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How rare are polyglots | ||
Tags: Number of Languages | Polyglot | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| cymro Triglot Groupie Wales Joined 6256 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes  Speaks: English*, Welsh, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 1 of 28 20 July 2007 at 5:09am | IP Logged | ||
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It is not unusual to speak more than one language. Many people are bilingual. I live in a country that has hundreds of thousands of bilinuguals. I have a number of trilingual friends and one or two who speak nore. One usually communicates with me in his Seventh language.
? My question is this. How rare are the higher levels of polyglottery in the population of the world? How many people, for example, can speak a dozen languages? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6467 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 2 of 28 20 July 2007 at 8:01am | IP Logged | ||
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Here
you can see how rare they are on this forum. Of course it's a little biased, because people here are more interested in language than average, they're mostly from Northern America and Europe, they might evaluate themselves incorrectly in their target languages, etc. But you get a general idea... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Aritaurus Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6376 days ago 197 posts - 204 votes Speaks: Cantonese, English*, Japanese, Mandarin Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 28 23 July 2007 at 10:47am | IP Logged | ||
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I've yet to meet any polyglots in my city after living here for 23 years. Most second generation Canadians born to immigrant parents I know usually understand their parent's native tongue but at most can only speak it at a conversational level. I know of many diglots (bilingual) but I've yet to meet any triglots or better - unless you consider English, Mandarin & Cantonese speakers triglots. There are plenty of those around.
When I was in high school , I knew many people of Italian ,Portuguese and Chinese descent. Most of them would tell me that they understand their parent's language but they can hardly speak it. I think to be a polyglot, you have to be genuinely enthusiastic in languages or just have been around in many parts of the world. The only person I know closest to a polyglot is my long time friend who can speak English, Cantonese and Spanish with fluency and Japanese and Mandarin at the high intermediate level. I still think most polyglots in Canada are non-native born so they came from another country. You're more likely to be a polyglot if you were not raised in an English speaking country. I'm sure there are more triglots in Quebec because most people there are fluent in English and French and if they're first or second generation Canadian, they may know a third language. Edited by Aritaurus on 23 July 2007 at 10:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| winters Trilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6846 days ago 199 posts - 218 votes Speaks: Croatian*, Serbian*, Russian*, English, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek Studies: Greek, French, Hungarian | Message 4 of 28 25 July 2007 at 8:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I might be an exception, but I know a lot of people who are polyglots (not as much in Italy, though - only recently I moved here); in fact, I would say that I know far more bilinguals and polyglots than people who are fluent only in their native language.
Let me start from my family. My mother speaks Croatian/Serbian (the language of the countries she spent most of her adulthood in), Russian (her native language, which she has been refusing to speak for about a decade now, but in those rare moments when I hear her speak it I see that her Russian remains intact, and did not deteriorate a bit!), English (not only that she speaks it fluently, but she also has very good professional knowledge of the language related to her field, and I often saw her communicating with her colleagues in English) and she studied German during her formal schooling, but she claims not to speak any of it any more, though she understands it. I do not believe her quite that she does not speak it, as I heard her on a couple of occassions in my childhood, but me not being the speaker of the language I could not determine how well-versed in German she is. I also suspect she speaks Hungarian, but she refuses to discuss this topic with me and gets all upset over it, so Hungarian is better not to bring up in our house (and so Russian). My father speaks Slovenian (native language), Croatian (another native language) and English (fluently, studied throughout the entire formal education). He also speaks some decent Russian, but he is not fluent in it, and he studied French (I recall that he used to read in French when I was younger), but I never heard him speaking it. Even the generation before in my family are at least bilinguals. Most of my maternal side speaks two or more of the following: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian, German, and her parents are entirely bilingual in Russian and Serbian, and her mother also spent some time of her life in Greece so I suppose she still retains some of the language even if she is no longer fluent. I have also met some Italian relatives from the maternal side of the family, who happen to speak the weirdest of combinations - Russian, Italian, Hungarian, and snippets of English or French they learnt at school. My paternal side of the family is not as multilingual, but even my grandmother is perfect bilingual in Croatian and Slovenian (as in, not speaking the mixture some bilinguals of the kind tend to speak in their private life, but keeping them apart). A part of his family lives in Germany, where they kept their native language, so their children nowadays are trilingual (I tend to converse in English with them as I have not been speaking Slovenian for years, and they speak Slovenian/German/English combination). I have grown up in such a multilingual surrounding as a child that I grew to consider