What Language Did Albert Einstein Speak? (Wunderbar!)

Albert Einstein’s native language was German, but he also spoke English, French, Italian, and was able to read and write in Latin to some degree. However, German was the language Einstein felt most comfortable in and talked in the most. Most of his writings were translated by his secretaries and assistants.

Given his legendary intelligence, it is unsurprising that Einstein had working knowledge of multiple languages.

However, he really preferred to speak only in German.

He was born to a family of Ashkenazi Jews, so he also spoke Yiddish at one time or another.

Let’s find out more.

In This Article

What was Einstein’s native language?

Einstein was born in the city of Ulm, located in the then Kingdom of Wurttemberg in the former German Empire.

He and his family would move to Munich less than a year after his birth.

So, his native language was German.

This was always the language he was most comfortable with throughout his life, always preferring to speak and write in German.

His family were secular Ashkenazi Jews.

Some have tried to suggest his native and original language was Yiddish, given his heritage, but at least later on in life, he does not seem to have had a good grasp of the language.

In 1935, he apologised for not his lack of fluency in Yiddish to the international community of Jews at a dinner raising money for a hospital.

So, plainly, Yiddish was not the language he was most familiar with.

It’s very unlikely that he learned Yiddish from his family at an early age which was then replaced by German.

German, it seems, was always his mother tongue, and Yiddish something his family attempted to teach him on the side.

Trends show that German Jews stopped using the Yiddish language in the early 19^th Century.

But unsurprisingly, Einstein did learn a variety of other languages to varying degrees over the course of his life.

Let’s find out which ones.

What languages could Albert Einstein speak?

There is a degree to which this question is up for debate.

We don’t really know for sure what Einstein’s grasp of his other languages were.

However, we can see that he plainly had working knowledge of several European languages.

He was reasonably proficient in English which, even during his lifetime, was beginning to become the international language, particularly in Europe.

As a scientist, he spent a lot his life in correspondence to an international community, so he sometimes wrote in English for this purpose.

However, it would be more common that he would read the English, respond in German, and have a secretary or an assistant translate the letter.

This was often the case with many of his other languages, too.

He certainly wrote in Italian from time to time, so we know he had some knowledge of the language.

But, again, he would still prefer German.

The same is largely true of his knowledge of French and Spanish.

He could comprehend it and write in to a degree, but preferred not to.

From the perspective of which languages he had a working knowledge of and could comfortably converse in, it is probably limited to German and English.

Many often associate high intelligence with good language skills, but this just wasn’t really the case with Einstein.

Learning extra languages to some extent happened to be a necessity for his field, but he wasn’t really bothered about knowing many languages.

What about Latin?

Did Einstein know Latin?

For all intents and purposes, Einstein did not know Latin.

When Einstein went to school, teaching Latin was still a standard part of the schooling process.

All students would learn it to some degree, and often in ecclesiastical settings it was still used widely at the end of the 19^th Century.

This meant schooling was often heavily dependent on Latin.

So, he would have had about the same knowledge of Latin that you may have of Spanish from your time learning it at school.

He wasn’t comfortable writing in Latin and that convention had gone out of fashion in any case.

He may have recalled some of it, but in no great amount.

In all this, there is often a question lying behind it all about whether language skills are a universal sign of intelligence.

Does speaking multiple languages increase IQ?

No, it doesn’t, and IQ on the whole is mostly pseudoscience.

You might wonder if Einstein increased his intelligence through his knowledge of many languages or if, conversely, he was able to learn so many languages because of a high IQ.

The simple answer is that neither of these things are true.

Learning more languages doesn’t make you more intelligent, and intelligence is very hard to quantify in any case.

Furthermore, being able to learn more languages isn’t necessarily a sign of higher intelligence either.

Einstein himself, as I have tried to show, really did not have great language skills.

He may have been better than the average person, but he did not have a strong grasp of any language other than his own.

Despite that, he is still without doubt one of the greatest minds of the modern scientific world.

So, though he certainly had far better language skills than the average person, Einstein’s language skills were perhaps not as robust as you might expect.

He was really always more comfortable speaking in his native language of German.

International science and academia demanded multiple languages from him to a degree, but he mostly got by just fine speaking only German.

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Founder - @PollyWebster

Polly Webster is the founder of Foreign Lingo and a seasoned traveler with a decade of exploration under her belt.

Over the past 10 years, she has journeyed to numerous countries around the globe, immersing herself in diverse cultures, traditions, and languages.

Drawing from her rich experiences, Polly now writes insightful articles about travel, languages, traditions, and cultures, sharing her unique perspectives and invaluable tips with her readers.

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