Indeed, a surprising proportion of them are “hyperglots”, like Keeley and Krasa, who can speak at least 10 languages. Yet I’m here in Berlin for the Polyglot Gathering, a meeting of 350 or so people who speak multiple languages – some as diverse as Manx, Klingon and Saami, the language of reindeer herders in Scandinavia. It can be difficult enough to learn one foreign tongue. “It’s quite a common situation for us,” a woman called Alisa tells me. It looks like the perfect recipe for a headache, but they are nonchalant. Others are gathering in threes, preparing for a rapid-fire game that involves interpreting two different languages simultaneously. Together, they pass through about 20 different languages or so in total.īack inside, I find small groups exchanging tongue twisters. First German, then Hindi, Nepali, Polish, Croatian, Mandarin and Thai – they’ve barely spoken one language before the conversation seamlessly melds into another. Out on a sunny Berlin balcony, Tim Keeley and Daniel Krasa are firing words like bullets at each other.
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