What Is a Polyglot?

Felt this was great!  Great to remember as we prepare our Esperanza scholars to be biliterate. 

What is a polyglot?

March 21, 2012 by sara0902

Eddie Donovan discusses the practice of multilingualism and shares some interesting facts with us.
A polyglot is someone with a high degree of proficiency in several languages. (A bilingual person can speak two languages fluently, a trilingual three. One who can speak six or more languages fluently is known as a hyper polyglot.)
The following list must be seen as anecdotal. Calculations as to “how many” languages anyone speaks is impossible for several reasons.
To start with there is no clear definition of what it means to “speak a language”. A tourist, who can handle a simple conversation with a waiter, may be completely lost when it comes to discussing current affairs or even using past tense. A diplomat or businessman, who can handle complicated negotiations in a foreign language, may not be able to write a simple letter correctly. A four year old French child usually must be said to “speak French fluently”, but it is unlikely that he can handle the subjunctive as well as even a mediocre foreign student of the language does.
In addition there is no clear definition of what “one language” means. The Scandinavian languages are so similar that a large part of the native speakers understand all of them without much trouble. This means that a speaker of Danish, Norwegian or Swedish easily can get his count up to 3 languages. On the other hand, the differences between variants of Chinese, like Cantonese and Mandarin, are so big that hard studies are needed for a speaker of one of them to learn even to understand a different one correctly. A person who has learnt to speak five Chinese “dialects” perfectly has achieved something impressive, but his “count” would still be only one “language”.
Sometimes a new language is “created” or “deleted” for purely political purposes, like when Serbo-Croatian was split into Serb and Croatian after Yugoslavia broke up, or when Ukrainian was dismissed as a Russian dialect by the Russian Czars to discourage national feelings.
To take it to its extreme, there is an apocryphal story about a Bavarian linguist who spoke 126 languages, none of which could be identified.

What is a polyglot?

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