The University of Toronto’s Arts and Science News as well as the university Bulletin inform their readers on Xin Yi Lim as one of its students who is distinguished by ability to speak eleven languages. These are English, Malay, Mandarin and Cantonese, Indonesian, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, Turkish and Swahili.
What that means is that she speaks five more languages than is required to be called a hyperpolyglot. That makes calling her a polyglot extraordinary apt.
She simply has what the Bulletin calls multilingual talent. It is hard to know what she would want to be after graduating from the university later the Fall ahead.
How did she come by learning and speaking so many languages? She was raised in a family where the first four of the languages were spoken. And the rest were acquired later.
As it is now, she can fit almost into any part of the world with little difficulty of finding her feet. In Africa, she would find herself at home in much of the East, Central Africa and parts of North Africa where Swahili can make her cope too. In any case, she plans to master Arabic soon. Language she says opens doors for her to people and to work opportunities.
Guess what, it was Nelson Mandela who put the idea of learning so many tongues into her. How did that happen? Her story is that she never saw languages in the same light again after coming across Mandela’s statement somewhere else to the effect that “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”. she realised that even if she could mutter just a couple of words in someone else’s language, such would be a message that she spent time and effort to understand another culture. People who speak many languages are said to be very open minded, less suspicious and civilized!
She compares herself to having eleven channels in her brain although it is English that she is most perfect at. She is a Master’s degree student in Hispanic Linguistics with a collaborative specialisation in and Diaspora and Transnational Studies.
