Why I HATE the term POLYGLOT and you should too

In this video, I talk about people who speak multiple languages, and why I hate the term "polyglot" and refuse to identify myself as one (hint: it's not that I don't speak a few languages). I talk about the de facto polyglot arms race on YouTube, and I explain why I prefer calling myself a "linguaphile."

[LanguageSimp]

I’m a hyperpolyglot gigachad alpha male

[bmwii]

I once claimed to speak Spanish when I was at a B2 level and was accused of lying, I also once claimed to not speak French when I was at an A2 level and was accused of lying then as well, “speaking” a language can be extremely ambiguous so I mostly dont bother with that terminology at all anymore lol

[MrNiceguyjin]

YouTube and Twitter ruined the word “polyglot” for me. No matter how many more languages I learn, I will probably still just tell people I’m a language lover.

[staatenhao]

I also feel like this fascination with "polyglots" is primarily an American/Western European thing. In most African countries there are millions of people that speak four or more languages due to the vast amount of ethnic groups that exist. For example, my parents speak Wolof, Mandinka, French, and English, but they don't see it as anything mind blowing or even impressive. That's just how you had to survive in a country where you had to learn the colonial language, the language of the major ethnic group, your own ethnic language, and English for obvious reasons.

[justicebeske]

I respect your humility and actual respect for other languages and cultures rather than just seeing them as quests to be conquered before moving on to the next.

[ellenlehrman]

Fun fact: “speaking” a language is only half the battle. You also have to be able to understand what that lady who lives on a mountaintop in Guatemala is trying to tell you. And you make an excellent point about languages not being discrete entities. My dad once told me a story about how in the 1950s, he returned home to New York after an extended trip to German & French speaking Europe. Hours after disembarking, he was sitting with his aunts as they discussed making new curtains for their living room. He said, “I couldn’t follow the conversation at all, and they were speaking English!” So for sure, the subject matter is a major factor!

[ghostofmybrain]

Yes make that video about how to pretend to be a polyglot

[uamsnof]

You are a breath of fresh air. Finally someone I can watch talk about languages without getting annoyed or feeling cringe. Thank you for being real and genuine about what it means to "know a language."

[ssimms]

This makes a lot of sense. I feel like many polyglots just treat the languages as another number on their "Learned" language list. They settle at a degree of "fluency" where they could have a basic conversation and impress beginners/those who don't speak the language, but wouldn't hold up after a few days or a topic they weren't prepared for in that country or language.

I myself have not reached fluency in the languages I have studied, but I feel like this is a better term. I love languages, linguistics, and everything about languages. I am studying Korean because I lived there, got attached to the culture, learned the history of the language, etc. I love not only learning the language, but learning about the language and everything that goes with it.

[matteoposa]

I'm an Italian native speaker, I began learning English when I was six. At around 15, while learning (how to badly translate from) Latin and Ancient Greek at school for five years, I started studying Finnish on my own because I hated myself that much. I went on to study it in university, along with Russian and English, and took also a little introductory course of Slovak, which basically meant for me to speak Russian with a different accent. Incidentally, I had to take a two week course of Estonian, where I also got an OFFICIAL B2 language certificate (to this day, the only word I can say in Estonian is "libahund", werewolf, and I'm 100% sure that's not how you spell it). I moved to the Netherlands two years ago, started taking private lessons right away to learn the language and I still tell my clients they can only pay with cash when they really can only pay with their card. I recently learnt the Tibetan alphabet and stopped right there because it really isn't worth the struggle, to be honest.  

By internet standards: hypermegapolyglot on steroids.
In reality: unrequited linguaphile.

[corynicolas]

I speak six languages and learned them over the course of 46 years. I have native fluency in English-Spanish, speak French, Portuguese and American Sign Language fluently and can also speak Italian which is my newest language. I've been a professional interpreter for 30 years and picked up languages during different decades of my life. I took a year of German in school and studied a few other languages but I don't count them at all. Languages are a lifestyle and you have to have many experiences in the languages to truly know them intimately and this takes time. English was my first language, then I learned Spanish because my uncle married a Mexican woman when I was ten and I chose to become bilingual-bicultural. It became my life. I then learned French in High School and continued studying it for years. I grew up with Deaf friends and learned ASL and eventually interpreted Sign Language. When I was 28 years old, I met some Brazilians while interpreting Spanish, ended up living with them for 2 years and learned Portuguese. Years later I started to delve more deeply into the language because so many of my students were from Brasil and I decided to work on my mastery of all aspects of the language. In the last few years I have been studying Italian. Many of these polyglots who claim to speak 20 or more languages (or even a few languages) don't actually have a high level of fluency in more than one language. I have no desire for quantity. My desire is to continually attain higher and higher levels of fluency in the languages I have learned thus far. I know how to attain high levels of fluency in languages instead of learning enough to fool some people.

[zhentang]

LOVE this video. I can confirm as a linguist too I do get "how many languages do you speak" a lot and I get annoyed not only because it reduces language experience into a binary (the implication that you either speak the language or you don't) and a non-cultural, non-political thing, but also because by asking me this question right after learning that I'm a linguist sometimes they're assuming that being monolingual is the default. It's not. Most societies in the world are multilingual. Most people grow up using/exposed to more than one language and they NEED to be multilingual in order to navigate their lives. I speak Cantonese because I grew up in a Cantonese-speaking area, but not as well as Mandarin because it's the official and dominant language in my country where minority languages and dialects are culturally and politically oppressed. Behind every language that I speak/sign there is a unique context where I acquired it and use it, and you can't really separate language ability from personal language history.

