Do Polyglots Have a Secret Gift?

What genes, brain scans, and aptitude reveal about language talent

Photo by Mikhail Nilov

What is the largest number of languages one person has ever learned?

Nobody knows for sure.

The biggest claims are impossible to check, and “knowing a language” can mean anything from ordering coffee to reading philosophy.

Still, the records are staggering:

Cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti (1774 to 1849): around 30 languages with real command, most of them learned without leaving Bologna.

Emil Krebs, a German diplomat: 68 languages. After he died, his brain was preserved for study.

Harold Williams, a New Zealand journalist: more than 58.

Sir Richard Francis Burton, the explorer: more than 25.

Kató Lomb, a Hungarian interpreter: 16 languages.

These are just a few examples. The list is much longer and definitely isn’t limited to many publicly unknown cases of accomplished polyglots.

Today, neuroscientists are putting polyglots into brain scanners, including some self-described hyperpolyglots who report speaking dozens of languages. Researchers have used precision fMRI to study the language networks of polyglots and hyperpolyglots.

Before we look at what those brain scans reveal, it helps to keep one important fact in mind.

Speaking more than one language is not, by itself, extraordinary. Most of the planet is multilingual.

Estimates vary, but a commonly cited global breakdown suggests that roughly 40% of people are monolingual, 43% speak two languages, 13% speak three, and only about 3% speak four or more (Grosjean, 2010; Erard, 2012). Exact global numbers are hard to pin down because everything depends on what counts as “speaking” a language, but the broader point is clear: multilingualism is not rare. In many parts of the world, it is normal life.

We are not talking about that everyday, grown-up-with-it multilingualism here. We are talking about people who set out to learn ten, twenty, or fifty languages on purpose, often as adults, starting from nothing.

So are they exceptionally gifted, built differently from you and me?

And if they are, where does that leave you when you decided long ago that you are just not a language person and let the dream go?

I am an applied linguist, and I speak eight languages: two mother tongues, Russian and Belarusian, and six foreign languages - English, Spanish, Swedish, Polish, German, and Italian.

This article answers three main questions:

1. Is there such a thing as a language gene?

2. What do brain scans of polyglots reveal?

3. What sets them apart from the rest of us?

The answers are probably not what most people expect, and by the end, you may think very differently about what you are capable of.

Is It In Their Genes?

Start with the most common assumption, the one that lets the rest of us off the hook. People like Krebs and Williams were born with it. Somewhere in their DNA sits a variant the rest of us did not inherit, a language gene, and that is the end of the conversation.

It would be a tidy explanation. It is also, as far as anyone can tell, wrong.

In 2014, a large international team searched for exactly that gene. They combed the genomes of thousands of people for variants linked to language ability, the same kind of genome-wide scan that has turned up reliable signals for height, eye color, and a long list of traits (St Pourcain et al., 2014).

For language, the signal did not appear. No single gene, no tidy cluster of genes, nothing that would let you read a child’s DNA and predict a future polyglot.

This surprises people because we might have heard about “the language gene.”

That phrase usually points to a gene called FOXP2, which became famous when a fault in it was found to cause a severe speech and language disorder in one English family. This was the well-known KE family, whose affected members had serious difficulties with speech and language.

FOXP2 is associated especially with speech-motor control and language development, and pathogenic variants can lead to conditions such as childhood apraxia of speech, a disorder in which children know what they want to say but have difficulty planning and coordinating the mouth movements needed to say it.

However, that is very different from saying that FOXP2 is a “polyglot gene.”

But FOXP2 is not a gene for talent. It is a gene that, when broken, disrupts ordinary speech, the way removing one bolt can stop a car without that bolt being the thing that made the car fast. A part you need for language to work at all is a different thing from a part that makes you good at collecting languages.

Language ability, like most interesting human traits, is what geneticists call complex. It draws on many genes, each adding a little, all of it filtered through environment, schooling, and luck.

Think of height. There is no height gene either. Tall parents tend to have tall children, so genetics clearly matters, and yet you cannot point to the gene that did it, and a child’s final height still depends on food and a hundred other things.

Language aptitude lives in the same category. Partly inherited, in a tangled way, and nowhere near a switch you were handed or denied at birth.

So the genetic lottery ticket does not exist. That removes the cleanest excuse, and it raises the next question. If it is not in the genes, maybe it is in the brain.

Do they have a different brain?

This is where the research turns strange, and it is recent enough that it has barely reached the language-learning world.

The researchers behind that MIT study I mentioned in the introduction, led by neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko and Steven Piantadosi, decided to take a closer look.

They recruited polyglots, including people who spoke far more than ten languages, slid them into a scanner, and watched the brain’s language network at work while they listened to passages in different tongues (Jouravlev et al., 2021).

