How many languages can one person speak?
How many languages can one person speak? The record claims run past fifty: the Italian cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti is credited with 38 to 50, the German diplomat Emil Krebs with 68, and Ziad Fazah claimed 59, until a television programme tested him. None of those numbers can be checked the way a running record can, because nobody agrees what "speaking" a language means. What the research on people who learn many languages suggests is less dramatic and more useful: knowing more than five or six languages well is rare, more than eleven is exceptional, and even the record-holders know their languages to very different levels.
Cardinal Mezzofanti
Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774–1849) was a priest in Bologna and later a cardinal and custodian of the Vatican Library. Wikipedia credits him with 38 to 50 languages. His contemporaries tested him by bringing speakers to him, and accounts describe students crowding round him in Rome while he answered each in their own language.
The fullest account is a biography by Charles William Russell, published in 1858. Russell lists 72 languages and sorts them into four groups by how well Mezzofanti knew them:
| Russell's category | Languages |
|---|---|
| "frequently tested, and spoken with rare excellence" | 30 |
| "spoken fluently, but hardly sufficiently tested" | 9 |
| "spoken rarely, and less perfectly" | 11 |
| "spoken imperfectly; a few sentences and conversational forms" | 8 |
| "studied from books, but not known to have been spoken" | 14 |
That table explains why the numbers vary so much. Count the first group and Mezzofanti spoke 30 languages; count everything and he spoke 72. Scholars have doubted parts of Russell's account, and even in his own time it was disputed.
Emil Krebs
Emil Krebs (1867–1930) was a German diplomat and sinologist who spent much of his career in China. He was reportedly able to speak and write 68 languages and to have studied 120 more. He already spoke twelve languages when he left school, and during his life he passed government examinations in Chinese, Turkish, Japanese and Finnish, among others.
Krebs is unusual in one way: his brain was preserved, and in 2002 the German neuroscientists Katrin Amunts and Karl Zilles studied its structure. They reported that it did differ from ordinary brains, though, in the words of the writer Michael Erard, "in fully unexpected ways".
Ziad Fazah
Ziad Fazah, born in 1954 and living in Brazil, has claimed to speak 59 languages. Until its 1998 edition, the Guinness Book of World Records listed him as able to speak and read 58, based on a live interview in Athens in 1991; it later removed the entry.
In 1997 he was tested on the Chilean television programme Viva el lunes. Ambassadors and guests asked him questions in Egyptian Arabic, Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Persian, Hindi and Greek. He could not properly understand or answer any of them except the first, in Arabic, his native language. Asked in Russian what day of the week it was, he repeated the first word of the question.
Fazah's case shows the problem with record claims: they are rarely tested, and when they are, the test is usually a short conversation with strangers, which is a hard test of any language and a cruel one of fifty.
Why "speaks a language" is hard to define
Every count above depends on a definition nobody agrees on.
- Speaking or understanding? Many people understand a language far better than they speak it. Reading is easier again.
- How well? Ordering in a restaurant, holding a conversation, working as a professional and passing as a native are four different levels. Russell's five-level table for Mezzofanti is the honest way to report a polyglot, and almost nobody does it.
- Now or ever? Languages fade without use. Someone who spoke ten languages at different points in their life may speak four comfortably today.
- What counts as one language? Is someone who speaks Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian a speaker of one language or three? The same question about Spanish and Portuguese, or Mandarin and Shanghainese, changes the count again. It is the question behind how many languages are there in the world.
What the research on polyglots found
The writer Michael Erard spent years investigating these claims for his book Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners (2012). He went through the historical accounts of Mezzofanti and Krebs, and met living people who learn many languages.
Two points stand out:
- There is a natural cut-off. Many multilingual people know up to five or six languages, and numbers fall away sharply after that. Erard proposed eleven or more as the threshold for the term hyperpolyglot. Others put it lower, at six to eight depending on proficiency.
- The best-documented cases are uneven. Russell's table for Mezzofanti and the accounts of Krebs both describe a few languages known very well and many others to a lesser degree. Speaking fifty languages perfectly, all at once, is not what the records show either of them doing.
So how many?
The honest answer depends on the level:
- Two or three languages, very well: common, especially for people who grow up with more than one.
- Five or six well: uncommon, but many people manage it, especially in multilingual countries.
- More than eleven: rare enough to have its own name.
- Fifty or more: claimed, and impossible to verify at any level a native speaker would recognise as speaking.
For most learners the useful question is not how many languages someone could speak, but how long the next one takes. The estimates are in how long to learn Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin and Esperanto, and the age question in is it too late to learn a language.
Verbavia (our own course) teaches nine languages, a lesson a day, free on the web.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Giuseppe Gasparo Mezzofanti (38 to 50 languages; Russell's 1858 list of 72 in its categories; scholarly doubt).
- Erard, M. (2012). The Polyglot of Bologna, The Public Domain Review (Russell's biography and the accounts of Mezzofanti).
- Wikipedia: Emil Krebs (68 languages; 120 studied; twelve on leaving school).
- Erard, M. (2012). King of the Hyperpolyglots, The Morning News, adapted from Babel No More (Krebs's examinations; the study of his brain by Zilles and Amunts).
- Wikipedia: Ziad Fazah (59 languages claimed; Guinness to 1998; the 1997 Viva el lunes test).
- Wikipedia: Multilingualism § Hyperpolyglots and savants (five or six languages; Erard's threshold of eleven; others' six to eight).
- Erard, M. (2012). Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners. New York: Free Press.