Limits?

Just some quick links to a story of interest today: the BBC reports today that a 20 year old has won a competition to find the most polyglot student in the UK:

Twenty-year-old Alex Rawlings has won a national competition to find the UK’s most multi-lingual student.

The Oxford University undergraduate can currently speak 11 languages – English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian.

Entrants in the competition run by the publishers Collins had to be aged between 16 and 22 and conversant in multiple languages.

They also have a longer article on other “hyperpolyglot” people, the most interesting part of which, in my personal opinion, is the suggestion that 11 languages is a significant watershed, with those who speak more languages than this being particularly rare. This is apparently the opinion of the author of Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners by Michael Erard, which sounds like it might be an interesting book.

Unfortunately I couldn’t get the videos attached to the two articles to display, so can’t comment on those. I also haven’t found the announcement from Collins itself.

Related articles

• The cult of the hyperpolyglot (bbc.co.uk)
• VIDEO: How did this man learn 11 languages? (bbc.co.uk)
• Inside the Mind of a Polyglot (billzart.wordpress.com)
• Are You a Hyperpolyglot? The Secrets of Language Superlearners (healthland.time.com)
• ‘Babel No More’ – Adventures with an Extreme Polyglot (translaborberlin.wordpress.com)
• REVIEWS: Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learner (macleans.ca)
• The Road to Hyperpolyglottery with Michael Erard (patrickcox.wordpress.com)
• Speaking in Tongues (thedailybeast.com)
• Being a bilingual / multilingual family (mothertonguesblog.com)
• Babel No More: Inside the Secrets of Superhuman Language-Learners (brainpickings.org)
• Celebrate Your Mother Tongue (mothertonguesblog.com)
• Are You Postmonolingual? (psychologytoday.com)