List of polyglots

A polyglot is a person with a command of many languages. A polyglot may also be called a multilingual person; the label "multilingual" is used for communities as well as individual speakers.

Richard Hudson, professor emeritus of linguistics at University College London, coined the term "hyperpolyglot" for a person who can speak twelve or more languages fluently. Other scholars apply the label to speakers of even more languages: twelve, sixteen, or in the most extreme cases, even fifty or more.

It is difficult to judge which individuals are polyglots, as there is no uncontroversial definition for what it means to "master" a language, and because it is not always clear where to distinguish a dialect from a language. Being able to communicate in a language does not mean the person has "mastered" a language. There are far fewer who have attained higher levels of multi-linguistic skill, and there is no basis for testing those levels, or at least those levels of ability have not been noted here.

This list consists of people who have been noted in news media, historical texts, or academic work as speaking five or more languages fluently. For general discussion of the phenomenon, including discussion of polyglot savants, see polyglotism.

Notable living polyglots

The 2012 book Babel No More by Michael Erard highlights some polyglots around the globe, including Alexander Argüelles. Canada's Global TV also brought out a piece on hyperpolyglots on their 16x9 show, entitled "Word Play", featuring Canadian polyglots Axel Van Hout, Alexandre Coutu, Steven Kaufmann, James Chang and Keith Swayne. Tim Doner (US) and Richard Simcott (UK) also appear in the programme to describe their experiences speaking multiple languages.

Australia

• Ghil'ad Zuckermann, linguist, revivalist and hyperpolyglot.

Africa

• Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, a Ghanaian cardinal of the Catholic Church is able to speak English, Fante, French, Italian, German, and Hebrew, in addition to understanding Latin and Greek.
• Dikembe Mutombo, a former NBA player, is able to speak English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Tshiluba, Swahili, Lingala, and two other central African languages.
• Trevor Noah, a South African comedian and author who is the current host of The Daily Show; he is able to speak English, Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, and German.

Americas

• Alexander Argüelles is an American polyglot. He speaks around a dozen languages and has a reading knowledge of many more. He was profiled in Michael Erard's Babel No More.
• Andrew Divoff is an actor and producer polyglot. He speaks fluent nine languages, English, Spanish, Italian, French, Catalan, Russian, German, Portuguese and Swedish. He used to speak Romanian but he forgot the language when he had no one with whom to speak it.
• Pope Francis, in addition to his native Spanish, speaks fluent Italian (the official language of Vatican City and the "everyday language" of the Holy See), German (quarter), French (average), Portuguese and English (quarter), is conversant in Latin (the official language of the Holy See), and he understands the Piedmontese language and some Genoese.
• Powell Janulus (born 1939) is a notable living polyglot, also known as "the most fluent person on earth." In 1985, Powell Janulus was entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for fluency in forty-two languages.
• Melania Trump (Melania Knauss), Slovene-American former model and the current First Lady of the United States. She speaks English, French, Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian and her native Slovene.
• Henry Lau is a Canadian singer, rapper, dancer, composer, record producer, beatboxer, actor and entertainer mostly active in South Korea. He is quintilingual. Aside from speaking native English, Lau is also fluent in Mandarin, Korean, French and Cantonese.
• Steven Kaufmann is a Canadian ex diplomatic service/businessman who spent many years in a number of countries. He runs a Youtube channel on learning languages as well as an online service. He speaks 16 languages including English, French, Mandarin, Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Czech, Romanian, Cantonese, Swedish, Italian, Korean, Ukrainian, and most recently Polish.
• Wena Poon, Singaporean-American lawyer and novelist, speaks English, French, Mandarin, Teochew, Cantonese, and Fujian
• Naphtali D. Brooks is an American actor, model and comedian. He speaks English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Galician and Catalan.[3]

