Consider the okapi, a four-legged animal native to Central Africa. Depending on how familiar you are with African mammals, the okapi looks like either a tan zebra with an unusually long neck or a giraffe with an unusually short one. They’re staple exotics in modern zoos. But what the zoo’s information plaques won’t tell you is that Western naturalists of the nineteenth century once denied that the okapi could be real. They believed that African tribesman had concocted them or had simply seen a mutant zebra. Once zoologists touched okapi skins and then witnessed actual animals with their own eyes, the creatures were accepted as a new species. Heuvelmans discussed other cases, the brown bear of Kamchatka, the mountain gorilla, the Komodo dragon, the bonobo, and the coelacanth, all creatures whose existences were long doubted by scientists but attested to by local people. He had unrelenting faith in scientific progress, but he had a somewhat cynical view of scientists themselves, who (in his opinion) lacked his sense that lost worlds might still exist. To find those creatures, you had to be willing to listen to the locals. Though a scientist himself, Heuvelmans was comfortable living with mythologies. I had to learn the same.
I set out to write Babel No More along the lines of a book about, say, some fabled creature like the Loch Ness monster. Such a book would acknowledge the tangle of myth, history, and science behind the monster by investigating old reports of monster sightings, reports which, for any number of reasons, crumble under inspection. Off the author goes to Loch Ness itself, where cameras and sonar are unpacked, crews are assembled, locals interviewed. The author goes out in a boat, crisscrosses the waters, hoping for that crucial face-to-face encounter with the beast. The author does learn what it’s like to be on the water, which he rather enjoys, and he likes the culture of Nessie searchers, with their self-serious testing of myth and folklore. From this experience the author develops a list of questions and a set of conclusions about more ordinary forms of biological diversity. He returns from his wanderings enlightened, engaged. But not with the creature in a cage.
Proceeding along those same lines, I came to feel that Heuvelmans was a kindred spirit. However, my project differs from the standard cryptozoological account in this main respect: I made a real discovery, and that discovery was not a single species but an entire tribe.
Recall that I wanted a modern figure, someone with oral skills (not just a reader or translator) whose abilities had been not merely reported by observers or claimed by the speaker but evaluated by a range of educated observers. I wanted evidence, the results to the natural experiment of hyperpolyglottery, and the answer to the question, What is the upper limit of the ability to learn and speak languages?
Johan Vandewalle, possibly a twenty-first-century Emil Krebs, had been in and out of the media since 1987, but he proved elusive. He didn’t return my emails begging him for an interview, and when I took the direct route and phoned him, the man who answered pointed to his website, which is in Dutch. The German newspapers at the time of the contest had portrayed him as a solitary young man, a trained engineer obsessed with languages. I wanted to gently prod that image and get his perspective on the Flanders contest. I finally got in touch through his wife, and we arranged a meeting in the small city of Aalst, near Brussels, where he lives.
I arrived in Aalst a day early to see the place, a former manufacturing stronghold, and I wandered through the bubbly shopping district, contemplating a coffee or a beer somewhere far from the rock band that had set up a stage on the square. Suddenly a man caught my eye, a househusband, dressed in baggy clothes, his shoulders pulled down by all the packages hung in his hands. He seemed lost in thought, as if his body was being operated by remote control. I don’t know why it struck me then. I wasn’t looking for him, and I couldn’t have picked him out from the photos I’d seen. Yet I knew. That’s the hyperpolyglot, I thought. Then: That’s absurd. You know that bookish scholars don’t always look the part. Briefly I contemplated following him to see where he’d go, but even if it was he, what could I do with that knowledge, except describe how he carried his groceries?
Johan was set to pick me up the next morning, from the Irish pub attached to my hotel. When he shuffled into the pub, I recognized him immediately, not from the photos, but from the town square the day before.
