Was the Philippine National Hero, Jose Rizal, a True Hyperolyglot?

(Translated by Google Gemini AI, proofread by the author)

During a recent trip back to Asia, I happened to transit through the Philippines and saw an advertisement for a “Free Manila Transit Tour” with a photo of the Rizal Park. Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work out, so I spent my time at the airport instead, researching the “multilingual legend” of the Philippine national hero, Jose Rizal.

Rizal was born in the late 19th century. Although Thomas Edison had already invented the phonograph by then, this “high technology” wasn’t yet widespread. Consequently, Rizal left behind no voice recordings. We can only verify the legends of his linguistic talent through historical documents and his personal diaries.

Legend has it that Rizal was “proficient” in over 20 languages, including his native Spanish and Tagalog, four to five other Philippine languages, various European tongues like German, French, and English, and even East Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese.

His proficiency in Philippine languages is likely undisputed. Rizal was a linguist who advocated for the formal orthography of Philippine languages, arguing they should not be written according to Spanish spelling rules. He didn’t just speak them; he studied them. Thus, we can safely credit him with at least 3 to 5 fluent Philippine languages. Whether these languages — such as Ilocano, Tagalog, Cebuano, and Subanon — are closely related is a discussion for another time.

Since the Philippines was still a Spanish colony at the time and his family was a prominent “Mestizo” family, Spanish was effectively one of his native languages. Later, he studied in Europe and completed his professional ophthalmology training in Heidelberg, Germany. He exerted great effort to master German, so we can assume that his proficiency was near-native. In addition to Spanish and German, he likely had a good command of English and French; for someone whose mother tongue is Spanish and who has a passion for linguistics, mastering these related and practical languages should have been a breeze. As for his proficiency in other European languages, accounts are vague and lack conviction. It is more likely he could read them or possessed only lower-intermediate conversational skills — what we would call A2 or B1 levels today.

But did Rizal know any Asian languages outside of the Philippines? If you look at Chinese sources, writers often emphasize his “Chinese heritage,” assuming he must have known Chinese or various dialects. In reality, this doesn’t align with historical facts. His family may have had the lineage, but they were culturally and linguistically colonized long before his time; the languages spoken at home were Tagalog and Spanish.

Rizal’s study of Chinese and Japanese happened later in his adult life. For instance, his diary contains an amusing entry about how he “learned Japanese very quickly” while in Tokyo. However, synthesizing all available data, his proficiency in Chinese and Japanese was likely not very high; it’s debatable whether he even reached a B1 level.

Finally, he studied classical languages like Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, and Ancient Hebrew. However, as these are “dead languages,” they remain academic pursuits. Knowledge of these doesn’t equate to “fluency,” so they shouldn’t be included in the final count.

Based on the evidence, we get the following results:

• Native or Near-Native: Spanish, Tagalog, German
• Fluent: French, English, and 3+ Philippine languages
• Fair or Rudimentary: Chinese (including dialects), Japanese, several European languages(?), Malay(?), Arabic(?)

Historical fact differs from legend. The claim that Rizal “fluently” spoke over 20 languages is historically inaccurate. Furthermore, the languages he truly mastered belonged to the same language families as his mother tongues. Even so, being able to master about 10 languages across two families (Austronesian and Indo-European) is an impressive feat. It is a pity he only lived into his 30s and was executed by the Spanish before seeing the success of the Philippine Revolution. Had he lived a full life, I believe he truly could have reached fluency in 20 languages.

Figures from the late 19th century like Rizal or Gu Hongming are often portrayed by nationalists as “multilingual national heroes,” described as leaving Europeans in awe. In reality, these stories should be taken with a grain of salt. To this day, I find the story of “Gu Hongming reading English newspapers upside down” to be the most hilarious — it’s the same kind of myth-making as the “Boxer Rebellion spirit soldiers” or the story of “a certain man from Zhejiang watching fish swim upstream.” (Refering to an article about Chang Kai-Shak that every Taiwanese primary school kid had to read)

Personally, among the historic figures who could speak many languages in Asia, the person I admire most is Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh.” Unlike Rizal, Uncle Ho grew up in a strictly monolingual environment; he was a Confucian scholar(儒生) who studied the Four Books and Five Classics. In the second half of his life, he self-taught English, French, Thai, Cantonese, and Mandarin, using these languages to further his revolution. Although he was a very controversial historic figure, he was still a truly accomplished, practical polyglot. Kudos to both Hu and Rizal