Asia

• Shoichi Funaki is a professional wrestler. He is fluent in Japanese, English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish.
• Jackson Wang is a Chinese singer, rapper and dancer from Hong Kong and a member of Got7. He speaks Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin, English, Shanghainese, Japanese and basic French.
• Asin is an Indian actress who can speak Malayalam (her mother-tongue), Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, English, Sanskrit, and French. She speaks some Marathi, Italian, Spanish and German.
• Ambassador Naela Chohan is a polyglot, feminist artist, and current Ambassador of Pakistan to Australia and former Ambassador of Pakistan for Latin America. She is fluent in 7 Indo-European languages: English, French, Bengali, Urdu, Punjabi, Persian (acquired at age 35), and Spanish (acquired at age 51).
• George Fernandes, an Indian politician who is well-versed in ten languages: Konkani (mother tongue), English, Hindi (official language), Tulu, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam and Latin.
• Janet Hsieh, Taiwanese-American television personality, violinist, author, and model. She is fluent in English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, and Taiwanese.
• Lokesh Chandra, one of the world's foremost scholars of Buddhism, the Indian researcher is described as "a polyglot and knows Pali, Avesta, Old Persian, Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, Mongolian, Indonesian, Greek, Latin, German, French and Russian besides Hindi, Sanskrit and English."
• Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo, Sri Lanka, a Sri Lankan Catholic prelate, is fluent in 11 languages: Sinhala, Tamil, English, (the 3 official languages of Sri Lanka), German, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Indonesian.
• Mickey Curtis, a Japanese actor, singer, and television celebrity born to Japanese-English parents. He speaks Japanese, English, French, German, Italian and Thai.
• Kamal Haasan, an Indian actor who can speak Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam and English.
• Péter Frankl, juggler and mathematician, speaks twelve languages (English, Russian, Swedish, French, Spanish, Polish, German, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Korean).
• Prakash Raj is an Indian actor who can speak Tulu (his mother tongue), Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Hindi and Malayalam.
• Priya Anand, an Indian actress who can speak Tamil, Telugu, English, Bengali, Hindi, Marathi and Spanish languages.
• R. Sarathkumar, an Indian actor who can speak Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi, Russian and English fluently.
• Rajinikanth, an Indian actor who can speak Marathi (his mother tongue), Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, and English fluently.
• Swami Rambhadracharya, a Hindu religious leader and Sanskrit scholar based in Chitrakoot, India, can speak twenty-two languages, including Sanskrit, Hindi, English, French, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Oriya, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, Magadhi, Awadhi, and Braj. Rambhadracharya has been blind since the age of two months and received no formal education until the age of seventeen. He has never used braille, or any other aid, to learn or compose his works and has authored more than 100 books.
• Suman Pokhrel, a Nepali poet who speaks Nepali, English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Maithili.
• Abin Shrestha, a Nepali scholar who can speak Nepali, Newari, English, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi and Spanish.
• Ling Tan, Malaysian supermodel, speaks four varieties of Chinese, Malay, and English.
• Karen Mok, Hong Kong-Chinese actress and singer, speaks English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian, German and French.
• Ziad Fazah, known for his claim of being able to speak, read and understand 59 languages. He was listed in the Guinness World Records up until 1998 as the person who could speak the most languages.

