May
31
I always knew that growing up in a bilingual home had its advantages. It not only enabled me to bridge the differences between cultures and countries, but it opened up a world of possibilities that would otherwise probably have been closed to me. I was raised speaking two languages: English and Spanish.
At our home we never thought twice about switching languages. What I also discovered was that no one in my family suffered from any mental handicaps because of our upbringing. The demands from learning other languages on our brain actually enriched our lives.
Sadly, I never learnt a third or fourth language, but I would have loved to, especially today that my professional work involves translation services.
I have always been fascinated by people who speak many languages and I wondered if you needed to be a genius to master many languages.
To answer this question, it was time to do a little digging. It made sense to start by learning about the boundaries of the possible and figure out what science had to tell us about our ability to speak many languages.
People that speak many languages are known as polyglots. It is common to find polyglots in places like Europe, where people have contact with and access to other languages. But there is another category of polyglots often known as hyperpolyglots: people who can speak more than 10 languages.
There are many examples in history of people who claimed to have been hyperpolyglots. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language lists a Sir John Bowring (1792-1872), a British diplomat who could speak 100 languages. Sir Richard Burton, the famous British explorer who discovered the sources of the Nile River, is rumored to have spoken dozens of languages and a handful of dialects. Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (1774-1849), an Italian priest, is thought to have spoken 88 languages.
It is difficult to assess the language abilities of people who lived 200 years ago, and my search would necessarily need to be focused on today