There may be more than one person in Toronto who excels as a figure skater, graphic designer, martial artist, mixologist and university teaching assistant.
But if so, there’s only one who — on top of all that — speaks 11 languages.
Xin Yi Lim was born and raised in Malaysia, where multilingualism is the norm and locals “mix and match” languages in conversation. Within her own family, English, Malay, Mandarin and Cantonese are all regularly spoken. “And because my dad worked in Indonesia for about 15 years, we picked that up too,” she says with a smile.
Today, Lim is completing her master’s degree in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Department of Spanish & Portuguese, specializing in Hispanic linguistics with a collaborative specialization in Diaspora & Transnational Studies.
Although she first enrolled in life sciences at U of T with the intention of becoming a cardiac surgeon, Lim soon switched to a specialist program in Spanish. One of her required courses dealt with linguistic varieties of Spanish. “And that’s where I first met Laura Colantoni,” she says. “She’s an amazing professor and her course was so intriguing. So I decided to pursue linguistics, and took more courses with her.”
With room to take electives, Lim decided to challenge herself by taking a new language course every year; so far, she’s added French, Turkish, Portuguese, Italian and Swahili.
By next year, Lim hopes to have mastered her twelfth tongue: Arabic. “I’m so interested to learn it,” she says. “It’s one of the most diverse and popular languages in Toronto, but the script is really challenging. That one requires time.”
A “hyperpolyglot” is generally defined as a person who speaks six or more languages. Although the only language Lim speaks, reads and writes to perfection is English, she can ably converse in the 10 others she has learned.
Her linguistic journey began at the age of 12, when she started studying Spanish and became a devoted competitor on her school’s Language Perfect (now known as Education Perfect) team. The online language-learning platform holds an international competition each year for budding linguists.
Shortly before that she also started figure skating, which soon led her to compete with the Malaysian junior national team. “Skating was one of the biggest motivators for me to learn Turkish,” she says, recalling a happy encounter with the Turkish national team at a training camp in Switzerland. Lim’s athletic career runs parallel to her scholastic accomplishments: a former figure skater with the Varsity Blues, she’s taught skating in Malaysia and Canada, and also holds a 1st Kyu in Kyokushinkan karate.
Languages have opened doors to so many friendships and work opportunities for me. Learning them is a genuine way of creating connection.
Her next ambition is to perform internationally as a skater with Disney on Ice, where she’ll no doubt meet others who’ll inspire her to learn a thirteenth language.
Right now though, she’s busy completing her graduate degree. The recipient of many academic awards, Lim was recently shortlisted for a Teaching Excellence Award in honour of her work as a TA in Spanish for Beginners. Her thesis examines how Spanish evolves and changes for bilingual Colombians in Toronto.
“Toronto’s Latin American population is so diverse,” she says, “and the more time one spends living in Toronto, the more someone from a given country deviates from their original way of speaking the language. It’s almost to the point where there could be a ‘Toronto’ version of Spanish emerging that combines different varieties into one.”
Lim says that effortless slaloming in and out of languages is common in polyglots, “because there are so many words in a given language that don’t translate into any other. You can translate language, but you can’t translate culture, which is carried by language. So when you learn another language, you’re really expanding your cognitive load — and that in turn helps you learn your next language.”
The intellectual advantages of acquiring new tongues are many, and Lim’s academic success attests to all of them. But she says the biggest benefit of all has been human connection.
“Nelson Mandela said: ‘If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.’ After I learned that saying, I never saw languages in the same light. I realized that even if I could only say a couple of words in somebody else’s language, it would let them know how much time, compassion and effort I have for understanding other cultures.”
In Lim’s future, the arts, athletics and academics are all sure to play equal parts — and so too will languages.
“Languages have opened doors to so many friendships and work opportunities for me,” she says. “Learning them is a genuine way of creating connection.”