Which person can speak the most languages?

[Hari_Seldon]

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.

[CookingWithGas]

I know Fortran, PL/1, SNOBOL, ALGOL, 360 Assembly, Ada83, C, C++, and Java.

Do they count?

[tiltypig]

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.

[Alive_At_Both_Ends]

@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.

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.

[Nava]

@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.

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.