Vaughn Smith is able to speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian… This modest carpet cleaner with extraordinary abilities fascinates America.
The term “polyglot” means, as everyone knows, “one who speaks several languages”. But in the case of Vaughn Smith, a resident of Washington, in the United States, this expression is not quite accurate… Beyond the mastery of 11 languages, linguists indeed qualify the speakers as “hyperpolyglots”. And this is more than the case of this 46-year-old American, who speaks a trifle of… 41 languages!
This extraordinary figure greatly exceeds that of the last identified hyperpolyglot, a Scotsman who died in 2019, named Derick Herning who spoke of thirty. To be exact, Vaughn is fluent in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Czech, and Slovak. It can hold sustained conservations in 16 other languages, including French, Italian, Finnish, Hebrew, Japanese and even Norwegian. Finally, he can chat simply in 17 other languages. His secret? He has loved languages since he was little.
“As a child, I was frustrated not to understand what my Belgian cousin was saying. I thought to myself, ‘I want this power'”
It was when he met, as a child, one of his French-speaking Belgian cousins that he decided to learn his first foreign language. “I was frustrated that I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. I was like, ‘I want this power,'” he explains. The young boy then takes out a subscription to the library and dives into the foreign languages section. He began by borrowing dictionaries and grammar books in French, then in Portuguese and German. And he hasn’t stopped since!
As an adult, however, he was unable to put his remarkable talents to use in learning languages. Never having done well in school, Vaughn dropped out before finishing high school. After having multiplied the odd jobs, from deliveryman to bouncer, passing by house painter, he is today a carpet cleaner at home… and continues to learn. “In reality, for me, speaking all these languages has only one goal: to connect with others,” he analyzes.
He learned Japanese because he worked in a sushi restaurant
These exceptional learning abilities have intrigued scientists. The famous MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) looked into his case and demonstrated that “the areas of Vaughn’s brain devoted to language are much less solicited than those of those who speak only one language and who need make an effort to express themselves, even in their mother tongue.”
Clearly, for Vaughn, language is easy. “So he can juggle languages effortlessly. Is it innate? Acquired? We don’t know.” Each new situation is, even today, an opportunity for him to extend the spectrum of his knowledge. While helping out in a sushi restaurant, he learned Japanese and learned American Sign Language from students at Gallaudet University (dedicated to the deaf and hard of hearing). Vaughn’s superpower is other people’s taste!