Stephen is a leadership and personal development coach. He has coached entrepreneurs, managers, artists, students and individuals in the U.S., Canada, Italy, Spain, and Germany. He is certified in Brain-Based Coaching by the NeuroLeadership Institute and holds the qualification of Associate Certified Coach (ACC) with the International Coach Federation (ICF), the largest professional coaching organization in the world. Brain-based coaching is about helping the client to make positive changes in their professional and personal life by improving their thinking. Stephen has worked for over 25 years in the tech and finance sectors and has extensive international experience, having worked in Europe, North America and Latin America. On a more personal note, people tell him that he is fun to be around, an explorer and incurably positive… at least on his good days! His favorite question is “How can I raise the energy?”

Georges Awaad is passionate about languages since the age of 11 and can currently hold a conversation in 18 of them. He has been involved in many language-related activities, such as an international Mandarin speech and culture competition (the Chinese Bridge), the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL), and, of course, LangFest and other polyglot events. He will start studying Linguistics this fall in McGill University and is thinking of working in Computational Linguistics in the future, maybe with some research and teaching on the side to help with the documentation and revitalization of endangered languages.

I study Political Science and German and REES (Russian and East-European Studies) at the University of Pittsburgh. I was born and raised in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and moved to New England at the age of six, where I have lived there until college. I studied Japanese in high school, and try to maintain it, though I now study German at Pitt. I recently returned from a seven-month long semester in Southwestern Germany, and had a wicked neat opportunity to really go abroad for the first time, and improve my German there. I hope to further hone my German and eventually take on Swedish and the other Germanic languages as well as Czech and Ukrainian and the other Slavic languages; and heading further east: Korean, Mandarin,Tyvan, Kazakh, and Turkish. I enjoy learning languages, classical literature, overtone singing (khöömii), calligraphy, cooking and traveling.

BigBong is a social media entertainer specializing in audio-visual content. He is known for imitating various accents in different languages. As a comedian, his main approach in learning new languages is to study the cultural and non-verbal communication.

Nella Buffmire has taught Spanish and English as a Second Language for 8 years. She completed her Master’s degree in Social Intervention and Immigration while teaching overseas. This allowed her to work with immigrants in southern Spain in the “invernaderos” (greenhouses). She taught English as a Second Language and provided assistance with common household technologies to help the participants integrate into Spanish culture. She also taught children and adults privately during the time she was completing her Master’s in Spain. After moving to Texas she taught a group of middle-aged women English as Second Language after completing her Master’s degree. She decided to start a tutoring company for Spanish and English. She has worked with children and adults from ages 4-75. Each student that comes from a different part of the world presents unique challenges. Her 12 year love affair with Spanish has shaped her professional and personal growth.

Dr Kai L. Chan is a Distinguished Fellow at INSEAD. Previously he was a special adviser to the UAE federal government on competitiveness and statistics, where he focused on that country’s positioning on global performance indices. Prior to his stint in the UAE, Dr Chan served as an associate and the in-house economist for a consumer finance merchant banking firm in Manhattan. Before that, he worked in the Singapore office of a global management consulting firm. Chan’s expertise/research cover education, income distribution, migration, government & policy, and performance measurement. He is the creator of the Power Language Index, Gender Progress Index, and Intelligence Capital Index. Dr Chan holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto and PhD from Princeton University. Kai grew up in Toronto, Canada, but currently resides in Montreal. He speaks English, French, Cantonese, Mandarin and German, and is currently learning Russian.

The Magdalen Islands native and #locationindependant translator “Marie à Léonce à Félix à Avila du Bassin” is an adamant advocate for gender-neutral writing, etymologies with eyebrow-raising backstories and larger-than-life words.

