List of polyglots

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A polyglot is someone with a high degree of proficiency in several languages. (A bilingual person can speak two languages fluently, a trilingual three. One who can speak six or more languages fluently is known as a hyperpolyglot.)

The following list must be seen as anecdotal. Calculations as to "how many" languages anyone speaks are impossible for several reasons.

To start with there is no clear definition of what it means to "speak a language". A tourist who can handle a simple conversation with a waiter may be completely lost when it comes to discussing current affairs or even using the past tense. A diplomat or businessman who can handle complicated negotiations in a foreign language may not be able to write a simple letter correctly. A four-year-old French child usually must be said to "speak French fluently", but it is unlikely that he can handle the subjunctive as well as even a mediocre foreign student of the language does.

In addition there is no clear definition of what "one language" means. The Scandinavian languages are so similar that a large part of the native speakers understand all of them without much trouble. This means that a speaker of Danish, Norwegian or Swedish can easily get his count up to 3 languages. On the other hand, the differences between variants of Chinese, like Cantonese and Mandarin, are so big that hard studies are needed for a speaker of one of them to learn even to understand a different one correctly. A person who has learned to speak five Chinese "dialects" perfectly has achieved something impressive, but his "count" would still be only one "language".

Furthermore, what is considered a language can change, often for purely political purposes, such as when Serbo-Croatian was split into Serb and Croatian after Yugoslavia broke up, or when Ukrainian was dismissed as a Russian dialect by the Russian Czars to discourage national feelings. (Similar political decisions were responsible for Scots formerly being considered a dialect of English, and Lower Saxon still being regarded by many in Germany as a dialect of German.)[citation needed]

A widely-cited statement concerning this issue, published by Max Weinreich, quoting a remark by an auditor of one of his lectures: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy."

To take it to its extreme, there is an apocryphal story about a Bavarian linguist who spoke 126 languages, none of which could be identified.[citation needed]

With this in mind, the following list contains some people who for some reason have a reputation of good language skills.

Contents

[edit] Highest claims

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[edit] 40

  • Georges Dumézil (1898–1986), famous French philologist, knew up to forty languages.
  • William James Sidis (1898–1944), child prodigy, knew around forty languages and could apparently learn a language in a day.
  • Ferenc Kemény (Francis Kemeni), Hungarian translator, understands 40 languages, writes in 24 languages out of them, speaks 12 languages out of them
  • Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Oxford classicist and senior editor at the Oxford Press knows 40 languages and bemused his tutors with translations from Greek to Serbo-Croatian, Greek to Hungarian, German to Arabic, and several others, in his tests as an undergraduate at Oxford.

[edit] 30 or more

[edit] 20 or more

[edit] 10 or more

[edit] References

  1. ^ Official profile in Government of India site mentions his interest in learning languages and his literary contributions and translations in Telugu, Hindi, and Marathi.

[edit] External links

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