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Ziad Youssef Fazah (born June 10, 1954 in Monrovia, Liberia) is a polyglot who has at least some notions of almost 60 languages. He has proved this in several television shows, where he successfully has communicated with native speakers of a large number of foreign languages.^[1] He was considered the world's greatest polyglot (greatest living linguist) by the 1993 UK edition of the Guinness Book of Records, but the most recent editions have removed that record category.

In order for these tests to work out well, he wants to know beforehand which languages he will be confronted with, so he can revise the grammar the evening before.^[1] That this preparation is important could be seen in the television show "Viva el lunes" (7 July 1997). At that time, he exceptionally failed translating phrases from Finnish, Persian, Mandarin Chinese and Greek. In Russian he even failed to understand the short question "Какой сегодня день недели?" ("What day of the week is it today?")^[2]

Raised in Lebanon, he has lived in Brazil since the 1970s, where he works as a private teacher of languages in Rio de Janeiro.

List of Fazah's languages from the cover of one of his books:

Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cantonese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dzongkha, English, Fijian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Kyrgyz, Lao, Malagasy, Malay, Mandarin, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Papiamento, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Singapore Colloquial English, Sinhalese, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tajik, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Wu.^[3]

(Fazah is usually quoted to speak 58 languages. The list above gives only 57, but the book cover also mentions "Bhutanese" which is another name for Dzongkha.)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• WorId's Greatest Living Polyglot. Spidra's Vortex. Retrieved on August 17, 2007.
• Samples from some of Fazah's books. Retrieved on October 8, 2007.