Conor Clyne is a polyglot who speaks over 10 languages and specializes in maximising the effectiveness of speaking local languages to create a unique travel lifestyle experience. Recently, he has focussed on traveling Eastern Europe and learning their languages. He produces regular travel vlogs, as well as, advice videos on language learning, travel and dating in countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Romania via his website and YouTube channel (“Tsar Experience with Conor Clyne”). There, he has been documenting his exploits learning Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian and Belarusian, all while teaching his viewers how to travel like a local to avoid tourist traps, apply these languages to meet and connect with more local people and ultimately create a more epic, authentic and romantic travel experience.

Jessica Coon is Associate Professor of Linguistics at McGill University and holds the Canada Research Chair in Syntax and Indigenous Languages. Her research focuses on topics in syntactic theory, with a special focus on languages of the Mayan family. In addition to theoretical work, she leads collaborative language documentation and revitalization projects with indigenous communities in Canada and Latin America. In summer 2015 she worked as the scientific consultant for the film Arrival, which stars Amy Adams as a linguistic fieldworker who is recruited by the military to decipher the language of the recently-arrived Heptapods. Since the film, Dr. Coon has helped create a public dialogue about linguistics and endangered languages through interviews and written work in outlets including Wired Magazine, The Washington Post, and CBC’s The Current.

Hélène Cormier is a French and English teacher with over 20 years’ experience. She grew up in New-Brunswick and moved to Montreal when she was 20. She became a language teacher when she went to teach English in Korea in 1996, where she was bit simultaneously by the teaching bug and the travel bug. Her focus as a teacher has always been to help her students become fluent. She’s worked for several language schools, Alliance Française de Shanghai, Shanghai American School, Immigration Québec, and Université de Montréal. More recently, she taught corporate English for a videogame company in Seoul, South Korea. She’s also been teaching online for over four years and loves the freedom it gives her! These days, she creates travel videos to help people learn French in a fun, engaging manner. She speaks French, English, and Spanish, as well as a little Mandarin, Korean, and Bulgarian.

Tobias is the co-founder of the language exchange community Tandem (www.tandem.net). Since launching the Tandem mobile app in 2015, more than five million members around the world have joined the community to practice 160 different languages together, including 12 sign languages. Both Apple and Google have given the Tandem app their prestigious “Best of the Year” awards.

Nat Dinham has been the Languages Director of uTalk since 2012 and has produced all of the app’s 141 languages. She works tirelessly with native speakers to find the most appropriate translations for each language course, and records native speakers in the uTalk studio to get the most authentic pronunciation for the app. Her linguistic education gave her the necessary ability to understand that languages do operate in different ways, but it has been a detailed and absorbing experience to spend so much time working so closely with such a huge range of languages from across the globe. She’s looking forward to recording uTalk’s next 100 languages.

Professor of phonology with a specialization in nasality, variation and the phonetics-phonology interface. Interest in French regional languages, Dogon languages (Mali) and Internet linguistics. Received 2 MAs (French Linguistics, Linguistics) and PhD (Linguistics) from Indiana University.

Sean Dunn is an Arabic student and the founder of wordi.com. After completing several Arabic courses and finding a lack of resources for intermediate to advanced learners, he had the idea to use short foreign-language videos from some of the biggest brands in the world to build a “playground for language learners”.

Rony Gao is a practicing Chinese-English conference interpreter and cross-cultural consultant based in Toronto and serving clients worldwide. He has worked for a wide array of political and business leaders. Rony is also a podcast host, test-preparation coach and education entrepreneur.

Jennifer is a lifelong polyglot who lives out her love for languages every day. She holds a master’s degree in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science, and is a career language technologist, writer, and Japanologist (EAJS). As a former language educator and curriculum developer for the School of International Liberal Studies at Waseda, University in Tokyo, Japan, she believes that mindset is very much a success factor in language learning, and this informs her teaching and learning advice. By intersecting techniques from disciplines such as Therapeutic and Applied Psychologies with language teaching method, she hopes that language learners can become more self-empowered to grow and thrive. In addition, she is an advocate for the use of language technologies to help preserve, document, and revive marginalised, endangered, and indigenous languages. Jennifer has been working for over 15 years as a private language, technology, creative, and marketing consultant. She is currently based in Berlin, Germany.

