Polyglot Wozniacki explains language gift

Moscow - After dazzling the Moscow media with her confident grasp of Russian, Danish professional tennis player Caroline Wozniacki counts herself lucky that she can absorb foreign languages so easily.

The 22-year-old won the Kremlin Cup tennis tournament final against Sam Stosur here on Sunday, and after answering questions in Russian said that she had never spent any time studying the language.

“I’ve never been learning Russian. It’s just come from listening to some phone calls and spending some time with my Russian friends when I was younger, so I never learned it, just picked it up,” said Wozniacki.

During her week in Moscow, the Dane has often thanked her fans with several sentences of well-accented Russian, answered dozens of Russian-language questions in English without waiting for translation and even corrected an interpreter just minutes after winning the final.

The daughter of Polish immigrants in Denmark, Wozniacki had those two languages as twin mother tongues from the outset.

She can pass for a native-English speaker too, and while her Russian, a language in the same Slavic group as Polish, might not quite reach those lofty heights, it demonstrates her gift nicely.

“I think I’m lucky that I can pick up some languages,” she said.

Polyglots on the globalised tennis tour are nothing new, with Swiss star Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, to name but two, boasting at least six languages between them.