Last month I posted about a new book by Michael Erard called Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners.

Erard defines a hyperpolyglot as someone who speaks eleven languages or more, and he can add Oxford University student Alex Rawlings to the list. Alex is only twenty, but can speak eleven languages: English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian.

He started learning as a child because his mother spoke three languages with him – English, French and Greek. Alex’s love of languages has grown from there. You can hear him talk about his language acquisition progression in this video from BBC News.