attention to Guzzlord's cry in the Japanese anime: https://youtube.com/watch?v=msp1eRosE-Y

Answer 1

There is absolutely no way to know this for sure. It is a case of the age-old paradox: which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I will start with whether they can only say their name, since that is easier. It is not always the case, although it usually is. Meowth from Team Rocket is the only known example of a Pokemon that has actually taught itself to speak human (that I can think of). Many Psychic types, legendaries, and a few others, seem to be able to communicate via telepathy instead. I can recall Mewtwo, Lapras, Shaymin, Jirachi, and various other Pokemon "talking" in this way.

Now I will move onto how they were named. Logically it makes no sense for Pokemon to only be able to say what the humans named them, meaning that they were probably named after the sounds they made. This then raises the question of how Pokemon like Charizard or Onix, which really only roar, were named. But this is just a theory, because as I said at the start there is no way to know for sure.

Comments

The egg came before the chicken .-.

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but who layed the egg?

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A lizard

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more like a 51% lizard 49% chicken. not that any such thing is in the fossil record, thus the term missing link.

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LOL Rlly guys?

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I imagined that when someone first saw a pokemon
"Oh look! It's a lizard with its tail on fire! I'll call it a Charmander! Hi charmander!" and then lots of people passed the charmander and said
"hi charmander"
"hello, you charmander"
"how are you charmander"
And then the Charmander copied what he was called. Like how parrots copy speech. And then when he kept saying Charmander it rubbed off others and all Charmanders said "charmander".
That's just my theory, though.

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The egg came before the chicken.

Before any chickens existed, two other species had to breed to create the first chicken, which hatched from the first chicken egg. That chicken then went on to make more chickens.

It's science.

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It’s like birds. Many birds were named after a sound they make, including the jay, the chickadee, the phoebe, and the whip-poor-will. If a bird’s sound doesn’t work well as a name, it’s named after something else.

Answer 2

Building off of MeloettaMelody's answer, Pokemon like Charizard and Onix, and others, like Krabby, are actually saying their Japanese names, and not just roaring. Its admittedly a bit of a stretch, but next time you watch the anime, listen closely to Charizard, and you can hear it saying "Lizardon", albeit very slurred. And now getting to the answer. Some of these names are very obscure if you don't know Japanese (Iwark for Onix makes zero sense to me, but I don't know Japanese, so it may be just a clever name for a rock snake), so maybe at some point somebody just said "These names make no sense, lets change em!", and they did.

I know this question has been sufficently answered already, but I just wanted to add my two cents.

Answer 3

In real life, a lot of birds are named after the sound they make (jay, phoebe, chickadee, towhee, etc). The birds that aren’t named after their sounds usually make sounds that don’t make very good names (hence why it’s called a mourning dove and not a coo-woo hoo hoo hoo).
I’m guessing that Pokémon names work the same way. Most Pokémon are named after their sounds, and Pokémon whose sounds aren’t name-like are given different names. As for why their names sound like real words that describe them, maybe human language was derived from Pokémon sounds and not the other way around?