South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg could bust out the Spanish at Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate. But that would be so passé.
After all, Beto O’Rourke, one of Buttigieg’s 24 rivals for the nomination, already used that trick in the first debate round, on Wednesday night. The former Texas congressman’s bilingual approach drew mixed reviews among pundits. But it logically opened the way for other candidates to show off their language skills.
And with Buttigieg, there’s much linguistic skill to demonstrate. The Harvard grad and Rhodes Scholar reportedly speaks several languages beyond English, with varying degrees of proficiency. That includes Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Dari Persian, French, and Norwegian.
It’s that final language that at one point caused the pundit class to swoon over the 37-year-old presidential candidate, who cuts an additionally unusual political profile as an Afghanistan War veteran and former McKinsey consultant who is openly gay. Buttigieg is said to have taught himself Norwegian in order to read novels in the language.
Maltese, another less-than-common language in the U.S., has a more direct explanation. His father, and namesake of his at-times tough-to-pronounce last name, was from Hamrun, Malta, and migrated to South Bend to be a professor of literature at the University of Notre Dame. And Pete Buttigieg likely learned Dari Persian, or some variant, during the candidate’s time as an ensign in the Navy Reserve, during which he trained to become a naval intelligence officer.
Buttigieg has occasionally used his language skills on the campaign trail in 2019. In April, he drew commendations for speaking in near-flawless French to express his condolences for the Notre Dame Cathedral fire.
