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There are people who can speak 4-6 languages well because they grew up in multilingual environments. When people claim they speak 10+ languages fluently, it's frankly unbelievable. Professors who study a foreign language their entire lives understand that despite their dedication to the language and culture they are still not as fluent as a native speaker. I suspect these 10+ language "polyglots" don't understand how much they have to learn.

If I ever met one of these people, I would like to have a simple way to disprove them. I would like to come up with some words/expressions that they are likely not to know in all of their languages. Some requirements:

  • The expression must be common enough that it exists in most languages. Something like "jumped the shark" is too specific to English.
  • It must be uncommonly taught in foreign language instruction. A word like "werewolf" might be uncommon in regular speech, but it is often taught to foreign language students.
  • It cannot be something that is too technical or domain-specific. Someone who isn't interested in football wouldn't feel like they are lacking vocabulary if you tell them they don't know what "offside" is in all of their languages. Similarly, someone who hasn't studied math won't feel like they're missing anything if they can't translate "the altitude of a triangle".

What are some words you can come up with that meet these expectations? Maybe you have a different way to convince a "polyglot" they might not be as fluent as they claim they are?

anonymous_pigeon
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  • I don't have a good answer, but as a Brit who's studied quite a lot of maths in my life (physics masters) I'm not sure I properly understand "altitude of a triangle". If I have understood it correctly though, I'd probably call it the "(perpendicular) height" of the triangle (e.g. I'd read the area formula for a triangle A=bh/2 as "area equals a half base times height) – Tristan Nov 03 '21 at 14:24
  • @Tristan Yes, you've understood correctly. Maybe "altitude" is a more American term. We also use "height" in the same way. – anonymous_pigeon Nov 03 '21 at 14:28
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    To my knowledge as a teacher of English as a foreign language, the best expressions for your purpose are not some obscure, but, on the contrary, the most basic everyday ones, so basic that nobody cares to remember and learn them, like ‘tie shoelaces’, ‘sew a button’, ‘wipe one's ass’, ‘pick one's teeth/nose’, ‘blow one's nose’, etc. When you learn a language, those expressions are some of the last stuff you learn. – Yellow Sky Nov 03 '21 at 16:24
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    ‘Fluent’ is a very vague and ill-defined term. It means little. I suspect those speakers you’re talking about are simply using it differently from how you understand it. As a very broad generalisation, it is my experience that English-speakers in general (Americans in particular) have a lower threshold for fluency than most Continental Europeans. I’ve met Americans who were described (and described themselves) as fluent in Spanish, but whose Spanish was not nearly as fluent as mine, although I absolutely do not consider myself fluent in Spanish. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 03 '21 at 16:54
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    Disappointingly for anyone hoping to work out the universe a priori, many "frankly unbelieveable" things do actually turn out to be true. – AakashM Nov 05 '21 at 13:19

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Nothing whatsoever fits that description. An expression like "jump the shark" is not just too English-centric to translate into another language, it is obscure slang that I didn't even know until you posted it (I'm a native US English speaker). Likewise "altitude" of a triangle (sounded like a language-learner mistake to me, apparently it's yet another dialect difference).

If you take a list of infrequent English words and present some to monolingual English speakers, and asked for an explanation of what the word means – then present "epicene, squamulose, alacrity, cynosure, defeasible, jeremiad, whinge" – most subjects won't know these words. You could say that these people are not fluent speakers of English, therefore they don't fluently speak any language. Fluent knowledge of a language is not the same as encyclopedic knowledge of the words of a language. Consult Urbandictionary and see if you fluently speak English, i.e. are up on all of the obscure slang that has been emitted by someone somewhere. As for "expressions", I'm constantly amazed at how many perfectly fluent speakers of English don't know marginal idioms, and the contractors working on my house are constantly amazed that I don't understand their idioms.

You could look for a word frequency list and pick some number like 10,000, focusing on the 10,000 most-frequent words of English. That includes words like guitar, oak, jeans, asshole, ecosystem, marine, hormone, shareholder, refrigerator, psychiatrist, swiss, pancake, condo, schmalz, atropine, arborist, gam, intranasal, shyster... You will probably recognize some problems, that there isn't likely to be a Tamazight equivalent of "blizzard" because they don't have blizzards; many fluent speakers of English have no idea what atropine is; what's the Hindi word for "schmaltz" (which meaning of schmalz?). In other words, I think any test based on knowing obscure words is doomed to failure because it also rules out actual fluent monolingual speakers of English.

You could also focus on grammatical knowledge. That is a bit less problematic, but still many speakers of English really do say "I would of gone" rather than "I would have gone" or "If I was you" instead of "If I were you". If you don't correctly understand "I might should go", does that mean you aren't a fluent speaker of English? A grammatical test would have to eliminate dialect / register distinctions that are not universal. After you're extracted a "minimum core of English grammar", you'd then need to convert that to the intended test languages, perhaps Mandarin, Arabic, Swahili, Hindu, Navajo, Bulgarian, Finnish. Devising a construction-translation framework between English and Arabic is going to be hard enough, doing it (and testing your translations!) for a dozen languages is really impossible.

A much simpler test is ad hoc. Find a person who claims to be fluent in Finnish. Find a person who you know is fluent in Finnish. Have them meet and talk, and see what the native speaker of Finnish thinks. Maybe use a dozen speakers to get an average evaluation.

user6726
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    Do English speakers actually say “would of” instead of “would have”? To me, and also to any other speaker I can think of, have and of in this context would both be pronounced /əv/ and quite indistinguishable. Are there any speakers who consistently pronounce them differently and use the pronunciation associated with of in compound tenses? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 03 '21 at 16:42
  • I agree with your points that my criteria are impossible to meet. Your suggestion of a "jury" of native speakers to decide if the polyglot is fluent seems like a good solution to me. – anonymous_pigeon Nov 03 '21 at 17:34
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    @JanusBahsJacquet: "of" is pronounced /ɒv/ in my idiolect, and I have 100% heard people say [wʊd ɒv], even though "have" can normally only possibly be reduced to /ə(v)/. – jogloran Nov 03 '21 at 21:50
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    @JanusBahsJacquet I'm pretty sure some English speakers actually say would of, or at least they think they're saying it. Of course, you can't tell by listening. Any more than you can tell by listening whether a speaker analyzes listen to the mockingbird as Verb + Object or Verb + Prepositional Phrase, or whether broken is an adjective or a participle in a broken leg. Those are analysts' decisions, and speakers may or may not agree with them; after all, it's their language and their grammar. – jlawler Nov 04 '21 at 15:43
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    As for polyglot debunkers, no hay. I know a lot of polyglots and language sponges, and have watched them operate. It works and they do learn fast and accurately. The late Ian Catford was a colleague of mine for decades; he used to classify languages by how long it would take (for him) to learn them. Most languages were 4- or 5-week languages, but we agreed that Indonesian was a 1-week language. – jlawler Nov 04 '21 at 15:46