1. What’s your story? How did you get into all these languages?

I was fascinated with languages as a child. I don’t know where this came from. At home we spoke Spanish and Galician, I started English lessons at about seven, and I soon started to wish I could learn more languages. As I lived in a small town, this was unfortunately not much of an option. At fourteen I could start learning French at high school -normally, studying high school French was only an option for those who had studied French at primary school, but my school didn’t offer it. I asked my parents to let me take French private lessons for two months in the summer so that I could reach the required level. At university, I studied Classics, which shared a school with Modern Languages, so this was fascinating to me. I learned German and Italian through a mixture of university classes and self-study. I also started to self-teach Modern Greek. During the summers I took language courses in Greece and Austria, and in my third year I did a year abroad in Italy. The year after I graduated I got a Leonardo scholarship to do an internship in Germany, and stayed there for one more year. Then I moved to London. The last language I added was Catalan (just two semesters in a group class), and then after my late 20s I drifted away from languages somehow as I needed to focus on my career. Ten years later, Covid arrived, and my university (in Scotland) offered a free online Scottish Gaelic class for staff. I signed up, but only went to two sessions before quitting; I found it very challenging and I thought that maybe my brain was too old to learn languages. However, about a month later I started Russian private lessons, and was able to progress rapidly, which put an end to my concerns.

2. Which language(s) do you wish you could spend more time practising?

I am quite fortunate that I have been able to find organized speaking clubs for four of my languages (Greek, Russian, French, German) which meet every week and don’t break the bank! Apart from speaking, at the moment I am focusing especially on Greek and Russian –working my way through textbooks, watching MOOCs and reading specialized texts and noting down words and phrases, etc. I feel this work, intended mostly to polish expression and comprehension and acquire nuance, deeply immersive –a two- or three-hour session of this always replenishes my energy. I wish I could do this with French, German and Italian but I don’t have time, so I rotate languages from time to time.

3. What are some languages you’d like to learn in the future?

Learning one or more of the Southern Slavic languages has been a dream of mine for more than twenty years. I would like to be challenged by Hungarian and Basque with their complex case systems. I have been reading a lot of Japanese literature recently and this has excited an interest in the language too. As a Galician speaker, I can read Portuguese almost perfectly and can get by, but I would like to sit down at some point and study it properly.

4. So let’s be honest, which language has the most charm for you?

I think at the moment it has to be Greek. I have a bit of a difficult history with the language –I learned it on my own at university, for several years, but I could only get to about B1. I became a bit desperate, because I had worked through the few textbooks and websites I could get my hands on at the time (we’re talking early to mid 00s), I knew every grammar rule, yet real-life texts, let alone audio material or conversation, felt massively out of reach. I got back to the language in 2021 (plenty of time to kill under Covid); this time I had the advantage of plenty of content available online (both real-life and tailored for learners) and access to teachers willing to teach on Zoom. I was then able to fully appreciate the beauty of Greek –its constant “recomposition” of Ancient Greek roots and prefixes, its expressive use of word order, its ability to create colloquial phrases all the time.

5. What’s the greatest pleasure you get from speaking so many languages?

I just love the period of time when learning a language when I move from survival to real deep understanding. I think of it as the time when I can really start being myself in the foreign language – when my choice of words, phrasing, speed, is truly able to convey my personality, my sense of humour, my state of mind. In terms of passive consumption, this would be the moment when I really start to see nuance in the language -e.g. reading a text and rather than simply understanding what it says, I notice tone, register, authors’ intentions…

6. Some people say the world is really just going to have a few languages left in a 100 years, do you think this is really true?

Unfortunately, I am a bit pessimistic. Living in an English-speaking country, I find it quite amazing how little regard the English-speaking world has for other languages. I work in an environment which is highly preoccupied with EDI (as it should be) –colleagues are tremendously sympathetic to the disadvantages some experience by virtue of their gender, ethnicity, sexuality, immigration status, disability, etc. However, when I say that native language can be a cause of discrimination/disadvantage too, it’s as if they’ve never thought about it. Why, if everyone speaks English anyway? What makes me harbour some hope is to see how social media and new technologies can be enlisted productively in favour of minority languages, either to create communities of speakers, disseminate awareness of the language, create resources which go from the incredibly sophisticated (corpora, thesauri) to the DIY, etc.

7. What is your message to young (and not so young) people out there who are interested in studying multiple languages?

I would first of all remind them that life is long. When I was in my late teens I wanted to learn all languages at the same time. As I am someone who thrives on depth rather than breadth, I think it would have been better for me to learn my languages sequentially -at 18, I could have learned German, and I could then start Italian at 23, Greek at 28, etc. This takes me to my next point, which is that everyone has a different style of language-learning; it might take some time to find what works for you but it’s totally worth it. In online communities about language learning and polyglotism I see so many people trying to sell “hacks” which allegedly work for everyone in every context, and I can see how a young person who tries it and doesn’t succeed could be led to think they don’t really have a talent for languages.