THE POLYGLOTTER

A person who speaks several languages is called a polyglot.

The following individuals are some of the world’s famous polyglots who claimed to speak 10 or more languages:

Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao (28 June 1921 – 23 December 2004) was the 12th Prime Minister of the Republic of India. He led one of the most important administrations in India’s modern history, overseeing a major economic transformation and several incidents affecting national security. Narasimha Rao was popularly known as PV. PV studied at Fergusson College and at the Universities of Mumbai and Nagpur where he obtained Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in law. He was a polyglot and could speak 13 languages including Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Hindi, Telugu and English with a fluency akin to a native speaker. His mother tongue was Telugu. In addition to seven Indian languages, he spoke English, French, Arabic, Spanish and Persian. Along with his cousin Pamulaparthi Sadasiva Rao, PV edited a Telugu weekly magazine called Kakatiya Patrika from 1948 to 1955.

Sir John Bowring, (17 October 1792 – 23 November 1872) was an English political economist, traveller, miscellaneous writer and polyglot, and the 4th Governor of Hong Kong.

Bowring was born in Exeter of an old Puritan family. In early life he came under the influence of Jeremy Bentham, and later became his friend. He did not, however, share Bentham’s contempt for belles lettres. He was a diligent student of literature and foreign languages, especially those of Eastern Europe.

Bowring ranked with Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti and Hans Conon von der Gabelentz among the world’s greatest hyperpolyglots — his talent enabling him at last to say that he knew 200 languages, and could speak 100. The first fruits of his study of foreign literature appeared in Specimens of the Russian Poets (1821–1823). These were followed by Batavian Anthology (1824), Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain (1824), Specimens of the Polish Poets, and Serbian Popular Poetry, both in 1827, and Poetry of the Magyars (1830).

Ziad Youssef Fazah (born June 10, 1954 in Monrovia, Liberia) is a Lebanese polyglot who has at least some notions of almost 60 languages. He has proved this in several television shows, where he successfully has communicated with native speakers of a large number of foreign languages. He was considered the world’s greatest polyglot (greatest living linguist) by the 1993 UK edition of the Guinness Book of Records.

Fazah does not use all of his languages on a regular basis. As can be expected, his fluency is higher in certain languages that he has more contact with (Portuguese, Arabic, German, French, English, Spanish, etc.) and limited in languages that he has hardly spoken in years (Cambodian, Dzongkha, Finnish, etc.). Before being submitted to a televised language test he asks to be told which languages he will be required to speak and the general topics that will be discussed. After about a week of preparation Fazah feels confident speaking on television in any of his languages.

Raised in Lebanon, he has lived in Brazil since the 1970s, where he works as a private teacher of languages in Rio de Janeiro.

List of Fazah’s languages from the cover of one of his books:

Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Cypriot, Dzongkha, English, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Lao, Malagasy, Malay, Maltese, Mandarin, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Papiamento, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Singapore Colloquial English, Sinhalese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Wu.

Ziad Fazah quotes himself as speaking 59 languages. Although, some may say Cyriot is just a dialect of Turkish, not separate as a language, making his language count 58.

Professor Alexander Arguelles was born in 1964 into an exclusively English-speaking American household. However, he lived in various parts of Europe during his earliest years, and throughout his childhood. Furthermore, his father is a scholarly polyglot whose shelves are filled with books in many different tongues.

A Professor of Linguistics, he spent nearly a decade in Korea following a monk-like life style, while he dedicated his time to studying Korean, Classical Chinese and Japanese in a comparative context, as he taught at the Handong University. Following his marriage and the completion of the Korean studies, Arguelles relocated to Lebanon, where he resided studying Arabic and teaching Linguistics at the American University of Science and Technology in Beirut, until in July of 2006 he and his family were forced to flee Lebanon under the Israeli bombs.

Dr. Arguelles has co-written and published a number of books in his field. He teaches linguistics in California. In his spare time he moderates a language forum on the internet and continues to write. He is also working on a plan of creating a private academy for training polyglots.

Dr. Arguelles has knowledge of more than 34 languages, including Korean, Russian, and Arabic.

Dr. José P. Rizal (full name: José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda) (June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896) was a Filipino polymath, nationalist and the most prominent advocate for reforms in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era. He is considered the Philippines’ national hero and the anniversary of Rizal’s death is commemorated as a Philippine holiday called Rizal Day. Rizal’s 1896 military trial and execution made him a martyr of the Philippine Revolution.

Rizal was a polyglot conversant in at least ten languages.He was a prolific poet, essayist, diarist, correspondent, and novelist whose most famous works were his two novels, Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo.