Did the survey. Your books sound fascinating. Off to find that thread mentioned in the O.P., then perhaps off to Amazon. 
Thanks to everyone who is replying to the survey! I knew I came to the right place.
To answer a couple questions: yes, please forward the surveys!
@oni no Maggie Of course, sexualities and gender identifications occur on spectrums, which is why the specific question about “homosexual preferences, behaviors, and/or orientations” is so broad – reporting one or all of those doesn’t preclude other behaviors, and it does not ask people to pin themselves down in regards to identity. I appreciate the comment, though, which points out the difficulty of doing research in this area. I’ve tried to be maximally sensitive while, as Svejk noted, keeping as close to the research question as I can.
@olivesmarch4th And if you think defining bilingual is hard, try defining monolingual! Australian linguist Elizabeth Ellis has a very good paper about it here: www.sociolinguistica.uvigo.es/descarga_gratis.asp?id=201
(This may automatically start the PDF download; if you don’t want this to happen, just google monolingualism Elizabeth Ellis.)
@Polly Glot I’m happy to hear about your work; do you know the research of Richard Sparks?
Can I suggest you rephrase the questions where you use the phrase “attends to”? Especially “attends to form”. I think I understand what you were getting at, but it’s a very strange phrasing and I suspect it’s likely to throw people.
I took the monolingual test. I took German in high school and managed to pass the requirement. I tried taking Spanish in college and ended up changing majors to avoid taking the last semester. ( I took more math instead ).
This sounds like a fascinating study; I hope you will share the results. I have to admit I’m always mildly suspicious of people who claim to speak several second languages. I have spent over a decade just trying to get the hang of Spanish! Maybe their idea of ‘‘speak’’ is different than mine. I pretty much hold myself the the highest standard of fluency–equally adept at both languages–which is a milestone I will never reach. That’s kind of why I do it–for the ongoing impossible challenge.
Survey filled out! It’ll look a bit skimpy on languages 3 aqnd 4, but hey, I’m just learning.
The note attached to Question Eight on the survay (“Note #2: The raw data on this answer won’t be published, as there is concern that it can identify individuals who are known to work with minority languages.”) was kind of an eye-opener. Are there areas where knowing multiple languages in and of itself is a social liability? (Here’s it’s basically a ticket to a better job, depending on the language.) Or is this related more to political concerns such as identifying members of specific communities?
The other eye-opener was Question 7 on page 6 (“There’s a folk belief that relatively more homosexuals are talented with languages, or that language talents and homosexuality are linked. …”) I have never heard of this. Certainly various types of artistic creativity are perceived as homosexual-linked, but I never had the sense that language learning, specifically, was so viewed.
Anyway, an interesting survey.
I just made my dad take this – he speaks four languages fluently, teaches three of those languages at the undergraduate and graduate level, and he can read and translate two others. Unfortunately, he gave really curt answers in the comment boxes, but I hope his data will still be useful.
Olivesmarch4th, you need to meet some of my friends.
M. speaks German natively, speaks fluent English and Esperanto, is studying Spanish, and can fake Italian. He used to work at the airport. K. speaks Farsi natively, and speaks fluent French, Esperanto, and English. Z’s native language is English, but he speaks more French these days and has taught math in French; he also speaks fluent Esperanto, and can make his way in Hebrew and I suspect Japanese. A. is native in English, was fluent in Esperanto in six months, learned Bulgarian one year when he had a Bulgarian girlfriend, and probably speaks other languages as well. But then A. is the smartest person I have ever met.
At our little social club, I met several people who did actially speak six languages. Then there were the people I met in Europe…
Compared to them, I’m just a beginner. 
However, I don’t know that they have native-level fluency in all of their languages. (Me, I’m aiming for Bad Restaurant French level myself in French and Japanese for now…)
Bi-lingual English Mandarin, some Japanese, chinese dialects and non existent high school French. Took the second survey.
My wife speaks native level Shanghaiese and Mandarin, fluent English, business level Cantonese, University level Japanese, some French.
Our kids speak Mandarin best, English second and Shanghaiese third.
All right, I believe you. It just seems like it would be really time-consuming. I have always thought I had a gift for learning language, but I can’t even fathom devoting that much time and effort to learning all those languages. High school Spanish was easy as hell, but it started getting hard right around the, ‘‘let’s read novels in the target language while I talk to you in my impossible-to-understand Puerto Rican accent’’ phase. I have written Spanish papers on surrealist literature from 1980s Argentina, NAFTA’s impact on the Mexican economy, homosexuals in the Caribbean and their diaspora, and the devastation of the Indies. I’ve taught as a volunteer in Detroit and Mexico, I’ve been paid to handle Spanish-speaking clients at a consumer-credit counseling agency, and even after all that, I still am not comfortable calling myself ‘‘fluent.’’
I still wish there was some standard definition of fluency. I call myself ‘‘functionally fluent,’’ which also has no formal definition, but for me means something like, ‘‘a hell of a lot more than proficient, seriously, it will really surprise you how well this little gringa speaks Spanish, but I’m still going to fuck it up from time to time. And if you’re Cuban, forget about it.’’
I must be really confused by the OP because I thought he only wanted people to respond to the second survey if they speak SIX OR MORE languages.
You sound much more fluent in Spanish than I am in Esperanto, and I gave a presentation on solar housing in it at a conference last year.
