On the day the waves rose up in the Indian Ocean, there appeared the first of only two obituaries on a modest man from the Highlands who had deep knowledge of the languages spoken by those swept away — Thai, Sinhala, Indonesian and English. His name was George Campbell, and he could apparently speak and write in 44 languages. Once listed in the Guinness Book of Records as “the world’s greatest linguist”, he worked for the BBC World Service for 40 years, retiring as head of the Romanian section.

Campbell, who was 92 when he died, appears never to have been written about in his lifetime, and the World Service has not even mentioned his passing in its own output. Yet his gifts were extraordinary. When he was a child, a dog attacked him, leaving him with a stammer. His teachers thought he was slow and sat him at the back of the class. There, from books he found at Inverness fish market, he taught himself the basics of Spanish, Portuguese and Danish, as well as the French and German on the syllabus. His natural bent became his life’s work. In retirement, for fun, he taught himself Basque.

Some may dismiss that as arcane and obsessive, the product of a vanished era of the gifted amateur. Does English not now dominate the globe? Has it not marginalised foreign tongues? Campbell lived long enough to see that such arguments were misplaced. “Other lan- guages are actually growing in importance,” argues Chris Westcott, director of BBC Monitoring, which (with some help from the Americans) listens to the world’s news agencies and radio and television output in 100 languages, including highly sensitive ones such as Korean and Uighur, which is spoken by a Muslim minority in western China. “This is because the web has given a global footprint to languages once confined to a relatively small area.” The World Service itself broadcasts in 43 languages (including English, though not Korean or Uighur). What is less well known is that each of them can be listened to on, and has a section of, the BBC World Service website — an array of strange scripts and fonts.

Politics, as well as the web, gives buoyancy to languages. The war of words rarely calls a ceasefire. For all international broadcasters, of which the BBC is only one, Arabic has become vastly more important as a result of 9/11 and the Iraq war. (It was the first of the BBC’s foreign- language ser-vices, launched in 1938 at the behest of the Foreign Office to counter Mussolini’s Arabic broadcasts denouncing “British imperialism”.) The break- up of both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has led to the emergence of new republics with a renewed nationalistic impulse, expressed in languages such as Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Macedonian.

So, even if there are no George Campbells any more, what he stood for — a respect for languages — is still of vital importance in the radio world. “I don’t think we have anyone here at Caversham who can speak 44 languages, but quite a few have mas- tered six or seven,” says Westcott. “Being barely literate in one, I’m rather in awe of them. I think sometimes we’re in danger of under- estimating the linguistic abilities of the British.”

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