Take the 2-minute tour ×  The following document:   Produces the
following .log file:  Running `LaTeX' on `mwe' with ``pdflatex
-interaction=nonstopmode "\input" mwe.tex''  restricted \write18
enabled. entering extended mode LaTeX2e <2011/06/27> Babel
<v3.8m> and hyphenation patterns for english, dumylang,
nohyphenation, ancientgreek, ibycus, basque, catalan, danish,
dutch, ukenglish, usenglishmax, french, galician, monogreek,
greek, italian, latin, spanish, loaded. (./mwe.tex
(/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
(/usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-
dist/tex/generic/babel/babel.def))) (./mwe.aux) (./mwe.aux)
)</usr/local/texlive/2011/texmf-
dist/fonts/type1/public/amsfonts/cm/cmr10.pfb> Output written on
mwe.pdf (1 page, 12356 bytes). Transcript written on mwe.log.
LaTeX finished at Thu Jan 19 13:00:40  Note that before
babel.sty is loaded (around line 9) babel has already loaded
patterns for, among others, ancientgreek,ibycus,basque,catalan…
It looks like somehow, babel is being loaded e