He claims to speak 59 languages !

Ziad Youssef Fazah (Arabic: زياد فصاح) (born June 10, 1954 in Monrovia, Liberia) is a Liberian-born Lebanese polyglot.

Fazah himself claims to speak 59 languages and maintains that he has proved this in several television shows, where he "successfully" communicated with native speakers of a large number of foreign languages.

The Guinness Book of World Records, up to the 1998 edition, listed Fazah as being able to speak and read 58 languages, citing a live interview in Athens, Greece July 1991.

However, in Viva el lunes, a Chilean TV program featuring Ziad Fazah, he failed to understand beginner-level phrases in Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Persian, Hindi, and Greek, such as:

• The Greek question "Πόσες μέρες θα μείνετε εδώ στη Χιλή;" ("How many days are you going to stay here in Chile?").

• He also mistook Russian for Croatian upon hearing "Какой сегодня день недели?" ("What day of the week is it today?").


• Also he failed to understand the Chinese phrase of "在月球上，能夠看到唯一的地球上的人造工程是甚麼" ("Zài yuèqiú shàng, nénggòu kàn dào wéiyī de dìqiú shàng de rénzào gōngchéng shì shénme?" What is the only man-made structure visible from the moon?).

Fazah claims he can speak, read and understand the following languages:

Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Cypriot, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dzongkha, English, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Kyrgyz, Laotian, Malagasy, Malay, Mandarin, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Pashto, Papiamento, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Shanghainese, Singlish, Sinhala, Spanish, Standard Tibetan, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Thai, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek and Vietnamese.

His record, however, pales in comparison to some from the past. Cardinal Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, born in 1774, spoke 38 languages and 40 dialects.
The 10th-century Muslim polymath Al-Farabi was reputed to know 70 languages.
The German Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, born in 1807, researched and published grammars of 80 languages. The record, though, probably belongs to Sir John Bowring, Governor of Hong Kong from 1854 to 1859, who was said to know 200 languages, and capable of speaking 100.

Fazah currently lives in Porto Alegre, Brazil




Sources: Science Focus, Wikipedia.

posted on: Wednesday August 21, 2013 by Olivier Hirwa

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