polyglottery as something entirely normal, and the "default" status of somebody. It was only later in life when I realised that it was far less common than it was in my family. Out of the realm of my family, most of my friends are at the very least bilingual, as English has crept pretty much everywhere, and we all acquired it at early age. My best friend, for example, speaks both Italian and Croatian as her native languages, in addition to English (she also lived in UK for a couple of years as a child) and French (which she studies at university, adores, and speaks fluently - she intends to move to Quebec in a couple of years), and classics if you count them (she went to classics-oriented school before the university). Seriously, I would have an easier time counting monolinguals I know than bilinguals/polyglots. Perhaps I am an exception in that case, but I simply grew up in surrounding in which that was normal, and circled amongst people who have also been brought up on the crossroads of cultures, countries and languages, as well as had interest in those and studied them further on their own, which results in enormous amount of polyglots I know (by polyglot, just for the reference, I consider fluency in 3+ languages - I must admit that I know very, very rare hyper-polyglots who speak them 6-7 fluently, but 3-4... a lot of them). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6505 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 5 of 28 25 July 2007 at 9:09am | IP Logged | ||
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I have certainly met a few polyglots with at least half a dozen languages on their score card when I studied the Romance languages at the University in Århus, but for some reason I never heard people counting their languages there. I doubt however that any of them had more than say ten, and the few persons that might have that many were teachers, not students. I had one co-student who had studied Sanskrit and Welsh (in addition to several Romance and Germanic languages), but that was an exception, and she couldn't speak those languages. As far as I could remember only three, maybe four teachers at the institute ever taught more than one Romance language, but of course they may have known more of them on a more basic level. As far as I know one and only one of of my teachers at the gymnasium (:half-academic pupils aged 15-18 years) knew half a dozen languages, the rest presumably 2-4 languages, which is not unusual in Denmark.
This dismal state of affairs among highly qualified teachers shows how rare really dedicated language collectors are. But to our defence most Danes at least speak a modicum of English, many also German or another L3, and then of course we have the immigrants who should at least speak the language of their home country plus Danish. Though some never learn Danish - shame on them! On this forum we had another thread almost a year ago where the proportion of polyglots in different places was discussed. In this thread I quoted some statistics from a Danish magazine. A place like Mauritius apparently has a mean rate of 3,78 languages per person, - maybe because it has a multiethnic population and mostly caters to luxury tourism. The Scandinavian countries were also well represented, while the US and Australia were at the bottom. Unfortunately the list didn't mention the countries on the Balkans where Winters comes from, but I would expect an area with such a heterogeneous population to foster a large number of polyglots. Edited by Iversen on 30 July 2007 at 4:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| joan.carles Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6135 days ago 332 posts - 342 votes Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, French, EnglishC1, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Hungarian, Russian, Georgian | Message 6 of 28 26 July 2007 at 1:42am | IP Logged | ||
And many good linguists come from Denmark, such as Rasmus Rask, Otto Jespersen, Louis Hjelmslev, Holger Pedersen, Verner... not bad taking into account the country's size and population. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| blindsheep Triglot Senior Member Spain Joined 6162 days ago 503 posts - 507 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 7 of 28 29 July 2007 at 4:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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In canada I knew almost zero polygots, here in catalunya there tend to be quite a few, because people start with catalan, easily pick up Spanish, and then just need to have actually made an effort with one other language, most commonly french for the older generation and english for the newer... having said that, most people are still not polyglots here, but my housemate speaks catalan, Spanish, french, and english...
a teacher I worked with spoke those languages as well as arabic... he had the strange circumstances of growing up in a Spanish enclave off of morocco and then going to english boarding schools for much of his education, and then moving himself to barcelona where he learned catalan... I think his 5 languages from three different language families is still the most of someone I've met in real life... my other experience in korea indicated that there were very few polyglots there, at best people might have a decent command of english in addition to korean, although despite the absurd amount of money people spend do learn english there, fluent english speakers still aren't very common... there must be a collection of people who also know japenese or chinese just due to proximity though. basically whether polyglots are rare or not really depends on one's area, geographically and culturally... where I grew up in canada, someone who knew another language had almost a mythical property... in europe its completely normal if not expected to know a couple... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shahid Newbie Czech Republic Joined 6089 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 8 of 28 08 September 2007 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think leraning languages is not only inside but also depends on options you get in life..
1 person has voted this message useful |
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