The word “hyperpolyglot” was coined two decades ago, by a British linguist, Richard Hudson, who was launching an Internet search for the world’s greatest language learner. (The app is free, and I was curious about the challenges of a tonal language.) It turns out that I’m good at hello- chào-but thank you, cảm ơn, is harder.
I tested that presumption at the start of my research, signing up on Duolingo to learn Vietnamese. Such is the promise of online language-learning programs like Pimsleur, Babbel, Rosetta Stone, and Duolingo: in the brain of every monolingual, there’s a dormant polyglot-a genie-who, with some brisk mental friction, can be woken up. If Rojas-Berscia can speak twenty-two languages, perhaps you can crank up your high-school Spanish or bat-mitzvah Hebrew, or learn enough of your grandma’s Korean to understand her stories. If the ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes can run three hundred and fifty miles without sleep, he may inspire you to jog around the block. Superlative feats have always thrilled average mortals, in part, perhaps, because they register as a victory for Team Homo Sapiens: they redefine the humanly possible. How could such a claim be verified? Pretty much only, it turned out, by Rojas-Berscia. We first made contact three years ago, when I was writing about a Chilean youth who called himself the last surviving speaker of Selk’nam. He also knows six classical or endangered languages: Latin, Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Shiwilu, Muniche, and Selk’nam, an indigenous tongue of Tierra del Fuego, which was the subject of his master’s thesis. He is a hyperpolyglot, with a command of twenty-two living languages (Spanish, Italian, Piedmontese, English, Mandarin, French, Esperanto, Portuguese, Romanian, Quechua, Shawi, Aymara, German, Dutch, Catalan, Russian, Hakka Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Guarani, Farsi, and Serbian), thirteen of which he speaks fluently. Linguistic competence, as it happens, was the subject of my own interest in Rojas-Berscia. “A flux is a dynamism that involves a social fact and an impact, either functionally or formally, in linguistic competence.” “I’m developing a theory of language change called the Flux Approach,” he explained one evening, at a country inn outside the city, over the delicious pannenkoeken (pancakes) that are a local specialty. research, with the Shawi people of the Peruvian rain forest, doesn’t involve fMRI data or computer modelling, but it is still arcane to a layperson.
At a conference in Nijmegen that had preceded our trip to Malta, there were papers on “the anatomical similarities in the phonatory apparati of humans and harbor seals” and “hippocampal-dependent declarative memory,” along with a neuropsychological analysis of speech and sound processing in the brains of beatboxers. Linguistics is a formidably cerebral discipline. He looked like any other laid-back young tourist, except for the intense focus-all senses cocked-with which he takes in a new environment. A friend had given him a new pair of earrings, which he wore on Malta with funky tank tops and a chain necklace. Rojas-Berscia is a twenty-seven-year-old Peruvian with a baby face and spiky dark hair. Our plan was for me to observe how he went about learning a new language, starting with “hello” and “thank you.” “We’ll do this as I would in the Amazon,” he told me, referring to his fieldwork as a linguist. He had a hefty grammar book in his backpack, but he didn’t plan to open it unless he had to. Last May, Luis Miguel Rojas-Berscia, a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, flew to Malta for a week to learn Maltese.