Polyglot: Person Who Knows Several Languages

How many Languages do you think there are?

They say that there approximately 7106 languages but still this isn’t the exact number of languages across the globe. Are you surprised? Among these languages is French, Italian, Spanish and German. But there are people who know, more than 20 languages, these are polyglots. Polyglot is what you can call a person who knows and uses several languages. We can refer to this also as a multilingual person. This made me curious who are these polyglots. So, I made a list of some well-known polyglots below.

• Ziad Fazah - Fazah is a Liberian-born Lebanese Polyglot which is said to be living in Brazil. He holds the Guinness World Record up until 1998 for knowing the most number of languages. He claimed to speak, read and understand 59 languages. Isn’t amazing? Some of the languages he knows are Arabic, French, Greek, Polish, English, Russian and many more.

• Cardinal Guiseppe Mezzofanti - his name is included in one of the greatest polyglots. He is an Italian Theologian, but his knowledge doesn’t stop from religion. His passion was really in linguistics that leads him to speak at least 39 languages. Some believed that he may have spoken almost a hundred languages. He was a professor of Arabic at the University of Bologna, then professor of Oriental Languages and Greek. All of this while learning other languages, attending missionary activities, and maintaining the Vatican Library. When he died people all over Europe competed for his skull because of being a linguistic genius. 

• John Bowring - was the fourth governor of Hong Kong. He was very talented, but he is well-known for his love of languages. During his time, he started to know 200 languages and speak 100 languages. He enjoyed a career of being a translator of folk songs, literature and poetry from Spain, Europe and Russia. 

• Kenneth Hale - he was an MIT Linguistic Professor who concentrates on studying the endangered languages, especially in North and Central America and Australia. But this isn’t just the languages he studied, he became fluent in around 45 languages. What is really amazing about him is he can adopt the German language after 10 to 15 minutes of having a conversation with a native person.

Are you amazed? Start learning a new language it has many benefits for you. There are many language tutors online and can personally train you.
You can personally look onto them here classesa2z.com/us.