After watching the Olympics and the amazing feats of people like Michael Phelps it makes me reconsider what is possible for people to achieve. How fast can human beings swim; how fast can we run; how much weight can we lift? Similarly, it wouldn’t be strange for any linguist to wonder how many languages a human being could learn in the course of a lifetime.
It’s a Bigger Number than You Think
John Bowring was a British literary translator, economist, politician and diplomat whose service included being the fourth governor of Hong Kong. He claimed that he knew 200 languages and that he could speak 100 of them. Cardinal Joseph Caspar Mezzofanti knew more than 70 languages and could speak 38 without ever having left his homeland: Italy. In our day, the Brazilian linguist Dr. Carlos do Amaral Freire claims to know over 100 languages and the Lebanese language instructor Ziad Fazah claims 59. This article has information regarding great hyperpolyglots of the past and this article has information about the great polyglots that are still with us. You may find these numbers hard to believe but each one of these hyperpolyglots has publications or video recordings that suggest that their claims are true.
What Is Speaking a Language?
I used to naively think that this meant being able to say anything in the foreign language and in your own native language. That would mean that if you couldn’t explain how to change a carburetor, the difference between socialism and communism or the steps to buying a house in your target language, without making any obvious grammatical or pronunciation mistakes, then you couldn’t really say that you spoke it. That seems to be a bit demanding since there are many monolinguals that have a hard time doing that well in their own native language.
Even so, I get very annoyed with people who learn a dozen phrases in five languages and try to pass themselves off as cultured polyglots. I don’t think that we should claim to speak a language unless we can at least deal with native speakers well enough to say: I’m sorry. What is a wiggetybunket? I’ve never heard that word before. and then be able to understand the native speaker’s simple explanation. We should also be able to pronounce words well enough for native speakers to be able to understand almost every word we say. Lastly, we should have a good enough understanding of the grammar/structure of the language to form original sentences that are at least mostly correct. If you have a higher level of proficiency then so much the better. Qualifying the number of languages you speak is always a good idea. Statements like, I speak two fluently and am conversational in four others or, I know four and have studied eight are good examples of how to honestly portray your language abilities.
Studying, Forgetting and Remembering
Bowring and Mezzofanti died over 200 years ago but I have had the opportunity to personally deal with Freire and Fazah, as well as with a few other truly great linguists, and I imagine that the former pair were something like the latter. First of all, both Freire and Fazah have studied many languages that they have had no occasion to use in decades. They both admit that speaking them with no prior notice would be very difficult. Freire describes these languages as being deactivated. The curious thing is that they both claim that they can reactivate these languages after a few days of study. This means that if you were to drop them in Istanbul tomorrow and ask them to give a speech to an audience of locals they would probably struggle greatly with the task. If you were to give them a week’s notice they would probably receive praise for how well they spoke Turkish.
How Many Languages Is It Possible to Have a High Level of Fluency In?
That is what many people would really like to know. How many languages can you speak with near native fluency in and have an enormous vocabulary in? To date my experience has taught me that this number has everything to do with your lifestyle. If you have a life that not only gives you the opportunity but also necessitates that or greatly benefits from knowing thirteen languages well then you will probably speak thirteen languages well. If you have a very monolingual lifestyle then even maintaining one other language will most likely be quite difficult.
Limitless Possibilities
What if you studied a new language until you were proficient in it and then switched to another for ten years? Let’s say you’re not Mezzofanti and only became proficient in four languages during that time. Then life happens and you don’t touch the languages for another ten years. Your languages will have become quite deactivated but as soon as you choose to pick up an old book in one of them or spend more than a day or two in a country that speaks that language you will find that it all starts to come back to you. Will your time have been wasted all of those years ago? Only if being able to get around in a foreign country without the help of a third party is not enjoyable for you; only if reading good literature in its original form has no value; only if if learning foreign languages is not enjoyable for you.
How many languages can humans learn? They learn as many as they have time to study and practice. Scientists have yet to find any biological reason why everyone cannot learn twenty languages or even one hundred. Linguists like Bowring, Mezzofanti, Freire and Fazah suggest that our abilities are much greater than we think. As it is with so many things in life, we often become our greatest limitation or our greatest asset. Our attitudes, lifestyles, habits, practices, interests, hobbies, etc. are what usually what determine what we can achieve much more than our physical or mental capacity.
Filed under: Language Learning, Polyglots
Very interesting article! I suppose the number of languages depends on the person’s own capacity, motivation, natural abilities etc. Personally I think motivation is one of the most important factors; I was never good at languages in school and was definitely monolingual. But since I started travelling and living in countries where other languages are spoken things have changed dramatically.
