# Which person can speak the most languages? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 21, 2006, 8:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-person-can-speak-the-most-languages/373610 "2006-09-21T20:20:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2006, 11:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-person-can-speak-the-most-languages/373610/21 "2006-09-26T11:28:17Z")
I heard a guy interviewed who claimed to speak about 100. He said it got easier after the first 30. There was a linguist named Kenneth Pike (now deceased, I believe) who put on a language-learning demo at the Modern Language Association every year. I didn’t witness it, but it was described to me that he sat at a table with a native speaker of a language he didn’t know and there were a few natural artifacts on the table: an apple, a stick, a stone, that sort of thing. After a half hour he was carrying on a simple conversation with him. ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2006, 3:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-person-can-speak-the-most-languages/373610/22 "2006-09-26T15:12:05Z")
I know Fortran, PL/1, SNOBOL, ALGOL, 360 Assembly, Ada83, C, C++, and Java. Do they count? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![tiltypig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/dbc845/32.png) [@tiltypig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tiltypig)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2006, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-person-can-speak-the-most-languages/373610/23 "2006-09-27T02:06:05Z")
My coworker doesn’t rank anywhere near the polyglots from wikipedia, but I’m still very impressed by him. I work at a translation company, and he has done QA work for us (so works at a professional level) in: French Italian German Spanish Portuguese Dutch Danish Swedish Norwegian Finnish Greek Russian Turkish plus he is a native English speaker. I believe he may also speak a few, like Latin and Welsh, that we don’t handle so I don’t know about. ---
**Author:** ![Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/73ab20/32.png) [@Alive\_At\_Both\_Ends](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alive_At_Both_Ends)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2006, 8:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-person-can-speak-the-most-languages/373610/24 "2006-09-27T08:14:28Z")
[QUOTE=diggleblop] A language in the sense of what I’m asking is this, if one group of people speak to each other and understand each other, that’s a language. If they speak the same language to a group of people living say…30 miles away from them and that group doesn’t understand them, then that must mean that group speaks a different language. [/QUOTE] The problem with this is that there aren’t nice sharp geographical boundaries between languages. People living near the border between two countries speaking different languages often understand the people living a few miles away on the other side of the border quite well. If A and B can understand each other, and B and C can also understand each other, it does not imply that A could understand C. The differences add up and eventually you have an undeniably different language, but A would say B spoke the same language as him, and B would say the same of C. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2006, 11:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-person-can-speak-the-most-languages/373610/25 "2006-09-27T11:55:31Z")
[QUOTE=diggleblop] A language in the sense of what I’m asking is this, if one group of people speak to each other and understand each other, that’s a language. If they speak the same language to a group of people living say…30 miles away from them and that group doesn’t understand them, then that must mean that group speaks a different language. If the actual words don’t make sense to another group living in the same area, then it’s is considered a different language. Dialect doesn’t count. What I mean by that is, British and American people both speak English and a lot of words may be altered, but it’s still English. [/QUOTE] According to your first paragraph, Jamaican and Floridian appear to be different languages. OTOH, Spanish and Italian aren’t, but I wouldn’t say that where any Italians or Hispanics other than yours truly can hear it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/which-person-can-speak-the-most-languages/373610.md?page=1)