The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-10)

A16 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022

“Like she was hit with a splash of happiness,” Vaughn remembers. His teachers and his parents, mean- while, so often looked at him with disappointment. He’d chosen the wrong sentence when it was his turn to read aloud in class, again. His teacher called his mother to say he wasn’t paying attention, again. His dad was sending him back to his mom’s house, again. Always, it felt to Vaughn like there was something wrong with him. “I feel like I didn't know how to guide him to do better,” his mom, Sandra Vargas, says now. She was in her early 20s, in the midst of a divorce, raising Vaughn and his brother in a country entirely new to her. When she first realized her son wasn’t connecting with other kids the way he should, she took him to a psychologist, who told her only that Vaughn was just “muy, muy intelligente.” As her boy grew, she knew it was more complicated than that. “Not only a big brain, but a big heart. And that’s the problem,” Sandra says. “Because he’s very sensitive. And he tends to think he’s not wanted, or he’s not loved.” By 14, Vaughn was living with his dad again, in a basement apartment in Ten- leytown, not far from D.C.’s many embas- sies. He no longer needed to fear looking different than his classmates because the student body at Wilson High School included kids from around the world. Kids who spoke other languages. Im- mediately, Vaughn had an in. There was a clique of Brazilian stu- dents, so he started to learn Portuguese. He befriended a brother and sister who would write him lists of phrases in

Romanian, and watch as Vaughn memo- rized them all. When he noticed a shy Ethiopian girl, he asked her to teach him Amharic. On the weekends, he took the bus downtown to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, which he’d discovered had the city’s best selection of language books. The way Vaughn describes it, any time he reads something in a book, he can remember it almost perfectly. When he returned to school, he had even more to say, and more that he could understand. In an environment where he never felt like he fit, he was connecting in a way that no one else could. But by 17, his mom had moved him back to Maryland. Vaughn tested into the highest-level Russian class at his new school, despite never taking classes before. His high school diploma would be the last he’d receive. A counselor encouraged him to apply to a trade school for medical assistants, but he didn’t get in. “Once that happened, I just gave up on the idea, and that was the very end of it,” Vaughn remembers. And so began an adulthood marked by jobs that came and went. Vaughn has been a painter, a bouncer, a punk rock roadie and a Kombucha delivery man. His friends encouraged him to start a YouTube channel, but after a bout of depression, he stopped filming. On days when there aren’t carpets to clean, he helps a friend tint office building win- dows. He was once a dog walker for the Czech art collector Meda Mládková, the widow of an International Monetary Fund governor. She kept him on as a caretaker of her Georgetown home, which was the closest he ever came to having a career that utilized his languages. Visitors to the house spoke nearly every Eastern European dialect, and before long, so did Vaughn. Beyond high school, he never had the chance to take a proficiency test in any language. And the more he learned, the more he understood the complexity of what it means to “know” a language. Though it’s common to hear words like “fluent” or “conversational,” there are no universally accepted definitions of such levels. Proficiency tests developed by governments or academic institutions often stress the skills needed to speak in formal settings, rather than the casual, slang or emotional language needed to truly understand another culture. And which feature of a language should matter most: Having a large vocabulary? Understanding the grammar? Perfecting the pronunciation? The best-known case of hyperpolyglots’ skills being tested was a 1990 contest that aimed to find Europe’s most multilingual speaker. Participants had short conversations with native or ad- vanced speakers who awarded them points based on their apparent proficien- cies. The winner, a Scottish organist named Derick Herning, showed mean- ingful proficiency in 22 languages. He was said to have learned at least eight more before he died in 2019. Herning was ousted from the Guin- ness Book of World Records by a hyperpolyglot who claimed to speak 59 languages — but who mostly disappeared from the limelight after a TV appear- ance in which he failed to answer questions in a number of those languages. Some believe he’s a fraud; others think he simply panicked under the pressure. Still, many of the best-known hyperpolyglots reject the question “How many languages do you speak?” because it ignores the many nuances of language learning. Timothy Doner did a Ted Talk about the media frenzy he endured after he was profiled by the New York Times as a teenager who could speak a dozen languages. TV producers didn’t want to hear about how language mastery was about far more than parroting phrase books.