Europe

• Zaharije Orfelin was a Serbian writer, artist, and polyglot who spoke more than 10 languages, and understood many more.
• Dositej Obradović is a Serbian writer. Obradović spoke and wrote in German, French, Italian, English, Greek, Albanian, Latin, Turkish, Hungarian, Romanian and all of the Slavic languages, including Russian and Church Slavonic.
• Jovan Rajić is a Serbian writer and cleric who spoke and wrote in many languages in his time. He was born in the Habsburg Empire where one had to know German, Hungarian, Latin, Italian, Romanian, and all the Slavic languages if one wanted to achieve a standing.
• Johan Vandewalle is a Belgian philologist and civil engineer. In 1987 the Polyglot of Flanders/Babel Prize judged him as able to speak 31 living languages.
• José Mourinho is a Portuguese football manager, who can speak Spanish, Italian, English and French as well as his native Portuguese.
• Frans Timmermans, a Dutch politician and diplomat, the First Vice-President of the European Commission, was Minister of Foreign Affairs (from 2012 to 2014). Speaks seven languages; Dutch, Limburgish, English, German, French, Italian and Russian.
• Zdeno Chára is a Slovakian professional ice hockey player in the NHL who speaks seven languages. These are: Slovak, Czech, Polish, Swedish, Russian, German and English.
• Mišo Juzmeski is a Macedonian writer who speaks nine languages: Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, English, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and German.
• Anatoly Moskvin, Russian linguist and polyglot, arrested in 2011 after the bodies of twenty-six mummified young women were discovered in his home.
• Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Armenian politician, first president of independent Armenia. He speaks at least seven languages (Armenian, Assyrian, Russian, French, English, German, Arabic) and has published academic papers in three (Armenian, Russian, French).
• Daniel Tammet, an English savant, 'knows' ten languages: English, Finnish, French, German, Lithuanian, Esperanto, Spanish, Romanian, Icelandic, and Welsh. He learned Icelandic in one week for a TV show experiment.
• Luca Lampariello is an Italian hyperpolygot. He is fluent in 12 languages. [1]
• Benny Lewis, an Irish traveller who is fluent in six langauges; Spanish, French, German, Italian, Esperanto and Portuguese. He can speak Mandarin, American sign language, Dutch and Irish Gaelic at a conversational level He has given a number of TEDx talks and has written a book about language learning published by HarperCollins.
• Nicolas Tournadre, a specialist of Tibetic languages who has some knowledge of languages belonging to seven families.
• Connie Nielsen, a Danish actress who speaks eight languages: Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, and a little Spanish.
• Ioannis Ikonomou a translator for the European Commission in Brussels knows thirty-two languages including Greek, English, German, Italian, Russian, East African Swahili, Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin and Bengali, plus some dead languages like Old Church Slavic.
• Queen Silvia of Sweden speaks Swedish as well as her native German, her mother's language of Portuguese, along with French, Spanish, and English. She has some fluency in Swedish Sign Language, a national sign language used by the deaf community in Sweden.
• Dmitrij Petrov is a language interpreter who speaks thirty languages and reads in fifty. His native language is Russian and he actively works with eight foreign languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Greek and Hindi.
• Claudio Castagnoli is a professional wrestler and is fluent in four languages: English, German, Italian, and French.
• Arsène Wenger, football manager of Arsenal F.C. He grew up speaking French and German, and has learnt English, Spanish and Italian. He also knows some Japanese.
• Roy Hodgson, former football manager of England. He speaks fluent English, Norwegian, Swedish, German and Italian, as well as some Danish, French and Finnish.
• Viggo Mortensen, Danish actor. He speaks fluent English, Danish, and Spanish, is conversational in French and Italian, and understands Norwegian and Swedish. He also has some knowledge of Catalan.
• Gianni Infantino, current president of FIFA. He is fluent in Italian, French and German, and also knows English, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic.
• Luís Figo, retired footballer. He is fluent in five languages: Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian and French.
• Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, Kalmyk multi-millionaire businessman and politician. In addition to his native Kalmyk and Russian, he is fluent in English, Japanese, and a little Korean, Mongolian and Chinese.
• Clarence Seedorf, retired footballer and former football manager of A.C. Milan. Seedorf speaks six languages fluently: Dutch, English, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Surinamese
• Richard Simcott lives in Chester UK, is a hyperpolyglot who speaks 16 languages fluently, but can speak about 30 languages in total to some degree.. He is regarded as one of the most profecient Polyglots in the UK. Simcott can learn languages in very short periods of time, and has passed A1 Fluency exams after 3 months of study.
• Michele San Pietro lives in Reggio Emilia (Italy), is a hyperpolyglot who can speak about 10 languages fluently and has a more limited knowledge of another 10 languages.

