The more languages you speak, the more men you are worth

“The more languages you speak, the more men you are worth” is a maxim attributed to Charles V and presented in Latin as “Quot linguas quis callet, tot homines valet.” It gives memorable form to the idea that a person’s worth rises with the number of languages they command. Within the world of Babel, however, the saying is more than praise of polyglot ability: it expresses an institution-wide economy in which languages become credentials, tools of power, and resources that can be accumulated by an empire.

The Maxim and Its Immediate Context

The phrase appears as the epigraph to Chapter Seven, with the Latin original followed by its English translation and Charles V’s name. Robin encounters it after marking a door with a cross and after deciding that he has seen enough to understand Babel at its roots. The placement makes the maxim function as a threshold statement: it links the visible discipline of language study to the larger political structure that Robin is beginning to distrust.

The wording treats linguistic knowledge as a form of human quantity. Each additional language supposedly adds another measure of value, as though a multilingual person contains several persons or can be counted as several useful lives. The formulation is therefore both admiring and unsettling. It celebrates exceptional fluency, but its arithmetic also suggests that people are being evaluated according to their usefulness to institutions that need interpreters, scholars, administrators, and silver-workers.

Language as Accomplishment and Discipline

Robin is unusually well positioned within this system because he has grown up with solid foundations in Mandarin, Cantonese, and English. Professor Richard Linton Lovell explains that Robin possesses the accents, rhythms, and unconscious linguistic habits that adults struggle to acquire, and warns him not to squander those natural gifts. The maxim’s promise of increased worth is thus attached to a demanding educational regime: languages must be maintained, practised, and inhabited until words arrive without hesitation or labour.

Robin nevertheless resists the hierarchy implied by formal language training. He complains that Latin has too many rules, endings, declensions, and conjugations, contrasting it with Chinese, which he sees as lacking those grammatical burdens. Professor Richard Linton Lovell rejects the opposition between simple and complex languages, arguing that every language organizes complexity differently. Latin’s richness lies in the shape of its words, while Chinese distributes its effects through another structure. The lesson complicates the maxim by showing that linguistic value cannot be measured by apparent simplicity, grammatical familiarity, or the number of rules a learner must memorize.

Professor Richard Linton Lovell also insists that Latin and Greek are necessary for understanding English, even while urging Robin to live in English and preserve his Chinese. Fluency is presented as an embodied condition rather than a collection of translations. A language can disappear when neglected, including one that seems carved into a person’s bones. The maxim therefore rewards not mere accumulation but continuing, active possession of linguistic worlds.

From Fluency to Institutional Power

The ideal expressed by the maxim becomes politically charged inside Babel. Anthony Ribben’s tour describes the Royal Institute of Translation as an institution created to serve imperial administration: Charles V’s Spanish translation secretariat handled more than a dozen languages, while Babel was founded in London and moved to Oxford in 1715 so Britain could train speakers of languages connected to its expanding colonial holdings. The history turns multilingual ability into an administrative technology.

Babel’s Grammaticas make that technology visible. The volumes are arranged alphabetically by the Romanized name of each language and by publication date, with European languages occupying entire display cases while Chinese appears in only three volumes and Japanese and Korean in one each. The collection’s organization presents languages as catalogued possessions. Its unevenness also records imperial priorities: Caribbean and South Asian Grammaticas remain unfinished, African languages have been neglected, and earlier work often came through Spanish or German scholars whose interests followed changing colonial territories.

Robin notices that the first authors credited in many Oriental Grammaticas are predominantly white British men rather than native speakers. That detail exposes the gap between possessing knowledge of a language and possessing authority over its representation. The maxim says that languages increase the value of the person who speaks them, but Babel’s practices show that institutions may also claim value by collecting, classifying, and translating languages that belong to other peoples.

The Imperial and Dehumanizing Arithmetic

Griffin Harley Lovell gives the maxim its sharpest political reversal. He argues that Babel collects foreign languages and foreign talent in the same way it hoards silver, then uses translation magic to benefit England alone. The most powerful silver bars depend on Chinese, Sanskrit, and Arabic, yet fewer than a thousand such bars are in use in the countries where those languages are widely spoken, and even there they are concentrated among wealthy and powerful households.

In this account, linguistic ability is not simply personal capital. It is extracted from foreign cultures and redirected toward British wealth, military power, and colonial expansion. Griffin Harley Lovell describes Babel as inseparable from the business of colonialism, challenging the claim that the tower exists above commerce and politics. The maxim’s language of human worth consequently acquires an economic and imperial meaning: the more languages an institution can command, the more territory, labour, silver, and influence it can potentially control.

The phrase also carries an implicit danger because it makes human value measurable through utility. A multilingual person is praised not only for possessing knowledge but for being worth “more men.” The expression turns linguistic difference into a ranking system, and Babel’s history reveals how quickly ranking becomes appropriation. London itself embodies this contradiction. It has accumulated much of the world’s silver and many of its languages, becoming larger, faster, and brighter while remaining both unimaginably rich and wretchedly poor. The city’s abundance reflects the same conversion of language and material resources into imperial power.

Limits, Exclusions, and Continuing Significance

The novel refuses to treat language as an unlimited magical resource. Professor Jerome Playfair explains that silver-working requires genuine fluency: a person must be able to think in a language and “live and breathe it,” not merely recognize words on a page. Invented languages cannot work, and ancient languages such as Old English have lost their effect because nobody now thinks in them. Latin and Greek remain mandatory for many Oxford degrees partly because abandoning that training would cause many silver bars in Oxford to stop working.

This rule gives the maxim a material foundation while exposing its exclusions. Linguistic worth depends on who is recognized as fluent, which languages are taught, whose scholarship is treated as authoritative, and which forms of speech institutions consider alive. Victoire Desgraves’s work on Kreyòl demonstrates the imbalance. Professor Hugo Leblanc is interested in Vodou spells and poems but cannot access them because they are written in Kreyòl, while he regards Kreyòl as a degenerate language. The episode shows how colonial judgment can dismiss a language even as the same culture is mined for exotic knowledge.

The maxim thus remains deliberately double-edged. It can describe the extraordinary power of multilingual understanding, especially in a world where fluency enables silver-working and makes communication across cultures possible. Yet it also supplies the vocabulary of Babel’s hierarchy, where languages are collected, reordered, and converted into imperial advantage. Its final significance lies in that tension: linguistic knowledge may enlarge a person’s capacities, but an institution that measures people by the languages they can provide can turn human intelligence into another form of extractable wealth.