The language network is a set of regions, mostly on the left side of the head, that do the heavy lifting of understanding and producing speech. This is not just the old textbook story of Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, although those names are still useful landmarks.

Current neuroscience treats language as a distributed network, mainly in the left frontal and temporal regions, that helps us recognize words, build sentence structure, connect sound to meaning, and understand what someone is saying. Everyone reading this has one.

The question was simple.

For someone who has learned a dozen or fifty languages, what would the brain look like?

The intuitive guess is bigger, busier, more of everything.

The opposite turned out to be true.

In the polyglots, the language network was smaller and quieter than in people who speak only one language. It did the same job while using less energy. More precisely, the researchers found that polyglots showed a smaller and less strongly activated language network when processing language. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive. After all, monolinguals are highly proficient in their native language, so why would polyglots show even less activation?

The key point is that the studies did not compare polyglots and monolinguals only in their strongest language. Researchers measured responses across a range of language tasks and found that polyglots’ language networks generally responded less strongly overall.

In fMRI research, activation is measured indirectly through changes in blood oxygenation. A smaller response does not mean the brain is doing less language processing. It means it is accomplishing the processing with less measurable neural activity.

The efficient brain is not necessarily a gifted brain

The researchers interpret this pattern as a possible sign of neural efficiency. One hypothesis is that years of learning and managing multiple languages may tune the language system to perform linguistic computations with fewer resources.

Importantly, the studies cannot tell us whether this efficiency was partly present before language learning began or whether it developed through extensive multilingual experience.

So the safest conclusion is not that polyglots have a “better” language network than monolinguals, but that they appear to use a smaller and less strongly activated one while achieving the same linguistic outcomes.

There is a homely version of this you can relate to.

Watch someone drive who has been at it for thirty years. Their hands are loose, they are halfway through a conversation, and the whole thing looks like nothing. Put a learner in the same car, and you get white knuckles, a stall at the lights, total concentration to manage what the veteran does without a thought. Same car, same road, wildly different effort. The polyglot’s language network is the thirty-year driver. It is not a bigger brain. It is the same equipment, worn smooth by use, doing more with less.

Two details make this reading hard to escape.

First, bilinguals, people with only two languages, tend to show more activity in that network, not less, so the quiet efficiency is not just a by-product of stuffing in more languages (Jouravlev et al., 2021).

Second, when the same lab scanned a larger group, the network’s response rose and fell with how well the person knew each language, and it answered more strongly to unfamiliar languages that happened to be related to ones the person already spoke (Malik-Moraleda et al., 2024).

Hold onto that last point, because it is a fingerprint of experience. The brain was leaning on what it had already built. And about two-thirds of these polyglots had taught themselves at least some of their languages, alone, with books and recordings and stubbornness.

The efficient polyglot brain is not a model you were refused. It is the standard model, tuned by years of use.

The scientists who ran these studies are careful to say they cannot yet untangle how much of the efficiency people were born with from how much they built, and that caution is the honest scientific position (Jouravlev et al., 2021).

But nothing in the scans points to a different machine. They point to the same machine and run hard for a long time.

If it is neither the genes nor a different brain, we reach the question you came here for.

So what sets them apart?

Something does.

I am not going to pretend everyone arrives at a language with identical equipment, because the research does not say that, and you have seen otherwise with your own eyes. You have sat in a room where one person caught the accent in a week while you were still wrestling the first ten words into place. That difference is real, and it has a name.

Linguists call it language aptitude.

This is also my own area of expertise. My PhD dissertation at the University of Warsaw was titled Exploring the Relationship Between Creativity in L2 Use and Foreign Language Aptitude as Individual Learner Differences.

The classic name here is John B. Carroll, the American psychologist who, together with Stanley Sapon, developed the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) in the 1950s.

Carroll did not treat aptitude as one magical “language gift.” He saw it as a cluster of cognitive abilities that help someone learn a foreign language faster and more easily when motivation and opportunity are present.

Carroll defined foreign language aptitude as:

“An individual’s initial state of readiness and capacity for learning a foreign language, and probable facility in doing so given the presence of motivation and opportunity” (Carroll, 1981, p. 86).

That final phrase is crucial. Aptitude is not destiny. It is a measure of readiness and probable ease of learning under favorable conditions. It may help predict how quickly someone learns, but it does not determine who can or cannot become multilingual.

In Carroll’s model, aptitude consists of four main components working together:

1. Phonetic coding ability — the ability to hear, distinguish, and remember unfamiliar sounds. For example, quickly noticing the difference between Spanish pero [but] and perro [dog].

2. Grammatical sensitivity — the ability to recognize how words function in a sentence. For example, understanding who is doing what to whom in “The girl gave her brother a book,” even without knowing grammatical terminology.