Mihai is a self-taught software engineer, artist and entrepreneur. He created Vernaly, an online language portal with interactive language courses in 2016. He co-founded Nao Vocab, a vocabulary app for reading physical books. The app will be launched in January 2019 and will help intermediate language self-learners expand their vocabulary by minimizing the input time and increasing retention of new vocabulary while reading.

Alan Hall has been teaching English as a Second Language at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit since 1998, where he also taught Spanish for ten years and where he teaches English Linguistics, covering such topics as bilingualism and multilingualism, code-switching, language contact, language laws, and second language education. He holds a Master’s in Second Language Education from McGill University and wrote a guide for parents entitled ‘‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting Your Child to Grow up Multilingual in Montreal’’ (unpublished). Alan is the father of a twelve-year-old boy who speaks English, Spanish and French. In 2012, Alan was a volunteer organizer for the 11th International Conference of The Language Awareness Association (ALA 2012) ‘‘Language Awareness for Our Multicultural World’’ held at Concordia University. In 2016, he presented ‘‘WTF: Swearing in Several Languages’’ at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit during their Printemps de la culture series. (The theme was taboos.)

Dick Howeson co-founded uTalk in 1991 after he discovered he wasn’t very good at speaking languages and wanted to do something about it! The company – then called EuroTalk – was one of the first to offer language learning on CD-ROM, and as demand increased, the company added more languages to the range and moved into mobile apps. Fast-forward to 2018 and our cross-platform app uTalk has 141 languages from all over the globe. Dick’s mission is to help people make friends by learning the basics of another language, gaining the confidence to start talking without fear of embarrassment or making mistakes. The system he has developed enables people to do this from any of the languages uTalk offers, whether it’s learning French from Zulu or English from Korean: there are currently 18,000 language combinations, and it’s only going to grow.

I was born in Montreal of French and Egyptian parents. I’ve always loved languages and foreign cultures, having lived in France, Honduras, Bolivia, Germany, Ukraine and Cambodia. I was at least once on every continent.
I work as an IT analyst and project manager for the Health Ministry.

Michael Levi Harris is an American polyglot actor and writer, best-known in polyglot and language-learning communities as writer and star of the award-winning short film, The Hyperglot. Based in London and New York City, Michael has acted in over a dozen languages and over a dozen accents. In addition to The Hyperglot, his multilingual acting has been seen on the stage of the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene in New York City, heard on BBC4 Radio, and watched on screens around the world. Michael has narrated a number of audiobooks, most recently Darius The Great Is Not Okay, in which you can hear him voice a number of Persian-accented and Persian-speaking characters. Other recent acting work includes the British crime drama Endeavour, Benedict Cumberbatch’s mini-series Patrick Melrose, and the mini-series Foreign Skies. Michael trained at the prestigious Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London.

Ellen is a grammar freak, a former freelance writer, and a founder and principal of Syntaxis, a communication skills training firm based in New York City. Her website, Words & Worlds of New York, documents her experiences studying 20+ languages over the past decade. Ellen lives with her husband, Brandt Johnson, in a wildly polylingual apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and can often be found roaming around the city listening to language lessons.

Steve Kaufmann is a graduate of l’Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, France (1966), and a former Canadian Diplomat and forest industry executive. He is co-founder (with his son Mark), of LingQ.com, an online language learning system and community. Steve speaks 16 languages, has written a book called The Way of the Linguist, A Language Learning Odyssey, has a blog called The Linguist on Language, and a youtube channel under the name of lingosteve.

Shannon Kennedy is a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland where she gained both a Master’s degree in Music and a passion for language learning. She is the writer and language enthusiast behind Eurolinguiste, a website dedicated to sharing language and travel tips. Her language learning adventures began with Italian, German and French at university. She has has since added Croatian, Russian, Korean, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese at various levels to her repertoire.

