One important key to the myth that tends to be built up around polyglots is the vaporous quality of numbers of languages. How many languages can Buttigieg actually speak? His campaign confirmed eight when I reached out: English, Norwegian, Spanish, French, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, and Dari. A specific count of languages, though, can also be an unreliable credential for any polyglot, because a language isn’t a defined unit of measure.

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At a certain point, it’s pegged more to people’s fascination than to actual language abilities. In my 2012 book, Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, one hyperpolyglot I profiled wouldn’t tell me how many languages he could speak, because he knew he’d lose control. “I would walk in the party and say I spoke nine languages,” he said, “and by the end of the night I would hear that I spoke 24.”

In the media glare, this fraught metric becomes even more unstable. Buttigieg’s linguistic repertoire could continue to swell or diversify, not because he claims more languages but because others do it for him. As soon as Buttigieg popped up on political media, anecdotes poured in about his swooping in out of nowhere with his exotic languages. Last month, the writer Anand Giridharadas tweeted that Buttigieg’s Norwegian appeared “like a magic trick.” A South Bend emergency-room doctor sent a message on Twitter to the BuzzFeed writer Ashley C. Ford about the time the mayor materialized in a local hospital and translated in Arabic for a patient. According to the message, Buttigieg had been listening to the police scanner and had heard that an Arabic translator was needed.

The Onion has already joked that Buttigieg “stunned a campaign crowd Wednesday by speaking to manufacturing robots in fluent binary.” (This seems to be an allusion to the most famous movie hyperpolyglot, C-3PO, who is “fluent in over 6 million forms of communication”—or so he claims.)

No matter the historical period, polyglot mythmaking has thrived on anecdotes of isolated encounters and mini-spectacles. In 1820, a Hungarian named Baron Franz Xaver von Zach visited an Italian cardinal, Giuseppe Mezzofanti, who by that point was a world-famous hyperpolyglot. Von Zach reported that Mezzofanti first addressed him in Hungarian, next in several dialects of German, and then spoke English to an Englishman and Russian and Polish to a visiting Russian prince. Mezzofanti’s reputation as “a monster of languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking polyglott,” as Lord Byron enthused, was a litany of such instances.

Modern academic linguists have traded similar stories about Ken Hale, an MIT professor who was said to speak 50 languages. They retell how a clerk at an Irish embassy once begged Hale to switch to English, because his Irish was better than hers, and how Hale showed up in an Australian Aboriginal village at 10 a.m. to begin fieldwork and was conversing fluently by lunchtime. (Hale died in 2001.)