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Number of languages humanly possible? | ||
Tags: Number of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 25 of 27 10 January 2010 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | ||
I doubt that you can trust the name nowadays. But the thing about placing the accent is another of my points. As late as a week ago I had a long discussion about British dialects with an employee at a museum in London. And it all started because she simply couldn't guess where I came from. And the reason that I'm difficult to pinpoint is that I don't have that immersion background I spoke about, where the outcome not only is that you get better generally, but also that you narrow your focus down to the dialect of a specific location. Those of us who have to learn languages through the media can simply not be expected to be able to limit ourselves to elements from one specific dialect or sociolect. We will almost always stand out because of our eclectic idiolect. Edited by Iversen on 10 January 2010 at 2:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zhiguli Senior Member Canada Joined 6443 days ago 176 posts - 221 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Mandarin | Message 26 of 27 11 January 2010 at 2:14am | IP Logged | ||
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The human brain may very well be limitless but there's one limitation that trumps all others - time. There are only so many hours in a day...
It takes a long time to get to educated, native-level fluency (not "native-like", which is pretty much impossible if you didn't immigrate as a teenager or don't have an X-language speaking parent) and it takes time to maintain it. I know immigrants who are still fluent in their native language but whose accents and vocabularies have been significantly eroded from spending decades away from "home". So I think 3-5 would be the maximum. The few people I know who are fluent in 5 languages admit they aren't equally proficient in all of them, and are always finding new gaps to fill in or formerly strong points that have become dulled with time. Edited by zhiguli on 11 January 2010 at 2:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5587 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 27 of 27 11 January 2010 at 2:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I've picked two languages that I want to pursue to the highest level of fluency possible in my lifetime. German and Spanish. The other ones don't mean as much to me, but they are fun to speak!
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