I was glad not to have followed him—his house, a pale yellow row house, was a bit of a drive, which we made in silence. By now I knew we wouldn’t sit in his dark basement, sipping water from paper cups. Indeed, in the kitchen of his comfortably furnished house, his wife, Linda, had laid out frangipane tart and coffee, and we sat down to eat with their two children, a boy and a girl. We talked for a long time into a dinner of cheese, fruit, meats, and bread, discussing languages and his hyperpolyglot life.
Johan has brown hair, wears square glasses, and speaks in a soft voice. Nowadays, he’s the head of a Turkish-language department at Ghent University College, where he’s finishing a PhD in Turkish, Uzbek, and Russian grammar. He appears to be well fed and well loved; he meets one’s gaze with equanimity, laughs at jokes, pauses to let Linda finish a comment—and she always has a comment to finish. Herself a language adventurer, she studied Mandarin and Russian in preparation for a trip on the Trans-Siberian railroad, and she wooed Johan in the early 1990s by writing a Christmas card to him in a language he’d invented. Somehow he was lucky enough to find one of what are likely few women on the planet who suit him. Johan grew up in a Flemish family, so he had early experiences with three languages. There are thousands of polyglots in Flanders, he said; learning foreign languages has a lot of prestige, and “it’s a normal thing to study a foreign language in one’s leisure time, just like doing sports.” His first non-Belgian language was Turkish, which he discovered when he was thirteen, on a trip with his father, a mathematics teacher, and which he dove into after another trip two years later, in 1975. Turkish is an agglutinating language, which means that you add grammatical particles to the ends of nouns and verbs. Because of a language reform in the 1930s, most of the exceptions, the language learner’s bugbears, had been cleaned out. It was, in other words, the perfect language for a systemizer with a strong memory. “Turkish saved my life,” Johan told me. (Later he said this was too strong, and wanted me to say that “Turkish had entered his life to stay.”)
When the Polyglot of Flanders contest was announced in 1987, his father pushed him to join. By then he knew Turkish and related languages—Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Turkmen, Azerbaijani—most of which were spoken in then-Soviet territory, so dictionaries and grammars were in Russian. To get at them, he learned Russian. (Because each was an official language of a Soviet republic, Eugeen Hermans would accept them.) To grasp Arabic and Persian loanwords in Turkish that had been cleaned out in the 1930s, he picked up those languages too.
When the contest organizers called him, he gave them a list of the languages he had studied. Only then, he said, did he realize that he had thirty-one. Seven were dead languages; in another seven he described his knowledge as superficial. At the time, he was in the middle of his military service. Before the contest he found an abandoned barracks in which to lay out his books and spent weeks practicing his languages every night.
When I heard this, I was disappointed. In a way he was no different from the hyperpolyglots who kept half a dozen or so languages active with many more on ice. I’d hoped that he stepped from his life straight into the contest, all of his languages at the ready. Even the Polyglot of Flanders didn’t work that way.
Would it have been possible to keep all those languages activated? I asked.
Johan scoffed at the idea. “What is the use of this?” he asked. “My Kyrgyz is not as good as it’s been, but I don’t expect a Kyrgyz to ring my bell today or tomorrow.” To keep all the languages up, he’d need a schedule: get up at six o’clock, do some Tajik, switch to Turkmen at seven, and so on. “I find such a thing absurd,” he said. He had never aimed to know as many languages as he could. “What I like is going to the country and functioning in that language,
in that society.” (I recalled Rainer Ganahl’s shopper/tourist paradigm of language learning.) Last summer, he said, they traveled to Egypt; he had bought a book on hieroglyphics and happily deciphered temple walls and obelisks. “Some people may be indifferent to that,” he said, “but for me, I find it important, to have that kind of amazement. To stay amazed by language.”
He used to think anyone could learn languages, and that one didn’t need to be special to do it well. He stated this opinion over and over in his early interviews. Now, he’s of a different mind. After twenty years of teaching languages, he doesn’t think that hard work is solely central to success. “I think some people really have a predisposition for learning languages or are better equipped than other people,” he said.