When asked “how many” languages I speak. My answer is always the same: one. Then I add “… but I can get by in 6 others and can understand 3 others well”. I remember meeting one person who confidently told me “I speak the English perfectily!!” and I never want to be that unjustifiably arrogant, Fluency means something different to everyone so I try to play my level down every time and let the other person decide how good I am. I was recently interviewed on the radio in Spanish about my travel blog and language abilities and used this kind of response, with the interviewer positively playing up my level. Nobody could ever argue that I don’t “get by” in Spanish (especially under the pressure of a live radio interview), but if I claimed perfect fluency a lot of people would easily nitpick at various mistakes I made.
I also agree that “reactivating” a language is possible. When you reach large numbers of languages it’s important to maintain your level or they’ll disappear into obscurity. I used to speak German very well, but now I can’t even have a simple conversation since I never practise, but I’m sure after a brief stay in Berlin I’d be back to my old self! Otherwise I use my blog as well as twitter updates to write about my travels in languages I’m confident about writing in; it forces me to think regularly in those languages and keep a decent level with them despite not having daily exposure to other speakers.
Irish Polyglot: First off, kudos for your interview in Spanish. It was quite impressive. I recommend that everybody (especially the Spanish speakers) give the interview a listen. I also like your idea of downplaying your skills just a bit and letting people come to their own conclusions about your language abilities. I think this mentality works everywhere in life but a job interview (lol).
Lastly, you said that the number of languages a person speaks has to do with their capacity and natural abilities (in addition to motivation). My observations have led me to believe that this capacity and natural ability are much greater than most people think. Why is it that there are so many Indians and Africans that speak five languages or more? Are they just genetically better at it than Asians and Americans and many Europeans? I doubt it. I think that everyone (excluding those with mental handicaps) is capable of learning to communicate in as many as 10 languages or more. I believe that personal interest, environment, methodology, diligence, etc. are more important than natural ability or talent. I think that this applies to language learning and many other aspects of life.
[...] Bowring was a British literary translator, economist, politician and diplomat whose service includehttp://thelinguistblogger.wordpress.com/2008/09/06/how-many-languages-is-it-possible-to-learn/Thirteen Days film reviewTiscali pull no punches with their exclusive review of thirteen days [...]
Many thanks for the feedback!
I’ve noticed quite a few visitors to my site from this link.
Yes, modesty is always the best policy I believe! I totally agree that speaking 10 or more languages is something everyone could learn to do. As I mention on my site, I’ve originally got an Electronic Engineering background and never did well in languages at school. But when I decided to really try to, I could learn several languages. I do not consider myself naturally talented and always enthusiastically try to convince people of all backgrounds and claims of low linguistic abilities, to jump in the deep end of language immersion and give it a try! If I can do it, anyone can
I didn’t mean to say that capacity and natural abilities are the defining factor, just that some people really do have better capacity than others and require less of an investment for the same results. I try not to say this much since it doesn’t apply to me and it is a great excuse for people to lazily decide they aren’t smart enough to learn other languages. It’s a weak argument, as you say, for many learning aspects of life, to simply give up saying that you can’t. I prefer to give everything a try; there are no limits to human learning capacities, especially for “ordinary” folk like me!
This is an interesting post, and it’s very true that languages can be deactivated and then reactivated again. In fact, I would say that accepting this is key if you wish to work on truly studying more than one language.
I often think of my language abilities in terms of active or passive knowledge, in the areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening. At any given time these levels are in a constant state of flux. As a professional translator, my reading and listening skills across my professional working languages of French, German and Spanish always remains quite high (active). However my written and spoken skills in these languages can drop quickly into ‘passive’ mode if I’m not actively working to maintain them, because despite what people may think, I rarely use (or arguably even need) these skills in my work.
And then of course there’s the fact that I could describe technical issues relating to car systems in German, for example, or specific aspects of pharmaceutical research in French, more comfortably than I could discuss literature (an area which I wouldn’t take a special interest in in English) or even the weather (an area which I would!).
At the end of the day, the reasons why you are learning a particular language, and the contexts in which you see yourself actively using it, have a big impact on your degree of ‘fluency’ in that language.
I think the amount of time and effort you commit to studying languages largely determines how many you can learn. It is very much also dependent upon your lifestyle and learning style. If you learn better by interacting with people, and you don’t mind living in the country of your target languages, then perhaps an immersion experience is better for you. If you’d rather teach yourself, then consult with the many resources online or in book stores! On a smaller degree, I think our mental capacity has its limits, but Fazah, Freire, and Mezzofanti certainly serve as great examples that you can push those limits.
Who holds the record of being fluent at the most number of languages?
