I think it was Ken Hale that someone once told me a story about. He was in a Baskin-Robbins store near MIT and Ken Hale and his kids came in. He heard Hale and his kids speaking some odd language. He later realized that they were talking in Warlpiri, which they had learned while he was in Australia doing research. The question I should have asked this guy when he told me this story was what was the word in Warlpiri for Rocky Road ice cream.
Yes but the notion that he learned 50 of them is laughable.
How many fluency examinations did he take and pass?
I have seen studies that suggest true fluency takes six years of cultural immersion to obtain. You may be able to memorize 1,000 words of icelandic in a weekend, but all you are doing is exercising your hippocampus - not becoming fluent.
I’m honestly quite skeptical of many of the people mentioned in this thread. In Mezzofanti’s case, how could they verify his ability? What if visiting dignitaries and students from other regions just said that Mezzofanti spoke it perfectly, in order to curry favor or just to be polite? Or maybe he was competent, like a third semester language student who had especially good pronunciation, but they were so surprised even by that level that they gave more credit than a more objective person would?
I guess I can buy that if his conversation with the Customs guys was 3-4 sentences long. Longer than that, I would be highly doubtful they would mistake him for a native speaker. No matter what grammar and vocab you can memorize from reading books, it takes exposure to be able to actually listen and respond in a fluent conversation, especially if you’re going after natural enough intonation and pronunciation to be considered almost native level.
The explorer Richard Burton was said to be able to speak 25 different languages.
I barely know more than his name, his reputation, and a few anecdotes, so I really don’t have the background or interest to defend him- I just mentioned Hale because he was a recent polyglot whose profession put him in a position where a large number of scholars were able to observe his skills with languages.
My experiences in both linguistics and teaching, however, leave me wary of words like “true fluency”. If you’re a native speaker you have grammatical intuition, but if you learn a language as an adult you’ll never develop the same sort of intuition. You’ll continue to improve for a very, very long time, but I don’t think there’s any such thing as true fluency; adult nonnative proficiency exists on a gradient. (Note that I’m a phonetician, so I’m largely talking out of my rear here- I haven’t done anything even remotely resembling learnability theory or L2 acquisition for years.)
I think it depends on your definition of fluent. To me fluent means no pause. I know a person who speaks, English, German, Dutch, French, and Spanish. I know a girl who speaks those two. She was from the Netherlands and he was from Belgium.
The difference was the girl Petra, never seemed to be translating at all. The man, Niek seemed to speak fine English, then he’d suddenly slow down and think and then speed. You could see the wheels turning in his head.
When we’d have the French airline crews come in Petra would speed through French as would Niek, and I could see that even though I don’t speak French. When the German airline crews came in, Petra again never stopped but you could see Niek slow and the wheels in his head turn looking for words etc.
Now both Petra and Niek were able to fully communicate with Germans, and English and French, and they both got the messages across, but Petra had a much better grasp of the languages.
So that’s a great example, some people may say Niek was fluent, 'cause he knew all the words and grammar but every once in awhile he’d have to think to get the language right. Petra never had to.
To me I would say Petra was fluent while Niek had advanced level (just under fluency)
But that’s just me
My dad can speak Spanish, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, French, and Quechua. Ditto my mum chaging Latin for Quechua.
So it they, with no particular desire to learn languages (they learnt them due to their extensive travelling/living abroad + school / Enlgish, Latin) can make 6 (+ basic Dutch) it does would not surpise me that a “professional” guy actively trying to learn them with lots of material can go 15 with a bit of effort.
Omi no Kami, are you aware that Noam Chomsky is not bilingual? Being a linguist does not imply, even a little bit, that you are fluent in many languages. Simply using the known rules of language to parse languages on paper, or fudge the ability to speak a language a bit, does not imply fluency.
Indeed. Given that a fairly significant proportion of UK native English-speakers would probably struggle to get past an intermediate level examination in English as a foreign language, I have to question some of the definitions in use. I work with many foreigners who speak english better than most british people, albeit with an accent.
Being able to speak a foreign language as well as a semi-coherent fifteen year old school dropout native in that language is probably not a particularly high hurdle, and it’s pretty pointless to set the definition of ‘fluency’ so high that it excludes native speakers.
I used to work with a guy that spoke 31 languages fluently, and could muddle through over 100 more. At least that’s what another coworker claimed. I know for a fact that he taught a bunch of languages.
That’s anecdotal, of course, but I have nothing better. Feel free to Google the name Pasquale Tato and see if you can come up with more than I did.
Elizabeth I allegedly was fluent in eight languages: English, Welsh, Scottish, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Greek, and French.
Not quite as impressive, but Benito Mussolini could speak at least four languages: Italian, English, French, and German. At the Munich Conference, Mussolini was the only national leader who could speak directly with everyone else there.
