Upon restarting the game, I got a message saying something about game settings having to be reset, I clicked OK and continued.
Now, all the spoken dialogue is no longer spoken. Music and sound effect are still working but speech is permanently gone.

I redownloaded and reinstalled the game, unfortunately the problem is still there, no spoken dialogue anymore.

Already encountered another fairly aggravating bug in the first couple minutes of gameplay but missing speech is too heavy to ignore. Any help greatly appreciated.

edit: I'm using Win 7 64bit, no driver updates were made since I've installed Divine Divinity 2 days ago.

So if you start a new game, there are no spoken lines when selecting each character, or once in the game, dialog from Joram is not spoken? What about if you change the voice volume level in the sound options?

You can try deleting the sound.cfg file in the Divine Divinity install folder, if it exists, though that will just reset the sound volumes to default levels.

A couple of people fixed missing sound effects by running the game as administrator and in XP SP3 compatibility mode. You browse to the install folder in Windows Explorer, right click on the div.exe program file, select Properties and switch to the Compatibility tab to try that.

Did you check for updated sound drivers? Even though the sound was working with the current drivers, an update could reset or change something that could potentially get it working properly again (a person with no sound at all in the game fixed it by reinstalling their sound drivers).

Thanks for the quick reply Raze, I've already tried deleting the sound cfg file and I also changed the voice volume to the max. The game is already running in XP SP3 mode as admin.
I'm a bit cautious of installing new sound drivers just for one game that worked fine just a couple hours ago, on my last computer I shot the whole system to pieces by installing a single new driver.

Forgot to mention that dialogue during non-interactive sequences is still spoken but whenever I approach an NPC no dialogue is spoken anymore, I've tried talking to the few NPC's I've already met when speech still worked and all their previously spoken lines are no longer spoken.

edit: characters still speak during character selection and Joram also speaks the during the very first dialogue. Lanilor and the crazy old guy also speak during the non interactive sequence but when I go talk to them and in subsequent dialogues, their lines aren't spoken (same with all the other NPC's in town). The knight at the entrance has no speech at all.

Again, thanks a lot for the quick reply. I feel rather silly now, it's just I could have sworn there was more spoken dialogue during my initial run around town. I'll take your word on it though!

Thanks again