Ken: That’s a good question and I don’t know that we’ll ever really know the answer. Unless there were some kind of competition that gave out a big prize I don’t know if there would be any reason for such a person to come forward. Since a highly functional hyperpolyglot needs a very multilingual lifestyle I would imagine such a person would work at the UN, a travel agency or some other place where he/she could actually use all of her languages in a variety of contexts and often.
Ken: There’s also the issue of quality versus quantity. There is basically no one way to measure *how* fluent someone is – or even any one accepted definition of what ‘fluency’ is. How to measure that fairly? Pretty much anyone can claim fluency!
well i agree to almost everything that you said except on your last sentences
when someone claims fluency they should be able to speak a lot close to a native speaker and one way to find that out is listening to songs and see if you understand everything or almost everything
and if you undertand like 90% of the song than you probably can speak like 70% of the language
because usually people understand more than they can speak
and about how many languages a human been can learn it’s not easy to tell ,it has a lot to do with how old you are when you are going to start studying your second language , i am brasilian living in USA for 6 years and i got here when i was 18 and i still don’t claim fluency there is still a lot to learn but i do know a few people that can speak three languages which is portuguese spanish and english and thats because of their parents usually brasilian that got married with spanish and lives in USA so they grow up talking these 3 languages but i personally never met anyone who can speak 4 languages fluently
and again it has a lot to do with your age and i personally say that if you are older than 18 years old and you speak only one language than you will not achieve fuency in more than 8 languages in your lifetime
@egber – I grew up as a monolingual boy from the states, but now I am learning German (am at a high-intermediate or low-advanced level), Dutch, and Spanish. I started learning German about 2 or 3 years ago, so maybe when I was 20 I started learning my first foreign language (excluding a very horrible attempt to learn Latin in high school). Anyway, I think that a person can easily achieve fluency (maybe not 100% fluency, but a reasonable level) in countless languages, even if they are a late comer. The key is to deal with the language families. I have a friend who studied Spanish and French at the university, then taught himself some level of Portuguese and Italian. SInce these are all so similiar to each other, I think it would be very easy to learn them all, once one learned one or two.
That is how my experience with German has been. I realized that between my knowledge of German and English, I could understand a good amount of Dutch, and now am learning it as well, which is another Germanic language. Sticking my head into the fog a bit more, I can understand some written Danish/Swedish/Norwegian and Frisian, though it is definitely more words and short phrases, as opposed to whole texts. However, if one I could put aside and learn the pronunciation differences, I think that I would have the heart of the language mastered, since these vocabulary sets share so much with what I already know. The biggest difficulty would be to learn to make the sounds to pronounce the words, but I’ve never heard of anyone who refused to learn English because they could not properly make the “th” sound, for example, so I think it seems doable.
I enjoyed the discussion and have always been curious about the topic. However, I think someone should address the question of whether efforts to learn multiple languages end up hampering the achievement of true fluency in one or two. I am also interested in learning cognate languages such as German and Yiddish, though sometimes I think it would be more stimulating to study an entirely distinct language than another cognate. Finally, I have found language study rewarding, but I also wonder if I can really justify spending time on another language as opposed to learning more philosophy or ecology for example. At some point, I think it is better to diversify into other fields.
The questions raised in the above discussion are very relevant to my day to day work and the following views come from my personal language learning experience as well as from my experience with students. I consider myself fluent in six languages and have been teaching these through my company (London Language Studio) for some time. I can understand and could speak several others but I somehow never mention these. I agree the definition ‘fluent’ is almost an abstract and often misused term.
I believe that a good criteria to assess whether you are or not fluent in a language is to understand jokes. To be able to understand a joke requires not just advanced language knowledge but also considerable cultural awareness. Knowing a language means also knowing its people, their culture and mentality. A combination of sociolinguistic awareness, command of the language commonly used in day to day communication and a good understanding of universal grammar (including how this applies to each of the languages in particular) are the three important factors, I believe, which contribute to us feeling fluent and accepted by the society where each of the languages is spoken.
I only really feel fluent in a language when people can’t immediately tell I am a foreigner.
In this particular case I believe the accent and pronunciation play a more important role than vocabulary or profound knowledge of grammar, at least in the first instance. I agree anyone can learn a language to a good level, but I don’t believe everyone can achieve an authentic accent or develop the ability to build on existing knowledge- which, in other terms, we might call ‘talent’.
In regards to how many languages one can learn, my view is simple; the more you learn the easier it gets. So someone who can already speak four or five languages fluently (in whichever of the above definitions of ‘fluency’) will certainly find it a lot easier to learn another four, and even easier, another four after that.
It just becomes a matter of time availability at that point.
However, I find that there is a certain limit to vocabulary capacity, where at certain point it becomes more difficult to learn and retain new words.