Notable deceased reputed polyglots

The following list consists of deceased individuals who are associated with claims of polyglotism, by year of birth.

• Mithridates VI of Pontus (134–63 BC) could supposedly speak the languages of all twenty-two nations within his kingdom.
• Cleopatra VII (69–30 BC), the last ruling Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, could, according to the Roman biographer Plutarch, speak nine languages and was the only member of her dynasty who could speak Egyptian as well as her native Greek.
• al-Farabi (872–950/951), a Persian polymath who mastered many languages.
• Thotagamuwe Sri Rahula Thera (1408–1491) was a Buddhist monk and an eminent scholar, who lived in the fifteenth century in Sri Lanka. He was a multi-linguist who was given the title "Shad Bhasha Parameshwara" due to his mastery in six oriental languages which prevailed in the Indian subcontinent.
• Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603 AD) could speak ten languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Latin, Welsh, Cornish, Scottish and Irish. The Venetian Ambassador once said: "it is as if she possessed these languages as if they were her mother tongue"
• Athanasius Kircher (1601?–1680), German Jesuit polymath and scholar. Claimed knowledge of twelve languages; among them: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic, as well as several modern languages. He also pioneered the study of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and Classical Chinese characters.
• John Milton (1608–1674), an English poet who is famous for the epic work Paradise Lost, could speak English, Latin, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Aramaic, Syriac, and Old English. Milton coined 630 terms in the English language.
• Wojciech Bobowski or Ali Ufki (1610–1675) a Polish musician based in the Ottoman Empire who mastered sixteen languages.
• Gavril Stefanović Venclović (1670–1749) was a Serbian priest, writer, poet, orator, philosopher, polyglot, and illuminator.
• Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799) was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian and humanitarian. Agnecy was known as "the seven language orator" already in her childhood, since she was fluent with Italian, French, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German and Latin.
• Adam František Kollár (1718–1783), a Slovak writer, spoke Slovak, Czech, Serbian, Polish, Rusin, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, German, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Chinese, Persian, Arabic, Italian, Romanian, French, Dutch, and English.
• Sir William Jones (1746–1794), an Anglo-Welsh philologist known for founding comparative linguistics through proposing the existence of a relationship between European and Indian languages (the Indo-European Languages). Alongside his native English and Welsh languages, he learned Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew and the basics of Chinese writing at an early age. In all, Jones could speak forty-one languages (at least thirteen fluently).
• Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), a French classical scholar, philologist, and orientalist, was the first to decipher the inscription on the Rosetta Stone, an achievement that facilitated the translation of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs—the titles "Father of Egyptology" and "the founder of scientific Egyptology" have since been bestowed upon Champollion. He specialized in Oriental languages while he was a student at the College de France between 1807 and 1809, and his linguistic repertoire eventually consisted of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Pahlavi, Arabic, Persian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Zend, and his native French.
• Matija Čop (1797–1835) was a Slovenian polymath and linguist, and was said to speak nineteen languages, among which were his native Slovene, Latin, ancient Greek, German, English, French, Italian, Serbian, Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Occitan and Hebrew.
• Noah Webster (1758–1843), a lexicographer, English spelling reformer, and author, mastered twenty-three languages.
• Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (1774–1849), an Italian Cardinal, knew the following thirty-nine languages, speaking many fluently and teaching some: Biblical Hebrew, Rabbinical Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Ancient Armenian, Modern Armenian, Persian, Turkish, Albanian, Maltese, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, English, Illyrian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Chinese, Syriac, Ge'ez, Hindustani, Amharic, Gujarati, Basque, Romanian, and Algonquin.
