Reid Knows A Lot Of Languages

1.2K 19 3
                                    

(I don't know how accurate these translations are, so don't come after me please ✌︎)
💖

The average person can learn about two languages fluently in a lifetime, but Spencer Reid knows seven.

It's honestly not a surprise that Reid can speak so many different languages, especially considering his genius IQ and eidetic memory.
He could read one book with English translations and be able to remember it for as long as he needed to. But his heavy interest in foreign languages also helped in forming his impressive collection by the age of 27.

Most of the BAU didn't know he knew so many languages. They actually figured he didn't know any, because of a case they worked on in the beginning of Elle Greenaway's career. She had to speak Spanish to many of the victims in a serial rapist case and Reid didn't have a clue what she was saying through any of the interactions. Spanish is considered one of the most popular languages among foreign speakers, so it was safe to assume Reid knew none if he didn't know the second most spoken one in the world.
But five years later he had accumulated an impressive deck consisting of Russian, Latin, Korean, American Sign Language, Arabic, and strangely enough, Morse and binary code. He didn't bother trying to memorize and learn Spanish because he thought Elle was going to stay on the team longer, and he'd have no use for it if she was fluent and could speak for the whole team.

When you break down the seven languages that Reid knows, he can read, write, and speak in five, Morse and binary code not being vocally spoken.
They all obviously have varying levels of use and value.

Russian isn't widely spoken in the US, but there is a great amount of media and literature that Reid enjoys that are in Russian or have only the Russian translations available. He particularly likes Russias horror genera, whether it's movies, books, or television.
Latin has almost no social use, but is, like Russian, very present in literature. Reid's mother herself was a professor of 15th century literature, so you can get quite a bit done with Latin. It has an even more practical use from a historical stand point. Most all ancient languages, at least most European landed ones, are heavily based in Latin. Though even Reid doesn't think it's very useful, it's still fun to speak in.
Korean is very functional, even in the US. 31% of all immigrated Koreans settle in California—a state the BAU travels to regularly. 1.2% of the population of the Golden State is Korean immigrants, averaging about 434,280 people with a .003% incline each year starting from the twenty first century. But statistics aside, Korean is a popular language in it of itself.
American Sign Language, or ASL as an acronym, is primarily used in Americas deaf community, but is also used with psychogenic and neurological mutism convalescences. About 48 million people in the US have complete hearing loss, or have ear related surgical implants. Of that 16% of American citizens, not all use or know sign language, but a large amount of US residents still use ASL.
Reid only knows Arabic because a colleague of his spoke it fluently. It was incredibly useful during the overseas case where they utilized it. It also made a great impression on the team, seeing as it was her first case while on the BAU. And because of what had happened with Elle Greenaway, Reid didn't want to rely on Emily Prentiss for the translations of Arabic have them ever need it again.
Now the Morse and binary code is pretty much useless. It has no practicality in the world of profiling, and Reid has only ever used either code once on separate cases. Binary code is somewhat complex. Each letter of the English alphabet is represented with a series of eight numbers called bits, only ever composed of 1's and 0's. Capital and lowercase letters matter in binary code; the difference is in bit 6, which is 0 in uppercase letters and 1 in lowercase letters. The eight bits a single letter is made of also has a corresponding three digit ASCII code. It's abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices.
Morse code is far less complicated as it was developed in the 1830s during the Civil War for faster communication, so the American Union could make more accurate battle strategies and keep Abraham Lincoln more up to date in the progress of the war. But the letters of Morse code are simple as they are just made up of dashes, dots, and pauses. The dit duration is the basic unit of time measurement in Morse code transmission. The length of a dot is one dit, the length of a dash is three dit units, the space between letters is also three dit units, and the space between words is seven dit units.
Besides crazy unsubs who find it enjoyable to create intricate codes and puzzles to send to the press and police, Reid really has no on-the-job use for Morse and binary code.

Reid and Reid Ship OneshotsWhere stories live. Discover now