Originally published 2021-10-23.
Ioannis Ikonomou, a translator from Heraklion in the Greek island of Crete, is a polyglot who speaks 32 languages, 16 of which he can speak fluently.
Ikonomou holds an undergraduate degree in linguistics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a postgraduate degree in Middle Eastern languages from New York's Columbia University. Following his studies, he worked as a translator for the European Commission.
Apart from Greek, which is his native language, Ikonomou also speaks English, German, Spanish, French, Swedish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Arabic, Hebrew, Portuguese, Chinese, Kurdish, Armenian, Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Danish, Hindi, Urdu, Romanian, Czech, Finnish, and Sanskrit. He also has a firm grasp of Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Iranian, Ancient Persian, Classical Armenian, Gothic, Ancient Bulgarian, Hittite and an ancient language that Greek Reporter spells “Lubik”. (No language of that name is known; the likely match is Luwian, an ancient Anatolian language closely related to Hittite (Source).)
He exhibited a curiosity about what people were saying when speaking in a foreign language and he dedicated much of his time learning those languages.
When he was 7-years-old, he began learning German from a teacher while on vacation in the town of Rethymno, Crete. He remembers preferring to study German when he was spending time at the beach instead of playing with other children.
Speaking of the difficulty in memorising so many different languages, Ikonomou said:
"It's a struggle, I'm not a machine. I'm flesh and bones, I forget languages, I get confused. When I speak Spanish I can use a Portuguese expression but it's a fight and it's worth giving it."
He added:
"When I learn a language, I do everything related to the culture and history of the respective country."
[Based on reporting by: Greek Reporter]
Knowing a language has several dimensions
Reading a historical text, translating a document, and having an everyday conversation draw on overlapping but different abilities. A headline total can obscure those differences. Ikonomou's own acknowledgment of forgetting and mixing expressions makes the profile more informative: language knowledge involves maintenance and use, not a permanent collection of perfectly separate mental files.
Follow an interest beyond the vocabulary list
His emphasis on culture suggests a practical way to make learning meaningful: connect words with a subject, story, or community that holds your attention. That does not require matching a polyglot's total. Understanding one conversation more fully can be a worthwhile achievement, and his reported language list should not be treated as a standardized fluency assessment.
Who Ioannis Ikonomou is
Born in Heraklion in 1964, Ikonomou has worked as a translator for the European Commission in Brussels since 2002. He is described as the only in-house translator at the Commission trusted to translate classified Chinese documents, and Chinese is the language he calls his favourite. His studies in linguistics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki were followed by a master’s degree in Middle Eastern languages and cultures at Columbia University. The 2018 Greek Reporter profile on which this article draws put his total at 32 languages, 16 of them spoken fluently, with the rest used mainly for translation and reading.
Sources: Ioannis Ikonomou (Wikipedia) Greek Reporter, February 2018: The Greek polyglot who speaks 32 languages
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