• John Bowring (1792–1872), an English political economist, traveler, writer, and the fourth governor of Hong Kong. Reputed to have known over two hundred languages, and to have had varying speaking ability in one hundred.
• Jan Prosper Witkiewicz (known as: Yan Vitkevich)(1808-1839) a Polish orientalist, explorer and diplomat in the Russian service, agent of Russia at Kabul just before the First Anglo-Afghan War a part of the Great Game. He knew 19 languages i.e.: Polish, Russian, French, German and English. In exile he learned Persian, Pashto and several Turkic languages, memorized the Qur'an in Arabic.
• Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), a German-English industrialist, social scientist, and cofounder of Marxist theory alongside Karl Marx, mastered over twenty languages.
• Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) was a British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, linguist, poet, fencer, and diplomat; his extraordinary knowledge of languages and cultures amounted to having "mastered at least twenty-five languages—or forty, if distinct dialects are counted."
• Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) was a German businessman and a pioneer of field archaeology. He was an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer. Schliemann was an archaeological excavator of Hissarlik, now presumed to be the site of Troy, along with the Mycenaean sites Mycenae and Tiryns. Mastered over fifteen languages.
• Pétrus Ky, Vĩnh Long Province, 6 December 1837 - 1 September 1898) was a Vietnamese scholar,
• Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil (1825 – 1891) had a deep interest in many different arts and sciences. His passion for linguistics prompted lifelong studies of new languages, and he was able to speak and write not only his native Portuguese but also Latin, French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Chinese, Occitan and Tupi.
• Pashko Vasa - (1825-1892) also known as Vaso Pasha, Wasa Pasha or Vaso Pashë Shkodrani, was an Albanian writer, poet and publicist. He had perfect knowledge of a number of foreign languages: Italian, French, Turkish and Greek. He also knew some English and Serbian, and in later years learned Arabic.
• Konstandin Kristoforidhi (1826-1895) was an Albanian translator and scholar. He is mostly known for having translated into Albanian the New Testament for the first time in the Gheg Albanian dialect in 1872. He knew Albanian (Tosk and Gheg dialects), Greek, Latin, Hebrew, English, Italian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Arabic, French, German.
• Georg Sauerwein (1831–1904) was a German publisher, polyglot, poet, and linguist. Sauerwein mastered about seventy-five languages, including: Latin, ancient Greek, modern Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, Basque, Portuguese, English, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx Gaelic, Dutch, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Sami, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Sorbian, Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian, Romanian, Albanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Chuvash (a Turkic language), Tamil, Kashgar (spoken in Siberia, similar to the language of Uzbekistan), Kumyk (spoken in Siberia), Persian, Armenian, Georgian, Sanskrit, Romani, Hindustani, Ethiopian, Tigrinya (another language of Ethiopia), Coptic or ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Malagasy (the language of Madagascar), Malay, Samoan, Hawaiian, different dialects of Chinese, and Aneitum (a language spoken in the New Hebrides).
• James Augustus Henry Murray (1837–1915), was a Scottish lexicographer, instrumental in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, and its primary editor from 1879 until his death. In an application letter written to the British Museum Library in November 1866, he claimed abilities in Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Latin, and "in a less degree" Portuguese, Provençal, Dutch, German, Flemish, and Danish. The letter also referred to Murray's study of Celtic, Russian, Persian, Hebrew, and Syriac, among other languages and dialects.
• Yaqub Sanu (1839–1912), Egyptian journalist.
• Hagop Baronian, (1843-1891), notable Armenian writer and playwright. He was fluent in 6 languages including French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian and his native Armenian
• Chiragh Ali (1844–1895), an Islamic scholar who, apart from his native Urdu, mastered Persian, Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Greek.