3. Inductive language learning ability — the ability to infer rules from examples. For instance, seeing hablo, hablas, and habla and figuring out that the verb ending changes depending on the speaker.

4. Associative memory (or rote learning ability for language materials) — the ability to form and retain links between sounds, words, and meanings. For example, remembering that Italian finestra means “window” after only a few encounters.

Carroll’s model was also important because he separated aptitude from motivation and general intelligence. A person can be very intelligent and still not learn languages fast. Another person can have a striking ear for sound and a strong verbal memory without being extraordinary in every other domain.

Aptitude is real, but it is specific.

In the classic Carroll tradition, aptitude was treated as relatively stable and largely resistant to training. That is why aptitude tests were originally useful for predicting how quickly someone might progress in a course, especially under time pressure.

Still, current research is more nuanced.

Some components of aptitude may be shaped by experience, previous language learning, literacy, musical training, working memory, and better strategies. So I would not say that aptitude is completely untrainable. I would say that Carroll treated it as relatively stable, while contemporary research leaves more room for development, compensation, and strategic learning.

Some people score higher across these than others. Aptitude is real and partly separate from general intelligence (Sasaki, 1996), so pretending it does not exist helps no one.

But what aptitude does is narrower than the word “gift” suggests.

It predicts the speed and ease of learning (please remember it for good), not the ceiling.

The Canadian psychologist Françoys Gagné, who has spent his career on the line between a natural gift and a developed skill, says that a gift shows up as the facility and speed with which someone picks things up (Gagné, 1995).

High aptitude means you climb faster. It does not mean you climb higher, and it says nothing at all about whether you will keep climbing and reach the summit.

How Much Does Aptitude Decide?

When the applied linguist Shaofeng Li pulled together fifty years of studies, aptitude lined up with eventual success at around r = .3 (Li, 2015). In plain terms, aptitude accounts for something like a tenth of the difference in outcomes between learners.

More exactly, Li’s meta-analysis found that people with higher language aptitude tended to do somewhat better at learning grammar in a second language, but the relationship was far from perfect. Statistically, the link was r = .31, which translates to roughly 10% of the differences in learners’ results being attributable to aptitude.

Put another way, if two learners end up with different outcomes, aptitude explains only about one-tenth of that gap on average. That is why “about a tenth” is a fair plain-language translation. It matters, but it does not tell the whole story.

The other nine-tenths is everything else: the hours you put in, the amount of language you swim in, whether you keep going after it stops being fun.

One trait does show up again and again in the people who reach the top, and it is not a dazzling general intelligence.

It is memory, and specifically a very good memory for verbal material, the sounds and shapes of words (Skehan, 1998).

When the Polish applied linguist Adriana Biedroń, who was my PhD thesis reviewer and examiner, studied a group of gifted adult learners up close, this is what stood out: strong verbal memory inside an otherwise ordinary profile (Biedroń, 2012). Not superhuman. Good with words, average elsewhere.

Now the part most people miss. It is quite obvious, actually.

Aptitude is not even required to become multilingual.

The writer and linguist Michael Erard, who tracked down many of the world’s living hyperpolyglots, points out that most multilingual people on the planet never tested into it. They grew up needing several languages, so they have them. High-aptitude learners and everyday multilinguals may be almost completely different groups of people (Erard, 2012).

Aptitude is one road up the mountain. It is not the only one, and for most of humanity, it is not the road taken.

My Story: Waiting for the Mail

I think about all of this through the lens of my adolescence in Belarus.

When I was sixteen, my mother spent close to a month’s salary for a full year on a Soviet correspondence course in English that I was begging her to order for me. I really wanted to learn English, and school didn’t help because after five years, all I could say was, “My name is Viktoria. London is the capital of Great Britain.”

The booklets came in the post. God knows how much I looked forward to them. Every month, waiting for the next package felt like waiting for Christmas. I find it hard to describe that anticipation now. I would watch for the mail, wondering whether this would be the day it arrived, and when it finally did, I could hardly wait to open it.

Even today, that feeling remains one of the happiest memories of my life, alongside the births of my two children. There was no private teacher, no class, no one to practice with. No access to social media, foreign language TV, or radio. I sat with those correspondence course booklets and cassettes in the evenings while the rest of the street did anything more fun, and slowly the language arrived.

People later told me I must have a gift. Maybe I have a little. But a gift was not the thing sitting at that table for hours on end. Something else was.

Talent Is the Engine, Motivation Is the Fuel

There’s a clear analogy I like to use to explain the concept of aptitude or talent.

