OK, I’m sure this will depend how you want to define things.
For the purposes of this discussion, let’s count dialects as separate languages if they are distinct enough from each other that speakers of one can only get the gist (not all the details) of what their counterpart is saying in, say, a speech. Thus, I would count most Chinese provincial dialects as separate languages (and hell, Cantonese vs. Mandarin is further away than Swedish vs. Norwegian, methinks), but Yunnanese would not get split up into the dialect spoken in Kunming (capital) vs. Dali (nearby city). Yes it’s still quite fuzzy, but whatever.
By “fluently”, I mean fluent enough to have conversations with people about all daily topics and some specialized topics; random unknown words and phrases can be gotten around by synonyms or other ways to express that idea. Also, for this discussion, I’m only counting speaking and listening; literacy is of no concern.
So, who is/was the world’s greatest polyglot and how many languages could he/she speak?
I couldn’t tell for sure, but each time I’ve heard about someone who was able to speak an amazing number of languages (second hand mentions, TV interviews…), the number of languages mentioned was around 30. So, the record must be at least that.
Also, I’m not sure it would be easy to find out what language a polyglot is speaking fluently.
(I remember a linguist interviewed on TV and asked if it wasn’t horribly difficult to learn so many languages. To which he responded that only the first ten languages or so were difficult to learn…after that it was easy!)
That’s true. Languages of all different families in every part of the world share many underlying similarities in phonological and syntactic processes. In practical terms, there’s a limited number of basic structural processes that keep turning up again and again in all different languages. What the linguist referred to was, through familiarity with several different languages, one begins to recognize quickly what’s going on in the grammar; having grasped the basic structure, there remains only to fill in the specific details. It’s like a classical musician quickly recognizing sonata form in a new piece, or rondo, or theme and variations, etc. and knowing what to expect from the form. Learning goes much more quickly. Chomsky revolutionized the field of linguistics by deriving theory from these “linguistic universals” and their deep structure.
Yeah, I really have to wonder when I see a number like 30. Perhaps they just know basic conversation in that language (“I want to go to _____”, “How much is ________?”) and then supplement most of the vocab with a related language? Norwegians and Swedes talk to each other all the time without learning their counterpart’s language, for example.
No matter how much you can generalize grammar between the languages you learn, the vocabulary must still be a real bitch to remember and keep straight, even between languages that have a lot of cognates. I reckon that being able to comprehend 30 languages is probably quite a bit easier than being able to produce (speak) them all fluently. Imagine having thirty choices for, say, the word “confused” and having to constantly come up with the right ones on the fly at normal conversational speed. You probably won’t end up producing Japanese words if you’re speaking Spanish (confundido), but you may just end up saying the Italian version (confuso). [Actually, I believe Spanish can say “confuso” as well, but that refers to ideas rather than a person’s state of mind]
How can you memorize and be able to produce more than a very basic vocab list (like a couple thousand words, which I wouldn’t count as “fluent”) of 30+ languages?
Emil Krebs was attested fluency in 68 languages by Prussian authorities. Later research reduced this number to 45 under a more restrictive definition of a language than in the OP.
This may or may not be world record, but I’d say it’s the highest number that has been documented beyond resonable doubt.
The guy I was talking about addressed that, sort of. He was specialized in middle-eastern languages, and quite old (80, maybe?). He mentioned that age was beginning to hamper his ability, and that he would sometimes confuse a word for the equivalent word in another language. Which implied that normally, he wouldn’t make such mistakes.
The list in this Wikipedia article mentions two persons who knew more languages than Krebs:
One such person is al-Farabi:
The other such person is Bowring:
I think that a useful rule of thumb is that it’s not difficult at all for someone to be fluent in three languages. Indeed, there are regions of the world where most people speak three languages natively, since the ethnic situation is so confused there. There have been a lot of people who knew up to about 10 languages. If you’re reasonably good at learning languages and spend all your time on that, you can easily learn that many languages in your lifetime. There are a handful of people who have learned considerably more languages than that. It takes both an extraordinary amount of talent and the opportunity to learn them.
Ken Hale, the linguistics professor, was highly fluent in at least fifty languages at the time of his death.
I actually went to school with one of his former students, who told me an extremely cool anecdote. (I have no clue if it’s true, but I can’t figure out why she would lie about it.)
Anyway, whenever Hale was invited to give presentations at foreign universities he would insist on learning whatever language was used at said university well enough to deliver his speech in it. My friend traveled with him to one such speaking engagement in the Netherlands, and she tells me that he stopped at the bookstore before they left for the airport and bought an armful of beginning, intermediate, and advanced Dutch textbooks. He spent the entire flight looking through the textbooks, and she claims that by the time they landed, he’d learned it well enough to convince the Customs officials that he was a native or near-native speaker.
I’ve heard that Gary Kasparov, the long-time chess champion, spoke something like 20 languages, but I’m not finding any support for that online. If so, it would be remarkable for someone not known primarily for his linguistic ability.
I once read a science-fantasy novel by Poul Anderson in which the spirit of Lobachevski enters the head of the protagonist to help guide him through the non-Euclidean realms of Hell, and… well, anyways, the protagonist suddenly finds that he can speak Russian and Polish. “Russian purled and fizzled from his lips.” sigh
Not nearly in the league of some of those mentioned in this thread, but… Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, hero of Gettysburg and later president of Bowdoin College, was fluent in nine languages other than English: Greek, Latin, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac. And President James A. Garfield was both multilingual and ambidextrous, capable of writing Greek with one hand and Latin with the other simultaneously.
I don’t know how he specifically handled pronunciation, but I’m assuming he had some kind of phonetic guide. One of the first basic tools they teach linguists is a (fairly) robust system of phonetic notation, called the International Phonetic Alphabet (or just IPA).
Given that, I’m guessing that he specifically bought at least one book that covered Dutch orthography in some detail. Most linguists, given a pronunciation guide that they trust, can work out how to accurately pronounce each sound. It won’t be perfect, but it’ll be more than enough for someone to make themselves understood long enough to hear actual native speakers perform and adjust accordingly.
That’s the main reason why I brought Ken Hale up; he spent most of his adult life working with any number of linguists and informants who got to see him learning and using various languages at an extremely high level.
(Oh, on an odd note, he apparently raised his kids in a bilingual Warlpiri/English environment.)