called to confirm their January appoint- ment, he quietly explained that there was something about himself that he’d never told them. That he rarely told anyone. And, well, a reporter was writing a story about it. Could he please bring her along? Now as they listen to Vaughn discuss the porousness of wool, and the differ- ence between Scotchgard and sanitizer, they can’t help but look at him different- ly. Once the stool stain is solved, Kelly just has to ask. “So, how many languages do you speak?” “Oh, goodness,” Vaughn says. “Eight, fluently.” “Eight?” Kelly marvels. “Eight,” Vaughn confirms. English, Spanish, Bulgarian, Czech, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Slovak. “But if you go by like, different grades of how much conversation,” he explains, “I know about 25 more.” Vaughn glances at me. He is still underselling his abilities. By his count, it is actually 37 more languages, with at least 24 he speaks well enough to carry on lengthy conversations. He can read and write in eight alphabets and scripts. He can tell stories in Italian and Finnish and American Sign Language. He’s teaching himself Indigenous languages, from Mexico’s Nahuatl to Montana’s Salish. The quality of his accents in Dutch and Catalan dazzle people from the Netherlands and Spain. In a city where diplomats and embas- sies abound, where interpreters can command six-figure salaries at the State Department or the International Mon- etary Fund, where language proficiency is résumé rocket fuel, Vaughn was a savant with a secret. “A real, live polyglot,” Kelly said. I’d never heard of that word — mean- ing, a person who can speak several languages — before meeting Vaughn. But Kelly, who dabbles in Cantonese, Manda- rin and “beer in most languages,” had seen polyglots on YouTube, promising that anyone can become multilingual if they try. Far more unusual are the world’s “hyperpolyglots,” people who, by one expert’s definition, can speak 11 languages or more. The higher the number, the rarer the person. But there have been many documented cases of such linguis- tic legends, each one raising questions about the limits of human potential — the same questions I had about Vaughn. How did he get this way? And what was going on in his brain? But also: why was he cleaning carpets for a living? To Vaughn, all of that is missing the point. He’s not interested in impressing anyone. He only counted his languages because I asked him to. He understands that he seems to remember names, numbers, dates and sounds far better than most people. Even to him, that has always been a mystery. But his reason for dedicating his life to learning so many languages has not. “I see a couple more spots on the rug,” Vaughn says. “Do I have permission to treat them?” He’s uncomfortable with all this attention. He gets down on his hands and knees. He turns on the carpet-cleaning machine, and then it’s too loud for anyone to speak.

H

e thought, at first, that there were two languages. English, like his dad spoke, and Spanish like his mom spoke. Vaughn liked visiting his family in Orizaba, Mexico, liked the way the Spanish words sounded in his mouth. But growing up in Maryland, he often tried not to use them. He didn’t want to feel even more different than the other kids. He was already browner than they. He already didn’t understand why they laughed at certain things, or why they seemed to be able to follow instruc- tions from the teacher that made no sense to him. Spanish was his first secret. When some distant cousins of his dad’s came to visit from Belgium, they used words different than Vaughn had ever heard. Vaughn became more and more frustrated that once again, he couldn’t understand. “I was like, ‘I want that power,’ ” Vaughn remembers. From then on, he was entranced by every language he encountered. His mom’s French record albums. A German dictionary he found at one of his dad’s handyman jobs. A boy from the Soviet Union who joined his junior high class. By then, one of Vaughn’s favorite places was the library. He checked out a begin- ner’s guide to Russian. Soon after, he overheard a Russian woman in a grocery store. Hello, how are you? Vaughn asked. He explained that he was trying to learn Russian. He liked the look he put on that woman’s face.

SMITH FROM A

‘Not only a

big brain,

but a

big heart’

PHOTOS BY ASTRID RIECKEN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Conversational Able to have deep conversations on a wide range of subjects, sometimes have to pause to think of words, can read and write Croatian | Finnish | Italian | Latvian Nahuatl | Serbian

Some familiarity Knows around 100 words and many introductory phrases Mongolian | Vietnamese Tz otzil | Z apotec

Vaughn’s languages

Hyperpolyglots like Vaughn have varying levels of expertise in the languages they speak. Here’s how Vaughn defines his abilities.

Listen to Vaughn speak multiple languages online at wapo.st/hyperpolyglot

FROM TOP: Vaughn Smith calms a dog named Schroeder while he cleans carpets at a home in Alexandria, Va.

Sandra Vargas, Vaughn’s mother, noticed her son’s talent for language the first time she took him to visit family in Mexico.

A family photograph shows Smith as a child. He often felt like he didn’t fit in.

Smith, left, and co-worker Tim Mohepath work on a carpet- cleaning job in the D.C. suburbs. Vaughn rarely mentions his affinity for languages to his clients.

The Washington Post - USA (2022-04-10)

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