Professor Emiko Kunitate has over 2 decades of experience teaching Japanese language to foreigners at Fu Jen University and the Language Training and Testing Center in Taipei, Taiwan. She left her native Japan when she was 28 years old and has been living abroad ever since, first in Taiwan, then in Canada since 1996.

Kyle is passionate about language learning and teaching through music, which happens to be his personal favorite learning method. He currently studies linguistics in Middlebury, Vermont, but spends all of his free time and money traveling and eating well in the meantime. He has big dreams of inspiring as many people as possible to learn languages through music by showing them how much more fun and efficient of a method it is. To pay for all this, he teaches English and German on italki and is constantly thinking of new ways to encourage everyone to learn languages in the way that best suits them.

Benny Lewis runs the world’s most popular language learning blog (1 million monthly visitors), “Fluent in 3 Months”, and has published an international best-selling book of the same title, as well as multiple “Language Hacking” courses with Teach Yourself. He graduated university in Dublin with a degree in Electronic Engineering and immediately embarked on a 13-year long journey across the world. Even though he only spoke English at the start of his travels, he has made a business around his rapid language learning adventures, even earning the title of National Geographic’s Traveler of the Year. He has also spoken at TEDx events, and speaks regularly for companies and universities.

Moti Lieberman is the host and producer of the Ling Space, a YouTube channel launched in 2014 with the goal of producing fun, accessible videos about linguistics. Since then, the channel has produced more than 100 videos on topics from theoretical linguistics like phonology, syntax, and semantics, and from applied linguistics like language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics, as well as interviews with prominent linguists. Prior to beginning work on the channel, Moti taught at Concordia University as a lecturer in Linguistics. He attended graduate school at McGill University in the Department of Linguistics, researching second language acquisition and comprehension, and presented his findings at numerous international conferences. Moti is an avid Japanophile, having lived in Japan for multiple years, and speaks Japanese at an advanced level.

Vladis Lim, originally from Moscow, Russia, had been learning one language a year during his university studies with Swahili being his 2nd foreign language after English. Installed in Montreal in 2013, he works as a journalist for an African francophone media since 2015. His educational background includes IT, management, economics, sociology and demography. Professionally, he’s also specialized in Southeast Asia since having learnt Indonesian in 2004 (other languages in progress include Vietnamese, Thai, Mandarin Chinese and Tagalog) and is often involved in international cultural and business projects in Asian and African countries. He speaks Russian, English, French, German, Swahili, Indonesian and Malay, some Spanish and Wolof.

Tamara Marie is a Certified Neurolanguage™ Coach and founder of SpanishConSalsa.com, a website that teaches Spanish through music. Tamara is a proud mom raising a bilingual child, Latin music lover, and self-described dance addict. Tamara is from the United States and speaks English, Spanish, and has started learning Brazilian Portuguese. Tamara is a lifelong learner and loves helping people learn languages.

Julie Morin is a communications advisor at the Translation Bureau’s Language Portal of Canada. She has over 11 years’ experience in the field: she graduated from the University of Sherbrooke in 2008 with a degree in communication, writing and multimedia, and has been a French certified editor since 2016. Julie is enthusiastic about giving people the tools they need to improve their oral and written communication at school and work. A seasoned speaker, she joined Toastmasters over 10 years ago to develop presentation techniques for connecting with audience members. Before becoming a proud member of the Language Portal, Julie made daily use of the site’s resources in her role as French revision team leader in a federal organization. She therefore knows the Portal’s writing tools better than anyone and will show you which resources you need to communicate effectively in a Canadian context. Get your questions ready!

Yuko Muto, M.D.

Dr. Yuko Muto is a Japanese physician born, raised and trained in Nagasaki, Japan. Although she had learned some English during her university years, her real language journey began when she married polyglot and LangFest organizer Tetsu Yung, had 3 little polyglot children (Ronnie, Nika and Akila) and left everything behind in Japan to immigrate to the French-speaking province of Quebec, Canada.

