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simultaneous conversations in more languages than he had fingers. One writer compared it to “a bird flitting from spray to spray.”
    Let’s suppose that Mezzofanti was a myth. Could someone actually do what he was supposed to have done? Could someone represent all the peoples and places of theworld in one body—in whose body they coexistwithout confusion or conflict—because they have more languages than allegiances, either political or cultural?
    In the biblical story of Babel, the people of Babel set out to build a tower to confront God in heaven. Sharing one language allowed them to communicate perfectly and move along with the construction of their tower. But God put a stop to theirtower—and its arrogance—by scrambling their shared language. In the ensuing miscommunication, the humans began to disagree, the building halted, the people scattered, and the tower crumbled. In the Sumerian version of the same story, a god named Enki, jealous about humans’ fondness for another god, Enlil, cursed humans with many languages.
    A language superlearner could embrace this curse of disparatelanguages and whisper in its ear, “Babel, no more .”
    Every adult of normal intelligence on the planet, about six billion people, has learned at least one language as a child. A sizable (though uncounted and, interestingly, uncountable) number also speak an extra tongue. In some places, many individuals speak four or five languages they learned, even as adults. But that’s not the sort of personI have in mind.
    I’m talking about those rumored language superlearners, glimpsed here and there, widely separated in time and space. Some, like Mithridates, lived half in legend; some, like Giuseppe Mezzofanti, lived in a bygone age. Some supposedly live among us right now. They are “hyperpolyglots.” Some can speak or read to varying degrees in many dozens of languages. According to one definition,a hyperpolyglot is someone who speaks (or can use in reading, writing, or translating) at least six languages; this is the definition around which I built my early investigations. Later I found that eleven languages may be a more accurate cutoff.
    I was originally drawn to hyperpolyglots for the way they reflect and refract ideas about language, literacy, and aspirations about language learningand cultural capital in the modern world: who has it, who wants it, who gets it. It’s easy to find someone with a ready anecdote about an uncle, a high school professor, or someone met on an airplane who speaks a lot of languages or who can learn them very easily. “Picks them up,” it’s said, as if languages had handles or could fit into vacuumcleaner hoses. Because we know how hard it is to learneven one foreign language, we receive the tales with awe. Then we repeat them with a skepticism or wonder that we save for stories about saints, healers, and prodigious lovers.
    At the outset, all I had were such stories, the tantalizing tales told over the centuries about people with remarkable linguistic gifts. Most of the stories are legends, unreliable as wholes. Yet hidden in them are kernelsof truth that are subject to discovery, assessment, and testing, which in turn can guide further exploration. Do such language superlearners really exist? How many are out there, and what are they like? What could this gift for learning languages amount to, if it’s real? And what are the upper limits of our ability to learn, remember, and speak languages?
    Babel No More is an account of my searchfor solid answers to these and other questions. I decided to write as a curious adventurer rather than as a scholar, seeking the freedom to move across intellectual borders. Because this journey had no predestined end, I couldn’t write as if I knew what I’d find. I drew on published research literature, my interviews with scientists, my investigation in historical archives, memoirs by—and, ofcourse, my interviews with—hyperpolyglots. An invaluable amount of