Think of aptitude as the engine of a car. A bigger engine means more power, an easier time on the hills, a quicker pull away from the lights. Some people are handed a bigger engine than others, and that is simply true. But an engine, however large, does not move the car. Fuel moves the car. And the fuel is motivation. A magnificent engine with an empty tank sits in the driveway and rusts. A modest engine with a full tank and a driver who refuses to stop will cross the whole country.

This is why the gift, on its own, explains so little.

Gagné (1995) makes the same point in the language of his field: a natural ability remains latent and undeveloped unless motivation and circumstances turn it into a real skill.

There are people walking around with a serious talent for languages who will never find out, because nothing ever set a language in front of them and made them want it. Their engine was never started.

Your own thin record, the courses you quit, and the apps you deleted, are not proof that your engine is small. It may only mean the tank ran dry, or that no road ever called to you.

The reverse carries the quiet cruelty inside the talent story.

A large engine with no fuel goes nowhere. You almost certainly know someone who was “so good at languages” at school and now speaks none of them.

The gift was real. The tank emptied. Meanwhile, the people who reach fluency, the ones the polyglots themselves resemble, describe years of work rather than effortless flight.

Biedroń (2012) found that even her gifted learners put their results down to engagement and hard work, not magic.

Kató Lomb, sixteen languages deep, spent her life insisting the gift was beside the point, and that the real enemy was not a missing talent but inhibition, the fear of getting it wrong.

The clearest evidence I know sits a short train ride from where I teach.

Two influential aptitude researchers from Stockholm University, where I also studied, Niclas Abrahamsson and Kenneth Hyltenstam, did research on adult immigrants whose Swedish had become so good that native speakers took them for natives (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2008).

Every one of them turned out to have high aptitude, so the gift was doing something. But that was not all they shared.

They had also poured years into the language, and many had built whole careers around it. The talent opened the door. The work walked them through it.

Where this leaves you

Now it’s time to put the three answers together.

1. There is no language gene to be born without. In other words, there is no single polyglot gene that you either received or missed at birth (St Pourcain et al., 2014).

2. There is no separate, superior brain, only the same language network everyone owns, running efficiently after long use (Jouravlev et al., 2021). And the one thing that does vary between people, aptitude, is a head start in speed and ease, worth about a tenth of the result, able to sit unused for a lifetime, and helpless without the fuel of motivation to move it (Li, 2015; Gagné, 1995).

3. You were not handed a smaller machine. You were handed the same one. The polyglots are running theirs faster, partly on a good memory for words, mostly on years of fuel you have not yet poured in.

When you say “I am not a language person,” you may be noticing something real, but interpreting it too harshly. You do learn vocabulary more slowly than your friend. Pronunciation does not come easily. Grammar feels like a locked door. Those experiences are real signals. But they measure your current learning conditions, your past methods, your exposure, your confidence, your memory load, your fatigue, and sometimes your aptitude profile.

They do not measure the final size of your possible life in another language. It is telling you about your pace and your history, how fast you have climbed so far and which roads you have not yet driven. It is not telling you about a ceiling, because science has not found one for you. The wall you picture is the edge of the effort you have spent, not the edge of what you can do.

A slow start is not a ceiling. A failed course is not a diagnosis. An app you deleted is not scientific evidence that your brain rejected Italian forever.

Which leaves two questions worth the next conversation. If it is not a gene and not a different brain, then it comes down to a set of traits and habits, which makes the whole thing practical.

• What does the profile of a strong language learner look like, up close?

• And how much of it, the memory, the methods, the way polyglots really study, can you build for yourself on purpose?

That is where we are going next in the paid post on Thursday.

For now, sit with this conclusion.

The most accomplished language learners on record are not running a different machine from you. They started the engine, and they kept the tank full. You can decide to do the same today.

Thanks for reading!

If this article made you wonder how to actually build a multilingual life in practice, I wrote a full system here:

Want to Become a Polyglot? The Complete System for Learning Multiple Languages

Every article and PDF guide here takes weeks of research, writing, and rewriting to turn dense science into something clear you can use tonight. I’m one person doing this work with care. Upgrade to paid to get full access to everything I create and help me keep building it.

I’d love to hear from you. Have you ever thought you were “not a language person”? Or have you had a moment when a language finally opened for you after months or years of effort? Do you believe polyglots are born, made, or somewhere in between? Have you ever met someone who seemed naturally gifted with languages? Tell us in the comments.

Want a truly personalized learning plan based on your level, goals, and how you actually learn? I design a clear, structured, science-based system tailored exclusively for you. Consider becoming a Founding Member. Read more here: Thinking About Becoming a Founding Member? This Is the Moment

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Viktoria Verde, PhD, is a linguist, polyglot, and certified English and Swedish language teacher based in Stockholm. She speaks eight languages, has taught for over twenty years across three countries, and writes about the science of language learning.

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