George Campbell (linguist)

George L. Campbell (1912–December 15, 2004) was a Scottish polyglot and a linguist at the BBC for many years, author of the Compendium of the World's Languages (Routledge, 2000), as well as Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets (Routledge, 1997). He was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records during the 1980s as one of the world's greatest living linguists, could speak and write fluently in at least 44 languages and had a working knowledge of perhaps 20 others.

He was born in Dingwall, Scotland, as a son of the overseer of gardens and dells for Lord and Lady Seaforth, heirs to the Braham Castle Estates. The Campbell family lived on the main estate, near the castle.

Campbell’s sister, Aileen Campbell McCausey, who emigrated to the United States in 1947 noted that her older brother had a slight stammer from an early age. Right through his schooldays, his sister recalled, teachers thought young Campbell a dunce because of his stammer. They relegated him to the back of the classroom and ignored him, which allowed him to devour language books on his own.

Sitting in the back of the classroom, he taught himself Spanish and Italian before learning French and German at secondary school. When he applied to the University of Edinburgh, he found out he needed to know a classic language, so he taught himself six years of Latin in a year and won the school’s Latin prize. He found his language books burrowing through secondhand bookstalls at a fish market.

He studied German at the University of Leipzig and mastered eight other languages from fellow students who had come to Leipzig from Central and Eastern Europe. In 1937, he received a degree in librarianship from London University and became assistant librarian in the School of Slavonic Studies. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Mr. Campbell was called to the military but was immediately transferred to the BBC World Service as a language supervisor.

He retired in 1974 as head of the Romanian Service. Living in retirement in Brighton, he taught himself classical Chinese, Basque, and several other languages. He also translated academic works, mainly from Russian and German. Mr. Campbell also played piano and taught himself tensor calculus. ("I wanted to know what the cosmologists were talking about," he told a former BBC colleague.)

Another BBC colleague, George Mikes, recalled in The Guardian newspaper that he had made a point of asking native speakers at the BBC about Mr. Campbell's facility. "All said that his knowledge was not only adequate but amazing," Mikes wrote.

Douglas Dearie, Mr. Campbell's nephew and a Bowie software engineer, recalled his uncle as a gentle man with a wry sense of humor who, in his soft-spoken Scottish burr, loved telling stories. Dearie recalled that Mr. Campbell and his wife traveled the world but didn't like to go where they already knew the language.

He died of pneumonia on December 15 2004 in Brighton, England, at the age of 92.

References

• George Campbell, fluent in 44 languages (Boston.com, News)
• George Campbell Dies; Spoke 44 Languages (The Washington Post)
• George L. Campbell, 92; Fluent in More Than 40 Languages (Los Angeles Times)
• George Campbell (Herald Scotland)
• George Campbell, linguist (The Scotsman)