This is a list of notable people with a knowledge of six or more languages.
Giuseppe Gasparo Mezzofanti was an Italian cardinal known for being a hyperpolyglot.
A sacred language, holy language or liturgical language is a language that is cultivated and used primarily for religious reasons by people who speak another, primary language in their daily lives.
This is a list of articles about poetry in a single language or produced by a single nation.
Radio Moscow, also known as Radio Moscow World Service, was the official international broadcasting station of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until 1993, when it was reorganized into Voice of Russia, which was subsequently reorganized and renamed into Radio Sputnik in 2014. At its peak, Radio Moscow broadcast in over 70 languages using transmitters in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Cuba.
Ziad Youssef Fazah is a Liberian-born Lebanese alleged polyglot. Fazah has claimed to speak 59 languages and maintains that he has proved this in several public appearances in which he supposedly communicated with native speakers of a large number of foreign languages. Fazah spoke Arabic at home and learned French and English in school. Fazah decided to study languages after encountering Armenians in Lebanon and learning Armenian. He currently lives in Brazil, having lived there since 1971.
Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is a concept having a dual notion with respect to foreign languages and with respect to the internal variants of a language (dialects) The first meaning is the historical trend of every language to conserve intact its lexical structure of word families, in opposition to foreign influence which are considered 'impure'. The second meaning is the practice, possibly prescriptive, of determining and recognizing one linguistic variety (dialect) as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other varieties.
Gollum browser is a discontinued web browser for accessing Wikipedia. Since 2017, Gollum is no longer accessible online.
Vatican City uses Italian in its official documents and as its main working language. However, many other languages are also used by institutions situated within the state, such as the Holy See and the Swiss Guard, as well as personally by its diverse population.
Teach Yourself is currently an imprint of Hodder Education and formerly a series published by the English Universities Press that specializes in self-instruction books. The series, which began in 1938, is most famous for its language education books, but its titles in mathematics are also best sellers, and over its long history the series has covered a great many other subjects as well. "A Concise Guide to Teach Yourself", compiled by A R Taylor, was published in 1958 and listed all the titles up until then.
Emil Krebs was a German polyglot and sinologist. He was reportedly able to speak and write 68 languages and studied 120 other languages.
Because of the nature of onomatopoeia, there are many words which show a similar pronunciation in the languages of the world. The following is a list of some conventional examples:
The language of the court and government of the Ottoman Empire was Ottoman Turkish, but many other languages were in contemporary use in parts of the empire. The Ottomans had three influential languages, known as "Alsina-i Thalātha", that were common to Ottoman readers: Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Persian. Turkish was spoken by the majority of the people in Anatolia and by the majority of Muslims of the Balkans except in Albania, Bosnia, and various Aegean Sea islands; Persian was initially a literary and high-court language used by the educated in the Ottoman Empire before being displaced by Ottoman Turkish; and Arabic, which was the legal and religious language of the empire, was also spoken regionally, mainly in Arabia, North Africa, Mesopotamia and the Levant.
Richard Simcott is a British polyglot who lives in Skopje, North Macedonia. Described by HarperCollins as "One of the most multilingual people from the United Kingdom", he speaks at least 30 languages.
Indeed, an academic career was foreshadowed by his precocious ability to read French at three, Latin at six, Greek at seven and Russian at 11.
Steven could read Latin and Greek by the time he was six.
…learning Russian, Bulgarian, Old Church Slavonic and Armenian in order to do so.
SR's next virtue was a skill with languages, begun early with Latin and Greek. Slavonic brought him Bury's respect—SR's mother had engaged the future Mrs Arthur Waley to teach him Russian as early as 1915. He taught himself Armenian for Lecapenus. His lectures in French were acclaimed in Belgium. He spoke basic Turkish with Rudolph Nureyev but wisely examined his students in Istanbul through an interpreter. He avoided Hungarian, but gave his last speech, on Mount Athos, in Greek katharevousa.
He was familiar with the sources not only in Latin and Greek but also in Arabic, Armenian, Russian, and the Balkan languages.
The collection also reflects Runciman's wide linguistic abilities: only around half is written in English, with French, Greek, Bulgarian, Latin and German being the main other source languages, and there are materials in a wide variety of other languages from Italian and Romanian to Armenian and Arabic.
He added systematically to his store of languages, among them Hebrew, which he learnt at 70 to help his studies of the Bible.
His Aramaic, his Greek and his Hebrew all came into play here.