Ronnie Yung

Ronnie Yung was born on July 13, 2012 in Nagasaki, Japan, and is the oldest of the 3 children of Yuko Muto and Tetsu Yung. His language education has been based on the OPOL (One Person One Language) method, and today he speaks English, French, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

Organizer of SIFA, licensed Chinese teacher, former Chinese class lecturer at Université de Sherbrooke, M.A. in Didactics.

Elisa is a professional language teacher and language enthusiast. She teaches Italian, German, English, Spanish, Russian, French, Dutch, Catalan, Portuguese, Greek, Hindi, Arabic and Esperanto (at different levels). She is specialised in multilingual teaching (up to 10 languages in one course) and is a certified language examiner for English, Italian, Russian, French, German and Spanish. She has been teaching and living in several countries, holds two BAs in Translating and Interpreting, a MA in International Communication and a MA in Didactics She often gives presentations about language learning, multilingual teaching and learning, intercultural communication and organises workshops where you can start speaking one or more languages from the very first moment and have your first conversation after a few minutes (http://www.speakfromdayonewithelisa.com). She is also a language coach and can help you improving quickly in your languages.

Language learning enthusiast and world traveler. I currently speak English, French, and Spanish fluently. I also have an intermediate level in Gujarati & Mandarin. My future language goals are to add Hindi, Arabic, and Russian to the list of languages I speak. I document my journey on most major social media platforms as Azren the Language Nerd or @PolyglotAzren. For work, I primarily teach English, French, and Spanish both in-person and online.

A breaker of every stereotype one can give (except that he loves rice and wears glasses), Indonesian-American Fiel Sahir is a writer, speaker, and podcaster hailing from New York City. He began the Between 3 Worlds podcast to kill hate by building empathy through conversation. Conversations with people of staggeringly different points of view united to connect the world in their own special way. Guests have included actors, writers, TED Talk speakers, and others. He holds a BM in Classical Guitar performance from the New England Conservatory and a Master’s from the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf, Germany. Involved in the language sphere, he is the Director of International Outreach and Partnerships for Polyglot Indonesia and a contributor at Wikitongues. He has also led 20 teenagers on a Spanish Immersion trip with Putney Student Travel through Spain. He speaks English, Indonesian, French, Spanish, and German.

Chuck Smith is the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) and a co-founder of the in-person language exchange app, Amikumu and a co-founder Polyglot Gathering. He has also led the development of the Esperanto course for English speakers on Duolingo as well as founding the Esperanto version of Wikipedia. In 2015, he was awarded the Esperantisto de la Jaro (Esperanto speaker of the year) for his work on Duolingo. Currently over a million people are learning Esperanto on Duolingo’s Esperanto courses.

Kevin Sun is a journalist and programmer from New York City, currently working as a data journalist for The Real Deal, a real estate magazine. Born in the USA and raised in China, Kevin has studied over thirty languages with varying degrees of success, and hopes to put more of these languages to use in his journalism career in the future.

Born and raised in Germany, Anja from Alemania left her home country 9 years ago to work, live and study in various countries. She is the founder and CEO of ZALOA Languages, an online language school that works with native speakers from all over the world who teach languages online in a virtual classroom. In 2014, she moved to Mexico where she founded ZALOA Languages Cholula for offline classes in Mexico. Since 2016, she works as a language coach and conference speaker and launched her social media blog “Anja from Alemania” that has the aim to motivate non-Polyglots to start or continue learning foreign languages. As a language- and fitness enthusiast, she is currently working on her new project “Learn&Burn”, a fitness program that makes it possible to learn vocabulary through fitness workouts.

