"How Many Languages Do You Speak?"

This question, which is naturally frequent in the sort of international groups I like, gave me the topic for this post. The answer to the question, of course, always depends upon how well one must know a language before one is justified in listing it among the languages one "knows," and one always wonders, of course, listening to the group's responses, whether this fellow claiming fluency in 30 languages might not be padding his resumee just a bit, and whether this lady saying she knows only 2 is being entirely too modest by listing 2 languages, her native language and one more, whose native speakers assume she's a native speaker, which is extremely unusual for a non-native speaker. Think of all the people you know who've lived in your native country for decades after having grown up somewhere else, who speak your language wonderfully, with ease and grace and a huge vocabulary -- how many of them entirely lack a charming accent? A foreign actor passing for a native in a movie or TV show doesn't count, even though it's still a remarkable achievement with a script and dialogue coaches and multiple takes.

I'll claim 6: I'll stand here and tell you (I won't look you in the eye and tell you, but that's because I'm autistic, not because I'm a shifty schemer or anything like that.) that I can speak English, German, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, in that descending order of proficiency. I read and write each of them better than I speak them. I have some rudimentary knowledge of Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. I've just started on Hungarian and Armenian.

But of course languages come in families, so my familiarity with Latin, French, Spanish and Italian means that Portugese, Romanian/Moldavian, Catalan, Provencal, Rhaeoto-Romanic and Maltese will not be total mysteries to me. Likewise, my native proficiency in English and a long and intensive study of German mean that I can understand some Yiddish, Dutch/Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian and Luxumbourgian, all of which can not entirely unreasonably be considered German dialects; and to a lesser extent the Scandanavian Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese. And that is not an abstract theoretical postulate; it's based on some experience with each of those languages, and having discovered that I could understand some of each of them. So should I have said that I speak 24 languages (or 29?) instead of 6? No, I shouldn't have; because, for example, that might've given someone somewhere the impression that I would be of some practical use if someone were needed to act as an interpreter between someone who speaks Provencal but no Faroese and someone else who speaks Faroese but no Provencal. Okay, I wouldn't be completely useless in such a situation, but, depending on the locale, my skills might be much better employed looking for an interpreter than in taking on the steep-uphill challenge of trying to act as one. I would understand enough to figure out, after some effort, that what we would want, ideally, would be someone fluent in both Provencal and Faroese. I would be able, with some effort, to figure out that those were the native languages of the 2 people who needed to communicate with each other.

(Naturally there's a very good chance that both of them would speak English well enough to make me fully superfluous.)

Rather than saying that I'm competent in 6 languages, I could say that I have some familiarity with the Germanic and Romance languages families, and that I have made some investigations into the history and development of those languages and their relationships to one another. This proficiency has not been acquired more or less accidentally in the course of a life of constant globe-trotting, but intentionally through a love for books. Many a la-dee-da carefree globetrotter who never had any particular ambitions as a scholar would be much more useful than I in many situations calling for a polyglot, especially if he or she had any proficiency whatsoever in Chinese or Russian or Japanese or Hungarian or Turkish or Swahili or Nahuatl, etc, etc, etc; whereas I would have much more urgent need than the average globetrotter to suppress the urge to be a pain-in-the-ass know-it-all and criticize as ahistorical the combinations of spoken and written languages and other cultural phenomena in "Game of Thrones." (The dragons could be considered ahistorical, too, Steven. Ya big goof.)



Ideally, the question "How many languages to you speak?" will not simply be answered with a number, but will be the opening to a long and fascinating conversation.

Worldwide Application

I'm guessing that in order to speak with the majority of the people on Earth easily enough that there would be no practical need for an interpreter, it would suffice to be fluent in 4 languages, in roughly this order of importance: English, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic. If they were listed by the number of native speakers, then of course Chinese would be way out in front, but of course English is the second language of a huge number of people. Each one of those 4 languages is spoken by a significant number of people other than native speakers. The number of people one could reach with English, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic might actually be much more than a simple majority of the Earth's inhabitants. It's hard to tell exactly about these sorts of things, keep in mind that I'm guessing and beware of people who claim to know the figures involved in these sorts of questions with anything close to actual accuracy.

What are the 5th- and 6th-most important languages for our hypothetical polyglot, the ones which would most effectively, in terms of sheer numbers, further shrink the parts of the human population with whom he could not speak without help? I'm guessing Swahili and French. Then maybe Russian -- lots and lots of people with Russian as a second language -- and then Portugese: less people with Portugese as a second language, but so very many native speakers there in Brazil. But maybe the speakers of Japanese, native and not, outnumber the speakers of either Russian or Portugese. I don't know. (And neither do you.)

We're up to 9 languages now. Not very many people are actually fluent in 9 or more languages, not using my standard for fluency of making an interpreter superfluous. Bear in mind, whenever people talk about how fluent they are, that there is no universally-understood standard for how fluent you have to be to legitimately call yourself fluent. My standard of not needing an interpreter is more exact than the usual standard, which is: no standard at all, but it too is a subjective call.

So what's number 10? Maybe Hindi. Or maybe Hindi is 9th, or 8th, or even 7th. Especially if one considers Hindi and Urdu to be one spoken language. That's another subjective call. There are many subjective calls when one talks about language, I can't imagine how it would be avoidable.

And then there are Indonesian and Punjabi and German and Italian. Don't ask me whether I got them in the right order, or if I've got the right top 14. For example, there's Dutch: Holland used to have vast colonies, and I don't know what sort of linguistic footprint they left behind around the world. Add that to the former huge colonies of Belgium, and the completely subjective question of whether Dutch and Flemish are 1 language or 2.

And my goodness, let's not forget Turkish. Or Amharic. But if you can become fluent in English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, French, Russian, Portugese, Japanese, Hindi (including Urdu), Indonesian, Punjabi, German, Italian, Dutch (including Flemish), Turkish, Amharic -- and my goodness I completely forgot Bengali, didn't I? It should probably be in the top 10 or close to it. So if you can master those 19, or 20, or 21 languages, depending on how we're counting, plus a couple more spoken by huge populations which I undoubtedly have also forgotten -- if you're fluent in those 25 or so languages then maybe you might be justified in claiming that you, as an individual, have something like a global reach in your mind. Until then you're basically stumbling around in the dark and at the mercy of strangers like the rest of us.

This has been today's It's a big world out there kid-lecture. Thank you for your kind attention.