On the day of the competition, which took place in a drab meeting hall in a government building, contestants went from table to table and talked for ten minutes in each language with native-speaker judges. They took only five-minute breaks between. Vandewalle was tested in twenty-two languages. Five of these were languages he knew superficially. Several weeks afterward, his father met him at the train station with a garland on the car. “That’s when I knew,” Johan said. He was twenty-six years old. He’d won with a grand point total of 251, with nineteen languages in which he had “proven to possess communicative competences.” The runner-up, a Russian professor, had scored only 181 points. Some languages, like Gaelic, Vandewalle hadn’t scored in (he could only say, “I’m a soldier”); others, like Latin and Old Slavic, hadn’t counted.
The shy student, now king of the language pile, the Polyglot van Vlaanderen, was about to have a grand whirl. He did more than seventy interviews for radio, print media, and television. An appearance on Turkish television won him hundreds of marriage proposals. Champagne corks popped on flights to Turkey. So great was the Turkish girls’ faith in his fame, or in the Belgian postal service, that some of them addressed their envelopes to The Polyglot of Flanders, Venice of the North.
Johan Vandewalle after winning the Polyglot of Flanders/Babel Prize, 1987. (Courtesy of Linda Gezels)
In his own mind, Vandewalle had a clear sense of what had happened. Hermans had come up with rules; the contest had applied the rules; and he’d won. With different rules, someone else might have won. In the resulting frenzy of attention, this was overlooked. “Johan Vandewalle speaks 22 languages fluently,” blared the headlines. The attention amused him, but also bored him. “I had been asked the same questions . . . hundreds of times, and didn’t want to start it again,” he told me. “That really was the reason why I didn’t participate in the second contest.”
The second contest?
It was 1990, the blast of attention from the Polyglot of Flanders contest had worn off, and Eugeen Hermans, who had a promoter’s flair, was looking for another hit. We couldn’t do the same thing, he thought; Vandewalle, if he enters, will win again.
He decided to broaden it to the (then twelve) countries of the European Union. The Belgian changed some rules. You now had to have at least nine languages to enter, and provide diplomas, certificates, or letters from professors proving that you’d studied the languages. Scoring was now different, too. Instead of having a flat twenty points to award in each language, judges were to use a five-level scale (a “survival” level of at least fifteen hundred words; a pre-intermediate level; an intermediate level in which mistakes were occasional but vocabulary measured five or six thousand words; an advanced level, “achieved by a university graduate in foreign language studies”; and a mother-tongue level) and a precise number of points assigned to each level.
Judges could also give points for the overall repertoire. “If you learn all the Germanic languages and all the Romance languages, that’s relatively easy,” Hermans told me, “but if you have Chinese and Arabic and Spanish, that’s an intellectually bigger performance than Spanish, French, and Italian,” which might get more overall points. That would eliminate the possibility of a win based on using all the languages from a single family very well. The winner would be someone like Vandewalle.
Hermans also instructed judges to interrupt the contestants with questions of their own—to have a real conversation, something dynamic, in the moment. In the earlier contest, the best hyperpolyglots had very skillfully started the interaction, “because they know exactly what they can say and can’t say.”
Nearly two hundred people applied for the Polyglot of Europe contest, out of whom twenty finalists were identified: three Greeks (one of whom was Helen Abadzi), three English, two Scots, three Belgians, two Italians, two Danes, and one apiece from France, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Johan Vandewalle wasn’t one of them. He’d grown tired of telling the same story to every newspaper, every weekly magazine, every small local radio station, and answering the same questions, being treated like a curiosity, seldom with any scientific interest. How many languages do you speak? Why do you study languages? What is your method? Always the focus on the method. What is the method? Hermans was reluctant to push Johan into participating. Hermans himself had begun to wonder if he was doing something of value. Was it just showbiz? Was he exposing this person to too much attention? Was it really worth it?