Agathe Tupula Kabola is a speech therapist, columnist, author, and lecturer at the University of Montreal. She has appeared in television and radio shows with a large audience, like Salut Bonjour on TVA and Marina Orsini on Radio-Canada. She can also be heard on the show Les Éclaireurs on the Radio-Canada Première channel. She is the founder of a multitherapy clinic called Proaction, a private multidisciplinary clinic in Saint-Laurent that offers services in speech therapy, occupational therapy, psychoeducation, and psychology. Her career, her writing, her conferences, and her interventions in the media all stem from the same source of motivation: being near people in need and providing families with practical and innovative tools to help them rapidly access the services they need. Such are her passion and her vision of service that she wishes to share with the population.

Ruth Valle has been a Spanish teacher for the last 31 years. She was named 2012 Monroe County and Sweetwater Area Teacher of the Year. Last year, she was one of the 2017 Great Global Project Challenge Awardees. She has presented in Washington, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Hong Kong on topics concerning teaching foreign languages with technology.

Curious about everything and eclectic by nature, Nicolas has long been passionate about languages. Born in France, he has spent over half of his life in Quebec and now lives in Montreal. His strong interest in international and language-related issues drove him to learn Esperanto a few years ago. He is now president of the Quebec Esperanto Society and vice president of the local committee for the 2020 World Esperanto Congress in Montreal. He is fluent in French, English, Esperanto and Spanish, can get by in Portuguese and German and has notions of several other languages. His educational background is in physics and in environmental management, and he now works for a renewable energy firm. A member of the LangFest team, he occasionally shares his thoughts, language-related or not, on his blog at ideesmultiples.ca. Nicolas is furthermore also interested in history, geography, politics, economics and philosophy. He enjoys city walks and conversation, whatever the language!

Lukas Van Vyve is a linguist, translator and interpreter from Belgium and the founder of The Polyglot Life and the 12 in 12 Challenge. He has taught thousands of language learners how to get to effortless conversations in their target language through the lexical approach, chunking and the power of observation. He runs online workshops on vocabulary acquisition and creating language learning routines, and hosts French, German, Spanish and Italian courses for independent language learners. Lukas has been featured on popular language learning blogs like I Will Teach You a Language, Lingholic, Memrise and has been a guest host on the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast.

After successfully completing a Bachelor’s degree in International Business Administration, Anja was indecisive between getting a Master’s degree or going travelling first. She decided for the latter – a decision which changed her life forever. In Thailand she started teaching English and German which showed her that her real passion is not business, but rather learning and teaching languages, and of course: Travelling.

She started the Youtube Channel Learn German with Anja which gained a huge following quite quickly. Having lived in several countries for several months, she speaks 4 languages: English, Spanish, German and French.

Her goal is to make language learning fun instead of boring and to teach with new methods, such as music and learning out live.

Tetsu Yung was born to a Taiwanese father and a Japanese mother and grew up in Taiwan before coming to Quebec at the age of 13. Through his living context and studying, he learned 10 languages, 5 of which he speaks fluently today. These languages have enriched Tetsu’s life, including family, career, and love.

Born in France from a German mother and a Japanese father, Anna grew up speaking French, German, and Japanese, to which she later added Italian and Spanish. For more than 25 years, she has been exploring the language of the body and the mind, and the fascinating relationship between movement, sound, breath, the brain, emotion, learning, creativity and stress management. 20 years ago she discovered Gaiayoga and the Vowel Chant – a form of active meditation using the voice – and moved to Quebec to further study this approach. Her ceaseless desire to lear also lead her to the study of other body-mind modalities like Brain Gym®, integrated and archetype movements, Jin Shin Jyutsu®, Hatha Yoga, Pneumacorps® Respiratory Relaxation, Access Consciousness® and most recently Body Mind Centering®… In 2012, she created Kinéson, a « yoga for voice and body » offering an integrated experience of all the approaches that fuel her practice. She teaches in France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Montreal, in French, German, Italian and Japanese. The simple and powerful exercises that she uses everyday also help her in her work as a translator specialized in self-help and wellness, and apprentice webmaster.