FEW people, when asked if the Basque language is the most difficult to learn, would be able to reply: “Well, it’s no more difficult than Navajo.” George Campbell could, and did. He was able to speak and write 44 languages, and in the 1980s his proficiency earned him a Guinness world record.

His Compendium of the World’s Languages (1991) features more than 250 languages, 100 in close detail; and his Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets (1997) covers 40 scripts, including such obscure ones as Cree and Samaritan. Campbell also worked for many years as a linguistic supervisor for the BBC.

George Campbell was born in 1912 on the Seaforth estate at Brahan, just north of Inverness. His parents spoke Gaelic as well as English; inevitably, he picked some of that language up, but had to perfect it later like all the others. He was educated at Dingwall Academy. He had a stammer, and on his first day in school he froze when asked a question and was relegated to the back of the class. Left to his own devices he picked up, from books he found at the Inverness fish market, the basics of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish and Danish, in addition to the French, German and Latin of the school syllabus.

The language which most attracted him was German, and in 1932 he went to Edinburgh University and Leipzig to read it; at Edinburgh he met Jen Porteous, who later became his wife. Having added several more languages and a diploma in librarianship to his qualifications, he became assistant librarian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London University, in 1937.

Called up in 1939, he was immediately transferred to the BBC’s expanding European Service, as a language supervisor and key censor for 12 languages, mainly East European. His role was to sit in the studio and listen, to ensure that the foreign announcers said what was in the script and no more; if they deviated from the text he had the right to switch them off. Campbell never exercised that right but did correct some glorious howlers: “The British system of government is based on universal suffrage” came out in one translation as “The British system of government is based on universal suffering.”

After supervisors were abolished Campbell continued in the BBC European Service, ending as Romanian programme organiser. He retired in 1974, but returned to make comparative studies of how different language services covered the same stories, and to stand in as programme organiser for the Spanish, Portuguese, Greek and Turkish services. He finally called it a day at 67, in 1980 — and the Bush House canteen was the poorer for it.

All through his career he had translated academic works from a variety of languages, including Arabic, Hungarian and Polish. It was in retirement that he compiled his Compendium of the World’s Languages.

Campbell had a vast knowledge of all the arts, especially music; he played the piano and could identify performers by their style after hearing just a few notes on the radio. He could recite reams of poetry in many languages from memory. He read and understood Einstein. He was also an expert on tennis and railway locomotives.

Though altruistic and modest, he had a sly, very Highland sense of humour, which revealed itself in some of the reports he wrote for the BBC. He looked after his wife, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, until he was 90. She and their two sons survive him.

George Campbell, linguist and polymath, was born on August 9, 1912. He died on December 15, 2004, aged 92.