[Bucherviews]

Linguaphile is definitely more like it for me - getting to what I'd call fluency in any of my non-native languages hasn't happened yet because I've simply not had the motivation. I do as much as is enjoyable for me, then I stop and move on. People around me like to say that I 'speak 4 languages' but that's laughably untrue, even with languages I've learnt for years - I'm conversational in French and British Sign Language, and as long as I'm with people who are very forgiving of mistakes I could probably have a conversation in Mandarin, but... that's the limit of my abilities. Not quite monolingual, but definitely no polyglot!

[extrachipper]

One of the most bothersome questions to be asked as a language learner is "so, how many languages do you speak?" There's just no way to give an accurate answer without talking your interlocutor's ear off.

[CJLloyd]

I completely get this! I studied linguistics to undergrad level, but spent 10 years hanging around people doing at MA and above, so my discussions got pretty deep. Whenever I tell people that, they ask me "how many languages do you speak?", and I simultaneously try to explain that a) the concept of speaking a language is not clearly defined, b)linguistics isn't learning languages and c) I speak 3.54 languages, and none but my native English is an integer thereof. People usually stop listening after point a.

There's also another point I'd make, in that there are different types of fluency - in a different sense than you talked about here. I'm an English teacher as well as language learner, and in both arenas I view fluency more like the skill of being able to keep talking and use phrases without needed to think too hard about it. When a student is able to talk to me freely with basic vocabulary and limited syntactic accuracy, but nonetheless make themselves understood, they're clearly not fluent in the sense that most people would use the word, but to me, that's an important milestone, because I can build on that skill and help them expand in the areas they need, whereas teaching them to just speak and stop thinking so hard about speaking is a much harder task.

Similarly, I feel the same way with my own languages. I studied French throughout my childhood, took two years of tuition at university, and I can, with effort, understand news broadcasts, movies, conversations and so on in French. My vocabulary is reasonably large and I understand all the grammar (even if I forget it in use sometimes). However, it always takes me time to engage the French part of my brain when I need it. On the other hand, I have lived in Chinese speaking countries for six years, and while my Chinese is very poor in objective terms, what little I know I can access quickly and without thought, because I've had to use it constantly, day in day out. By most people's metric, I'm more fluent in French than in Mandarin, but by the same standards I judge my student's fluency, it's the reverse.

As to the other languages I "speak", I know very basic Japanese, a tiny amount of Greek, and a limited amount of German. For me, what's very interesting is how much I can understand of languages related to ones I know fairly well. I can listen to Scots speakers and, through exposure to the vocabulary differences, understand a decent amount. I can read Spanish, and if I spend enough time watching Spanish speaking on television, I can follow the conversation up to a point - all from knowledge of French (though IRL, Spanish confounds me, so there is a definite bias there towards the more comprehensible language in media).

So how do I identify? Mostly monolingual, with the skills to adapt as needed. I'm really not interested in the language olympics, I just love finding out how different languages do things. What languages I've learned at more than a passing level I've done through necessity or happenstance (even French - it was the only language available at my little town school, mandatory to study until 16, and I was quite good at it, so I took it higher).

[trevorwearing]

Watching polyglots inspired me and convinced me to try learn a lot of languages, but after learning a lot of bits and pieces about several languages I realised focussing on one or two second languages, especially the ones I'd be most likely to use, and doing those really well was much better than claiming to speak several.

[Alltoc]

Great video! Learning a language should be about wanting to be able to talk to new people and getting to know their culture, not about being able to say "I speak X languages"

[imma]

I have a couple thoughts from this video.

1. My initial push to want to learn languages partially came from watching these "I speak 12 languages" types. I became fascinated with the idea that I too could be just like that. Of course I grew up in a city with a large Hispanic minority and many of my friends came from Hispanic families. I really wanted to speak Spanish to communicate with them more effectively. The drive to learn more has partially been driven by people who weren't always honest about their abilities. They'd present themselves as being fluent, yet would get called out for not being as fluent as they claim in a certain language. There's also the fact I fell victim to the idea that these languages were quests to be conquered. They require cultural knowledge and people to make the journey memorable. I'm probably never going to learn luxembourgish, not because I wouldn't want to, but simply because it is very difficult for me to fully appreciate everything a language like that has to offer. You can't just pick up a dictionary, learn a few grammar rules, and be on your way. The language has to become a part of who you are, not just some cheap party trick you use to impress your friends.

2. I used to consider myself bilingual in both Spanish and English. I majored in Spanish and spent 10 years learning in high school and college. I even lived in spain during my study abroad trip 3 years ago. Since then, my abilities have atrophied quite a bit. Even when I was "bilingual", I relied heavily on dictionaries to help me find words to use. I can still hold a conversation pretty well, but I hesitate to call myself fluent in the language. I would actually like to take some advanced classes again to get myself back up to speed.

[renkio]

Thanks for introducing the word linguaphile - never felt at home with the word polyglot. Feels like a title you have to earn, whereas I just want to do my own thing without being held to a particular standard. It's sort of that impostor-syndrome feeling you get when I say "I'm learning Korean" to my colleague in the lift, and he goes "oh so you understand what all those Korean dramas are saying..." and then I regret having ever shared that part of myself.

[Emielio]

I absolutely love how you explained this stuff. I've also never wanted to call myself a "polyglot". Linguaphile seems more fitting, indeed. I speak Dutch (mother tongue), English (C1), a bit of French, a bit of Italian, a bit of German, a tiny bit of Swahili, a tiny bit of Scottish Gaelic and I can sort of understand Spanish due to me having studied Italian for 3 years at university.