• Naim Frashëri - (1846-1900) was an Albanian poet and writer. He is the author of a total of twenty-two works: four in Turkish, one in Persian, two in Greek and fifteen in Albanian. He learned Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Ancient and Modern Greek, French, Italian
• Sami Frashëri (1850-1904) Albanian writer during Ottoman occupation of Albania. He authored many books, dictionaries, and an encyclopedia in every language he knows. He was fluent in Albanian, Turkish, Greek, French, Italian, Arabic and Persian.
• Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Symbolist poet. After retiring from writing he went on ambitious language learning program while traveling around Europe and the Middle East; mastering Latin, Ancient and Modern Greek, English, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Arabic, Hindi, Amharic, as well as developing a working knowledge of several native African languages while living in Ethiopia.
• Nikola Tesla (1856–1943), Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist, best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. Read and memorized the entirety of many books, and was capable of speaking eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin.
• Robert Dick Wilson (1856–1930), American Bible scholar, spoke forty-five languages including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, as well as all the languages into which the Scriptures had been translated up to 600 CE.
• Ludwig Zamenhof (1859–1917), creator of the constructed language Esperanto, spoke eleven languages besides his own: Aramaic, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Polish, Volapük, and his native Russian and Yiddish. He also had an interest in Arabic, Italian, and Lithuanian, though he never claimed fluency in those.
• José Rizal (1861–1896), was a Filipino nationalist, writer and revolutionary. He was able to speak twenty-two languages including Spanish, French, Latin, Greek, German, Portuguese, Italian, English, Dutch, and Japanese. Rizal also made translations from Arabic, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew and Sanskrit. He translated the poetry of Schiller into his native Tagalog. In addition, he had at least some knowledge of Malay, and some other Philippine languages like Chavacano, Cebuano, Ilocano, and Subanon.
• Minakata Kumagusu (1867–1941), a Japanese author, biologist and naturalist.
• Emil Krebs (1867-1930) was a German polyglot and sinologist. He mastered sixty-eight languages in speech and writing, and studied 120 others.
• Rıza Tevfik Bölükbaşı (1869–1949), a Turkish philosopher and politician, who "...was proficient in eight languages, including Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Latin, Persian, and Spanish" in addition to Hebrew, Albanian and Armenian.
• Ahatanhel Krymsky (1871–1942), a Ukrainian orientalist and linguist; was an expert in up to 34 languages.
• Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), an Indian philosopher who, apart from his native Bengali and educational English, knew ancient Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish and other Indian languages like Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati.
• Harold Williams (1876–1928), a New Zealand journalist and linguist, spoke more than fifty-eight languages.
• Hrachia Adjarian (1876–1953), Armenian linguist. He spoke Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, French, English, German, Italian, Persian, Latin, Sanskrit, and Laz.
• Sir Mohammed Iqbal (1877-1938), perhaps one of the greatest poets of the Persian language. Among his work of poetry, Asrar-e-Khudi, appeared in the Persian language in 1915, and other books of poetry include Rumuz-i-Bekhudi, Payam-i-Mashriq and Zabur-i-Ajam. Amongst these his best known Urdu works are Bang-i-Dara, Bal-i-Jibril, Zarb-i Kalim and a part of Armughan-e-Hijaz. Mohammed Iqbal was fluent in Persian, Panjabi, Arabic, Hindi, Latin, Greek and English.
• Martin Buber (1878–1965), Austrian Jewish philosopher, who "spoke German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, English, French and Italian and read, in addition to these, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Dutch and other languages".
• Subramania Bharati (1882-1921), a great Tamil poet, learnt 32 languages (29 Indian languages and 3 foreign languages) including Tamil, English, Hindi, Sanskrit and Bengali.
• Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), the Vietnamese Communist leader, became fluent in French, English, Russian, Cantonese, and Mandarin, in addition to his native Vietnamese, through study and many years spent in exile.
• Harinath De (1877–1911) could speak thirty-four languages including many eastern and western languages such as Chinese, Tibetan, Pali, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, Greek, Latin, out of which he was M.A in fourteen