From a website about Lewis & Clark:
*They hired different people as interpreters. One was George Drouillard, part-Shawnee Indian, who spoke Native sign language. They also hired Francois Labiche, who spoke French and several Indian languages, and Toussaint Charbonneau, who spoke French and Hidatsa. Charbonneau’s wife was named Sacagawea. She spoke Hidatsa and Shoshone. Members of the expedition spoke many different languages, and even communication among the members could be challenging. If Lewis wanted to speak to Sacagawea, he needed two interpreters. It was important to know who spoke what language. Sometimes it took up to six people just to communicate a simple phrase. *
I think that is a pretty high hurdle, considering how much even a random uneducated fifteen year-old knows about his own language. He might have crap grammar, but his grammar is crap in a native way that still follows certain guidelines.
“He out da game, Avon.” Pretty big grammar mistakes, as it should be: “He’s out of the game, Avon.” However, these are ‘mistakes’ that pretty much only native speakers would make, and is quite understandable.
“Avon, he is game outside.” This is something one of my Chinese students might say. Although the number of mistakes is about the same, it’s much harder to parse for a native speaker and would disqualify it from my standard of fluency.
For the purposes of this thread, I don’t think any of us expect such a high standard as to exclude some native speakers. I actually think talking like a high-school dropout would be harder for a lot of language learners than speaking the “standard” language.
Anyway, I think being able to talk about all daily life topics plus some specialized topics, and being able to get around language obstacles without resorting to another language are decent qualifications.
I have often wondered how L&C and company communicated with the Native Americans along the way. Thanks, Elendil’s Heir.
BTW, this is a wonderfully illuminating thread - IMHO. A tip of the hat to Windwalker.
OK, so we have:
Cardinal Mezzofanti, credited with 38 languages. 19th century, university, polyglot reputation with visiting scholars coming to test him. This seems fairly credible, though it’s not rock-solid.
**
Emil Krebs,** credited with 68 languages (or 45), died in 1930. Was an interpreter in China and definitely knew many languages, but the main evidence for the exact number were his Babel-like library and his own personal list of languages mastered. A bit suspect, IMO.
**
John Bowring.** He said that he knew 200 and spoke 100. This site said that it was closer to 8 + “a working understanding” of 25 dialects.
Ken Hale. I’m having a hard time finding an exact number, but a poster in this thread says he’s mastered 50+. Died in 2001, was famous for learning languages really quickly, his studies of linguistics and endangered languages, as well as teaching linguistics to native speakers of those languages.
To be honest, I’m most skeptical of polyglots that existed before the age where their mastery could really be verified and recorded. It’s already quite evident even from some of the people in the thread that they often vastly exaggerate their own abilities. For now, if we can get a number on Ken Hale’s mastered languages, I’d be most willing to believe that he’s the one. It makes sense that it would come from the modern age, since travel and language-learning are easier now that it ever has been in history.
Thanks for all the responses, guys.
I think the toughest aspect of the question is that there is no cut and dried definition of fluency, and therefore no test of it.
Even in English, my native language and the one in which I have the strongest claim to fluency, if the conversation turns to carpentry, as but one example, I encounter a whole bundle of specialized terms with which I am not familiar.
It gets worse when you cross cultural and linguistic boundaries - my friend who is fluent in German was none the less completely at sea when he had to go to the DIY store in Berlin. Not only is the thing with which you hang a picture not called an anchor in German, they use a totally different set up, so there is no equivalence between the terms.
So my first response to your original post is to ask how you would prefer to define ‘fluency’ and take it from there. Then we’ll get into the problems of attestation, and whether someone getting stuck at the airport is because they aren’t as fluent as they claimed to be…
I find it’s much easier to just not claim to be fluent; then people are impressed with how well you speak.
I defined fluency in my original post. To quote myself:
And now consider that Sacagawea was the only member of the Corps who spoke Shoshone, so when Lewis and Clark were negotiating with the Shoshone chief to buy horses, they had to go through the chain Lewis - Labiche - Charbonneau - Sacagawea - Cameahwait. Personally, I think it was only the fact that Cameahwait was Sacagawea’s brother that prevented some huge cultural misunderstanding from arising from the game of Telephone they were playing.
I’m sure by the time the phrase “I want to buy a horse” got to Sacagawea it must’ve been something like “Does your wife hav sex with horses?” and the S-gal had to figure out what the heck Lewis was asking
So they’re grammatically wrong, but in a right way? 
If you are testing some hypothetical uber-polyglot and they can neither spell, pronounce or construct according to the ‘rules’ and have a tiny vocabulary but can be mistaken for a native by other natives 99% of the time, do you then count them as being ‘fluent’ in that langauge? And are they more or less fluent than another potential candidate, who can follow all the rules of the language flawlessly and ace every academic langauge exam but still very obviously sounds like a foreigner?
These two things seem very different, at least to me.
I’ve met many non-native english speakers for whom this would be a non-issue, with not more than one or two difficulties in ten minutes of conversation. I’ve also met more than a few english people with whom this would be a truly painful exercise, just because the version of english they use is so different from the one I use. Given that nowadays I regard myself as a native english speaker, which is more fluent? The one I can communicate with easily, or the one I practically need an interpreter with?