My definition of fluency is not native-level proficiency; it’s much more pragmatic. Being able to talk on the phone, give and take directions, order in restaurants, discuss the news, argue for or against a position… basic skills to get by. These I can do. But I’m still a slow reader, and I’m always needing to pull out my dictionary for new words.
I do think my friends had an advantage though. I suspect many of them were at least bilingual as children, and thus had an early start on the rest of us.
Me, I didn’t get exposed to French until grade eight, and then it was the sort of grammatical teaching that progressed only slowly. If they’d had the resources to do the total-immersion thing like the Japanese school I’m going to, high school would have been a lot different for me.
I thought so too, but then he expanded the criteria in this thread. So if Bad Restaurant French and being able to read the cereal box counts as knowing a language, I’m there.
Don’t ever have lunch with someone from Andorra. Even the stupidest of them (and I’ve met some that made a doorknob sound like Marie Curie) speak five languages like I speak Spanish, at age 18. The intelligent ones can go up to seven. Count: Catalan and French, official languages; Spanish, spoken by the neighbors to the south; English and either Italian or German, learned as “second language” in school. That’s their idea of “basic” language skills!
Criticism of an American presidential candidate for speaking French comes to mind.
@Polly Glot I’m happy to hear about your work; do you know the research of Richard Sparks?
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Dr Sparks is only like a god to me! 
I’m actually hoping to meet him sometime soon, as he is based not too far from here; he has been apprised of the work I’m trying to do, believe it or not!
olives, my Spanish-language learning history is very similar to yours, yet I too have felt like calling myself “fluent” wasn’t quite accurate given the word’s inherent ambiguity. I spent years feeling unsure of my capabilities, until one day a couple of years ago at the cube farm, where I found myself speaking Spanish for a few minutes with a customer from Mexico. Out of nowhere she asked, “De cual parte de Mexico es Usted?” Being quite 'murkin…I was floored! A couple of months later I started graduate school so’s I could teach it, having become finally convinced I was “fluent (enough)” in Spanish.
My parents tried to raze me Bi-lingual, Dutch and English, they took me to a speech doctor when I was 3 because could only speak gibberish, the doctor told my mother she should consider me lucky if I managed to learn one language.
My sister speaks 6 or seven languages fluently…will ask her fill out the test
Yeah, that can be validating, and I finally started getting it around last year. I’m confident I could teach. Apparently, my accent is damn near perfect, because I’ve had people face-to-face ask deathly pale, blond-haired grey-eyed little me if I’m a native speaker. My native speaking coworkers said that sometimes they overheard me and said to one another, ‘‘Damn. If it weren’t for the occasional grammar errors, you wouldn’t even know she was americana.’’
My biggest problem is I have difficulty understanding what is being said to me, especially over the phone, especially from Caribbean accents. So a guy from Ecuador asks me if I’m Mexican and raves about my Spanish, whereas a lady from Puerto Rico says… ‘‘eh… me entiendes?’’* It completely varies.
*This doesn’t only mean, ‘‘Do you understand me?’’ it can also mean, "You know?’’ in a completely rhetorical way, so it’s kind of funny because any time anyone says, ‘‘blah blah blah, tu entiendes?’’ I respond, ‘‘Si, entiendo,’’ on autopilot… It would be like responding to every, ‘‘I know, right?’’ with, ‘‘Yes, you’re right.’’
@ruadh About “attends to form”: Several dimensions of the survey borrow from other people’s surveys, and the list of features of good language learners, from Joan Rubin, is one of these. It’s not my choice of words–and it wouldn’t be, and I’m not at liberty to change them.
The other dimension are the self-assessments in the languages. Many people have noted that I seem to pay more attention to speaking than other skills, and have no way of assessing active vs. passive language skills, and offer no way of assessing past vs. current levels. The self-assessment in speaking was adapted from the Interagency Language Roundtable scale, and at the time I launched this survey in January of 2009, only the speaking scale was available in self-report form. Since then, self-assessments for reading and listening have become available.
The reason I chose the adapted ILR scale is that 1) it’s well known, widely used, and widely criticized – if I made up my own scale, it would be a “devil you don’t know,” so to speak, and therefore less acceptable; and 2) the results of this survey could be compared to results aggregated by universities, companies, and the US Govt – this wouldn’t have been the case with any survey I’d come up with.
@sunspace There are academic linguists and language activists who are well-known for their work in a specific set of languages, so they flagged this issue for me to preserve their anonymity.
@olivesmarch4th Maybe it will be consoling to know that relatively few people who grew up speaking two (or more) languages have equal levels of proficiency in their languages – that’s to say, they won’t have the same sort of vocabulary of the same size, won’t necessarily be reading or writing in each language to the same degree, won’t make the same sort of errors, among other things. And it’s worth mentioning that proficiency levels are in flux over a person’s life; when someone’s in school in English, they’ll become practiced to a certain level that they won’t have in their other language, but then say that they work in a professional domain in the other language, which will become stronger than the English. I’m not saying there aren’t people who don’t have this asymmetry, or that people don’t report symmetry; rather, it’s that having the two languages to the same level is a very high bar that would, if it were used as a criterion for being “bilingual,” would disqualify a lot of people who identify themselves that way.
Understood. I think it will have some effect on the accuracy of your results, though. It might be worth pointing out to Joan Rubin that it’s not really a good idea to use one profession’s jargon in a survey aimed at the general populace.