There is only a single language spoken by all of the Genera and no cases have ever been encountered of differing civilisations unable to communicate. As they grow and interact with the world around them children gradually come to understand the breadth of language relating new concepts back to the previous ones at the same time learning to make themselves understood in return. All words when heard for the first time come with a vague and approximate sense of what previously encountered concepts that they link back to though this does not include a deep level of understanding and may allow for limited misinterpretation.
The critical part to understanding communication appears to be perceiving the entirety of the method the first individual used to convey it. Thus a deaf person gains nothing from being spoken to unless they are looking closely at the lips of the speaker.
There have been cases of individuals who have become unable to speak and understand speech after terrible accidents and in even rarer cases there has been evidence of some who have lost the ability to understand language but maintained the ability to convey it. It is mostly from the investigations of these rare few individuals that the following understandings have been drawn.
Those who have attempted to study communication have discovered that different Genera and even different individuals make radically different noises. All individuals (outside of rare cases such as those above) hear the same concepts conveyed however.
All written communication conveys its meaning to anyone who can find the whole original text though there is no consistent set of symbols used. This makes secret communication very difficult as there is no equivalent to a cipher. There are 3 methods sometimes used to work around this.
Those who have been unable to learn to speak for physical reasons and a limited portion of those who have devoted time to learning the skill are able to make themselves understood fully by means of gestures. Most however are about as effective at conveying meaning without speech as you might expect.
A great proportion of amateur performance is simply pleasant or unpleasant depending on the audience's personal preferences. Works by the greats truly embody the concept that a picture is worth a thousand words however.