hyperpolyglots

  • Up to 7,000 different languages are estimated to be spoken around the world
  • Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, Bengali, Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, German and French are world’s most widely spoken languages, according to UNESCO
  • Languages are grouped into families that share a common ancestry
  • English is related to German and Dutch, and all are part of Indo-European family of languages
  • Also includes French, Spanish and Italian, which come from Latin
  • 2,200 of the world’s languages can be found in Asia, while Europe has 260

BBC Languages



Ray Gillon speaks 18 languages. To be precise, he only speaks eight fluently. His grasp on the other 10 is merely conversational.

Throw anything at him in Portuguese, Thai, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Bulgarian or Mandarin and he will banter back.

In the UK, where there has been a growing anxiety over the failure to learn additional languages, Gillon might seem to be a bit of an anomaly. More and more children have been giving up languages since the last government made learning foreign languages optional in England from the age of 14.

Publisher HarperCollins has been searching for the UK’s most multilingual student, and has discovered a 20-year-old Oxford University undergraduate who can speak 11 languages. And a new book, Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, by Michael Erard, suggests Gillon is among a set of people who are learning languages for fun.