Derick Herning, a Scotsman who grew up north of Edinburgh and now lives in the small town of Lerwick on the Shetland Islands, won the Polyglot of Europe contest after being tested in twenty-two languages. Because the rules of the second language game were more rigorous, we might say that Herning was more prodigious than even Vandewalle. Born in 1932 and now in his late seventies, Herning gives tours and plays organ for his church (he’s a devout Christian, though he identifies himself as a “Jesuite,” his own neologism) and relies on his wife, a Russian artist, to “turn on the Internet” for him (which, feistily witty, Herning phrases that way on purpose, I’m certain).
In a series of phone calls, he described his life of language learning, a familiar pattern I’d heard before. There was an early fascination with German during World War II, which he heard on BBC propaganda broadcasts, because it was the language of the enemy. High school French (which he rejected as “sissy” but was forced to study) and more German. Latin (“which was dry at the time, but helped in the long run”) provided vocabulary for the Romance languages and grammatical preparation for the elaborate case systems of Russian, Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian.
At Edinburgh University he majored in German, taught himself Dutch, became fascinated by Frisian; entered the army and learned Russian (another enemy’s language), then worked in intelligence. He traveled a lot in Russia and Germany, fell in love with a German woman and lived in Germany for four years, learned Romanian in preparation for a trip to Moldova, and taught himself Gaelic.
He spun out a familiar narrative of accumulation, extended plasticity, and linguistic homelessness (but not despair). He moved to Lerwick in the late 1960s, learned Swedish, Icelandic, Faroese, the Swedish-Danish-Norwegian clump, and more Slavic languages. To me, Lerwick sounded like the far ends of the earth, but Derick assured me, it’s a cosmopolitan harbor filled with sailors, fisherman, and yachters from all over Europe. In the mid-1990s, he made a name for himself as an interpreter for Bulgarian sailors who were on strike aboard a factory ship; once he escorted a psychotic Russian sailor back to Moscow.
I asked him why he saw opportunity where others might see a language barrier.
Derick thought for a moment. “I suppose it’s an addiction. Other people get stuck on drugs. It’s quite a healthy form of addiction.”
“It’s an interesting comparison, because when people don’t have access to the thing they’re addicted to, they have a negative physical reaction.”
He then told me the following story. “At one time, I applied for a job as a headmaster at the Outer Hebrides, and I was on the short list for that job. The more I thought about it, the less it appealed to me. Okay, headmaster, oh, lovely. And then I thought, what am I going to do at the nights? The only language I could develop here is my Gaelic
. I could have been desperately wrong about that. But I don’t think the Western Isles have the same cosmopolitan atmosphere as the port of Lerwick. For my purposes, it was supreme. I thought, well, what am I going to do apart from going to the local pub and talk Gaelic to the locals? I could probably find a Gaelic-speaking wife, but the thought of speaking only Gaelic at home, Gaelic during the day, Gaelic at the night—that didn’t appeal to me either.”
In 1990, his life took a new turn. He related the contest and his sudden rise to fame in tones of alternating exasperation and pride. He was teaching German and some French at a Lerwick school whose headmaster told him about the Brussels contest. I think you should go in for it, he told Derick.
“I said ‘No, I haven’t a chance,’” Derick replied.
No, Derick, you try, the headmaster said.
“So I did. I applied.”
Soon Hermans called and said they would call in a week to ask him questions in up to ten languages. “It was quite difficult to participate in this conversation,” he said, “just one language after another without a pause. It was like being under machine-gun fire.” But he did well enough and was invited to Brussels.
Like Johan Vandewalle and Helen Abadzi, he didn’t keep many languages cranked up for use. “In the last month before the contest, I had to do a lot of concentrated swotting. I used to get up two hours earlier than usual every morning and just work through one language after the other, and when I came home at night I did the same again. I did that day in, day out until I was absolutely sick of languages.” He laughed.
When the contest day of multilingual conversations was over, the contestants all went out and revealed facts about themselves. A lot of us were born in the middle of the summer, Derick said. Quite a few of us are left-handed.
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