• B. R. Ambedkar (1891 – 1956), founding father of modern India, architect of Indian Constitution, champion of human rights and revivalist of Buddhism in India. He was great polymath (mastered over 64 subjects), linguist and polyglot. Ambedkar could speak ten languages, and more than seven fluently: Marathi (mother tongue), Hindi, English, Gujarati, Pali, Sanskrit, Bengali, Persian, French and German. He wrote Pali dictionary (Pali to English).
• Mahapandit Rahul Sankrityayan (1893–1963) could speak thirty-six languages and wrote in more than six.
• William James Sidis (1898–1944), an American child prodigy who knew eight languages (Latin, Greek, German, French, Russian, Hebrew, Turkish and Armenian) when eight years old and claimed to speak about forty languages shortly before his death. He also created his own artificial language, which was called Vendergood. Although Sidis was supposed to have an IQ between 250 and 300 measured through psychological analysis, this was never confirmed.
• Andrzej Gawroński (1885-1927) was a Polish indologist, linguist and polyglot, the author of the first Polish handbook of Sanskrit, founder of Polish Oriental Society who was able to speak more than 40 languages and studied 100 others
• Agop Dilâçar, Turkish-Armenian linguist who was proficient in 22 languages.
• Shuddhananda Bharati (1897-1990), an Indian revolutionary turned mystic author who wrote "over 250 published works, 173 are in Tamil, fifty in English, six in French, four in Hindi and three in Telugu. Apart from these languages, he was also conversant with Sanskrit, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu."
• Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) claimed to be trilingual "in the proper sense of writing, not only speaking, three languages". He wrote in English, Russian, and French.
• Sukarno (1901–1970), the first President of Indonesia, was able to speak Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, Indonesian, Dutch, German, English, French, Arabic, and Japanese.
• Steven Runciman (1903–2000), historian. Able to read Latin and Greek by the age of five, he mastered many languages so that, when writing about the Middle East, he was able to rely not only on accounts in Latin and Greek and the Western vernaculars, but on Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac, Armenian and Georgian sources as well.
• John von Neumann (1903–1957), mathematician. While better known for his work in mathematics, Von Neumann was a polyglot; fluent in French, German, Latin, Greek, English and Yiddish, as well as his native Hungarian.
• Antoun Saadeh (1904-1949) a Lebanese philosopher and figure of Syrian nationalism who was fluent in 7 languages : Arabic, English, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish and Russian.
• Syed Mujtaba Ali (1904-1974), a Bangladeshi author proficient in 15 languages.
• S. Srikanta Sastri (1904–1974), eminent Indian Historian, Indologist, and epigraphist at the University of Mysore, was fluent in over fourteen languages, including Greek, Latin, Hittite, Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit.
• Nathan Leopold Jr. (1904–1971) was born to a wealthy Jewish family. He spoke his first words at four months. He reportedly had an intelligence quotient of 210, and claimed to have been able to speak twenty-seven languages by the time he was nineteen. More likely he was only fluent in nine or ten languages. He was involved in the murder of Robert "Bobby" Franks with friend Richard Loeb. He served thirty-three years in prison before receiving parole.
• João Guimarães Rosa (1908–1967) was a Brazilian writer, considered by many to be one of the greatest Brazilian novelists born in the 20th century, and a self-taught polyglot. In a letter he claimed to speak Portuguese, German, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Esperanto, and some Russian. He also claimed to read Swedish, Dutch, Latin and Greek, but with the use of a dictionary. He also professed some understanding of German dialects, and study of Hungarian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, Polish, Tupi, Hebrew, Japanese, Czech, Finnish, and Danish grammar. Guimarães Rosa suggested that studying other languages helped him understand the national language of Brazil more deeply, but that he studied primarily for pleasure.
• Muhammad Hamidullah (1908–2002), an Islamic scholar, knew twenty-two languages and learned Thai at eighty-five.
• Uku Masing (1909–1985), an Estonian linguist, theologian, ethnologist, and poet, claimed to know approximately sixty-five languages, and could translate twenty.
• Kató Lomb (1909–2003), a Hungarian interpreter, translator, and one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world, was able to interpret fluently in ten languages.
