Ziad Youssef Fazah (Arabic: زياد فصاح) (born June 10, 1954 in Monrovia, Liberia) is a Liberian-born Lebanese polyglot. Fazah himself claims to speak 59 languages and maintains that he has proved this in several television shows, where he "successfully" communicated with native speakers of a large number of foreign languages.[1]
The Guinness Book of World Records, up to the 1998 edition, listed Fazah as being able to speak and read 58 languages, citing a live interview in Athens, Greece July 1991.[2]
However, in Viva el lunes, a Chilean TV program featuring Ziad Fazah, he failed to understand beginner level phrases in Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Persian, Greek and Hindi. He even wrongly recognized Russian as Croatian in being unable to comprehend what "Какой сегодня день недели?" ("What day of the week is it today?") means[3].
Fazah claims he can speak, read and understand the following languages:
Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Balochi, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Cypriot, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dzongkha, English, Fijian Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Kyrgyz, Laotian, Malagasy, Malay, Mandarin, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Pashto, Papiamento, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Shanghainese, Sinhala, Spanish, Standard Tibetan, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek and Vietnamese.[1]
Fazah currently lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil.