Alex Rawlings
Alex Rawlings is a polyglot and in 2012 was named Britain’s most multilingual student after being found fluent in 11 languages.
Alex was raised semi-bilingually as his mother is half-Greek and, growing up in cosmopolitan London, he grew used to hearing many different languages. Furthermore, when Alex was four, his father took a job in Japan, exposing him to Japanese for four years.
Alex spent summers in Greece and, as an only child, was forced to try to make friends with other children from all over the world and in this way improved his Greek, but was also introduced to German, Dutch, French, Spanish and Italian.
In addition to learning French and German at school, at 14 Alex started learning Dutch, which was quickly followed by Afrikaans, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Hebrew.
He studied for a degree in German and ‘ab initio’ Russian with Yiddish at St Catherine’s College, Oxford (2010-14), during which also studied in Yaroslavl, Russia, Tel Aviv, Israel and interned at the Greek Embassy in Berlin.
Alex’s first book HOW TO SPEAK ANY LANGUAGE was published in 2017 with How To Books. He then wrote FROM AMOURETTE TO ZAL: BIZARRE AND BEAUTIFUL WORDS FROM EUROPE (FOR WHEN ENGLISH JUST WON’T DO) which was published by The History Press in 2018.