• George Campbell (1912–2004), a Scottish polyglot and a linguist at the BBC, who could speak and write fluently in at least forty-four languages and had a working knowledge of perhaps twenty others.
• Meredith Gardner (1912–2002), an American linguist and codebreaker. German, Old High German, Middle High German, Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Lithuanian, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, and Japanese.
• Enoch Powell (1912–1998), an English politician, classical scholar, linguist, and poet. English, French, German, Italian, Urdu, Modern Greek, Classical Greek, Latin, Welsh, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew.
• Aziz Ahmad (1914-1978), a Pakistani poet, short story writer, novelist, translator, historian, research scholar, Iqbal scholar and critic fluent in Urdu, English, French, German, Arabic, Persian, Italian and Turkish.
• Toshihiko Izutsu (1914-1993), a Japanese scholar of Islam proficient in 30 languages.
• Nabi Bakhsh Khan Baloch (1917-2011), a Pakistani scholar who "has written in seven languages — Sindhi, Arabic, Urdu, English, Persian, Balochi and Seraiki."
• Shūichi Katō, a Japanese scholar who was fluent in English, French, German, Italian and Chinese.
• Fazlur Rahman Malik (1919-1988), a Pakistani scholar of Islam, proficient in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, English, classical Greek, Latin, German and French.
• Omeljan Pritsak (1919-2006), professor of Turkology and linguistics and cofounder of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, was fluent in 12 languages and learned 67 in connection with his research.
• Pope John Paul II (1920-2005), could speak many languages but reportedly was only fluent in Polish, Italian, Spanish, French, German, and Latin.
• Ahmad Hasan Dani (1920–2009), a Pakistani intellectual, archaeologist, historian, and linguist, who mastered thirty-five languages.
• Sahabzada Yaqub Khan (1920-2016), a Pakistani diplomat and army general who could "speak, read and write somewhere between 6 and 10 languages."
• Abdul Shakoor Rashad (1921-2004), Afghan scholar, who mastered a dozen of languages outside his native Pashto.
• P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004), who served as the tenth Prime Minister of India (1991–1996), could fluently speak nine Indian languages Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Oriya, Tamil , kannada , Sanskrit and Bengali and six Foreign languages English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, and Persian.
• Jayalalithaa (1948-2016), an Indian politician and actress, who could fluently speak Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Malayalam and English.
• Christopher Lee (1922–2015), English actor, singer, author, and World War II veteran who spoke fluent English, Italian, French, Spanish and German, and was moderately proficient in Swedish, Russian and Greek.
• Michael Ventris (1922–1956), an English linguist and architect. French, German, Swiss German, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, some Turkish, and Modern Greek.
• P. B. Sreenivas (1930–2013), an Indian singer and poet, spoke and wrote in eight languages, including Kannada, English and Urdu.
• Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou (1930–1989), a Kurdish political activist and economist, mastered eight languages that included his mother tongue.
• Jon Elia (1931-2002), a Pakistani poet and scholar who was fluent in Urdu, English, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and Hebrew.
• Thomas Joseph Odhiambo "Tom" Mboya, (1930 – 1969) a Kenyan trade unionist, educationist, Pan Africanist, author, and politician could speak English as well as several Kenyan languages such as KiKamba, Kikuyu and his mother tongue DhoLuo.
• Hassan al-Turabi (1932–2016), a Sudanese Islamist leader, was fluent in Arabic, English, French, German, and many European languages.
• Kenneth L. Hale (1934–2001) was an American professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spoke over fifty languages, including Basque, Dutch, French, Hopi, Irish Gaelic, Japanese, Jemez, Lardil, Navajo, O'odham, Polish, Spanish, Warlpiri, and Wômpanâak.
• Sergei Starostin (1953–2005), a Russian linguist, recognised as one of the creators of hypothetical Sino-Caucasian language family. He claimed to have known up to fifteen languages and to read forty without a dictionary.
• Shahab Ahmed (1966–2015), a university professor and scholar of Islam from Pakistan who was "master of perhaps 15 languages".

External links

• International Association of Hyperpolyglots, independent organisation to represent hyperpolyglot language experts