▼ Barty Crouch the Polyglot: How can Barty Crouch, Sr. speak more than 200
languages?
▼ The Other, Other Minister: Who attempted to defenestrate Minister
Fudge?
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(and ignore) these ideas to your heart's content. This is just an exploration of the possibilities.
Bagman turned most cheerfully back to Mr. Weasley.
“Couldn't do me a brew, I suppose? I'm keeping an eye out for Barty Crouch. My Bulgarian opposite number's making difficulties, and I can't understand a word he's saying. Barty'll be able to sort it out. He speaks about a hundred and fifty languages.”
“Mr. Crouch?” said Percy, suddenly abandoning his look of poker-stiff disapproval and positively writhing with excitement. “He speaks over two hundred! Mermish and Gobbledegook and Troll ...”
How does this work? The quick explanation would be that people are mistaken, but this doesn't work so well. If it were just Percy Weasley, I would suggest that he's exaggerating because he's so enamored with Crouch, and perhaps that's why he corrects Bagman with a bigger number, but it's hard to see why Bagman would give an inflated number. Whether or not he's correct, he probably believes that he's correct, which suggests that knowing one hundred and fifty languages is at least plausible.
An alternative to the quick explanation is that Percy and Bagman say such things because Crouch himself lied about his abilities. We must still ask ourselves why anybody would consider this plausible, but the diplomat John Bowring said that he knew two hundred languages, and though some people have called bullshit on that claim, others believed him.
Some fanfics suggest magic: There are charms, translating earrings, or “language lozenges” or something else that make learning another language easy. This opens up other questions, like “Why isn't this magical solution used more widely?” Offloading everything onto a spell also means that nobody should think highly of Crouch for knowing one or two hundred languages.
But perhaps magic hastens, rather than grants, the acquisition of another language, so that Crouch's linguistic prowess is akin to learning half a dozen languages the Muggle way: difficult and worthy of mention but in no way impossible. We might wonder why language lozenges aren't used by Hogwarts students, but (1) they might not be effective or safe for a developing mind and (2) Harry never tries to learn another language or discuss with Hermione what her Study of Ancient Runes class was like, so for all we know, Hogwarts students do use magic to speed up the acquisition of another language.
Other possibilities are that language-learning magic involves…
The third solution has to do with the lines that we draw (and don't draw) between languages. Rioplatense is a dialect of Spanish, Portuguese is universally considered a language in its own right, and Aragonese used to be classified as a Spanish dialect but in recent times is more often considered a language that is closely related to, but distinct from, Spanish.
We can talk about the precise differences between Aragonese, Rioplatense, Spanish, and Portuguese, and how similar one is or isn't to another, but the biggest factor may well be Max Weinrich's dictum that “a language is a dialect with an army and navy.” We might also add, “or a dialect that wants an army and navy” — nationalism often plays a big part in determining whether something gets classified as a language or not, even if the proponents of X-as-language haven't yet established an independent government.
When Percy says that Barty Crouch speaks two hundred languages, he mentions languages like “Mermish” and “Troll,” but there are probably dozens of languages that we might call “Mermish,” just like saying that somebody speaks “Chinese” only probably tells you what language they really speak. Also, Percy is referring to languages which he probably considers to be exotic (note that these are all nonhuman languages), but it could be the case that the majority of Crouch's languages are rather humdrum.
How fluent is Crouch, anyway? If I can say hello, ask for directions, and briefly comment on the weather in French and Vietnamese, then you might say that I speak these languages, albeit in a limited fashion. If Crouch is fluent in a dozen languages and can hold a five minute conversation (but no more) in another two hundred languages, well, that's certainly impressive and Crouch has every right to brag about it if he's so inclined but it doesn't beggar belief. People who can hold extended conversations in fifty languages are rare but they do exist.
In the first chapter of HBP, “The Other Minister,” we learn that the current Prime Minister — presently serving in 1996 — was preceded by a man:
“I must say, you're taking it a lot better than your predecessor. He tried to throw me out of the window, thought I was a hoax planned by the opposition.”
It is typically assumed that Fudge is speaking with John Major, the U.K.'s Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997, but Major's predecessor was Margaret Thatcher, which presents us with two problems:
If we take these facts as valid then we have to conclude that Muggle history is not our history. It diverged no later than 1990, and perhaps earlier than that. I've outlined a few possibilities below:
The Prime Minister in HBP is not John Major. When John Major became Prime Minister in 1990, it was expected that he was going to lead the Conservatives in defeat and that Neil Kinnock of the Labour Party would succeed him. The would-be defenestrator would then be John Major.
Michael Heseltine won leadership of the Conservative Party — for a time. When Heseltine went head to head against Thatcher in 1990, he won 40% of the vote (out of a pool of 372 votes). It's conceivable that he might have won, and just as conceivable that his success might have been short-lived, losing either to Labour in 1990 or to a subsequent leadership challenge (perhaps from John Major, and perhaps not).
Margaret Thatcher never saw the year 1990. Up until Halloween, 1981 was a bad, bad year for Magical Britain, and Voldemort never seemed closer to victory. In order to delegitimize the magical government by proving their inability to manage and protect their Muggle counterparts, Voldemort murdered Margaret Thatcher. This is why the Prime Minister was assigned a wizarding bodyguard in 1996 and not before — assassinating a major Muggle politician was so beyond the pale that, even after Voldemort did it, nobody seriously thought that someone else would follow his example. Perhaps he was considered an outlier just because nobody else would risk the consequences: “Sure, you could kill the PM but we'll definitely find you and then send you to Azkaban forever” works great until you're dealing with “the most feared Dark wizard for a hundred years.”
It's unclear what would happen if Margaret Thatcher died in office; parliamentary politics are often less straightforward than in the U.S., where you could kill a dozen people in the line of succession and still know who was next. But we can speculate:
Besides Voldemort, Thatcher might've also died in 1984, when the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Five people died in our history, and if Thatcher had needed to visit her hotel bathroom just shy of 3 a.m., there would have been six.