Languages

I occasionally get this question "how many languages do you speak?" to which the answer is two, as it is for 43% of the world's population. Another 17% speak three or more languages fluently, so my skill is not a rare one. Admittedly, the percentage of bilingual or multilingual people is lower in the US, even in California, but it is still high. Over a quarter of the California population is fluent in English and Spanish, and many also speak Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, Persian, Hindi, Arabic, Armenian, or Russian. Over 40% of Californians speak a language other than English at home, and there are over 200 languages spoken in the state. My native language is spoken by only about 0.32% of the world's population and doesn't make the list in California, so the fact that I'm bilingual is a simple combination of roots and necessity. 

What makes the question a bit awkward is the implied self-deprecation or deprecation of people who speak only one language (the other 40% of the world's population), as if that makes them victims of a lacking educational system rather than having been freely blessed with a sufficient tool for most circumstances. English, my second but primary language (unilingual speakers of which tend to be the target of this disdain) happens to be the language used most commonly between non-native speakers, as well as being the lingua franca of business, travel, online communication, and academia. It's useful, common, and for many people, sufficient.

But that does not take away from the fact that this very handy tool freely in one's pocket usually sucks all the life out of the incentive to learn or even try more languages, unless you are in a service-oriented profession where necessity overtakes. For most people, the polite linguistic "your place or mine" when talking with someone who might be more comfortable in another language is automatically pre-decided in favor of English. "Let THEM struggle." 

This linguistic laziness is not unique to Americans. Some time in the mid-80s, my sister and I were on a train in Greece and met some German fellow backpackers. Unfortunately, they had no idea that they were on Balkan-like thin ice. We grew up with an intense prejudice against Germans and Germany, something my grandparents and their generation had been imbued with a few decades before and which, two generations later, had been duly passed on. I went back and forth, on that train in Greece, between feeling smugly open-minded and mildly treasonous for even talking with them. Until then, my only conversations with Germans had been in situational emergencies - e.g., where to find the toilets at the Raststätte along the Autobahn on our way to, well, any place not Germany. So here we were, all of us non-native speakers speaking our version of English and getting along in this traveler's Esperanto -- until they found out we were Dutch, and elatedly switched from English to German: "Ach so können wir Deutsch sprechen!" We were having none of it. 

What was sort of funny is that they were right. We could have. I grew up 50 miles from the German border. We received German TV over the air, and occasionally watched it. German and Dutch have about 84% lexical vocabulary similarity, so despite very different pronunciation and grammar, we can understand one another. I could speak pidgin German at least as well as I can today speak pidgin Spanish.

My unwillingness to speak German that time aside, I am usually happy to give it a shot in almost any language. This makes answering the question slightly more complicated (the "how many languages" question). I am somewhat fearless, having a confidence not matched by knowledge, skill, or embarrassment. I improvise and interpolate and listen and remember and feel and adapt and learn pretty quickly. Thus, I recently had long conversations with a guy who would only speak Galego (the language of Galicia, which I did not know was a thing until then). My שָׁלוֹם and תודה רבה were just comprehensible enough to be polite at checkpoints. I once found myself giving directions to a Russian cab driver in a desolate suburb of St. Petersburg, not hindered by the fact that he spoke only Russian, I didn't, and I had been to our destination only once before, in summer, and we were now very lost on ever-smaller solidly snow-covered back roads in Russian winter. After I gestured to him to slip-slide through an alley between two depressing Soviet-era high rises ("we're going to die here" was the consensus of my fellow passengers), all of a sudden we found ourselves in front of the building we were trying to reach. My colleagues looked at me with that "who ARE you?" look I get every once in a while. During the same trip, when the people we were negotiating with switched to Russian to figure out a way to get dramatically more money out of us, I interrupted them asking whether there was a problem with the financial aspects. After that they no longer assumed their Russian conversation was private. Спасибо.

Part of that comfort in languages other than my own (regardless of skill) came from lots of exposure through TV, movies, music, and books, as well as from the pleasantries and quaintness of travel, foreign cousins, crushes, friends moving to military bases across the border, and grandparents having been born overseas. My grandmother live-translated Beatrix Potter while she was reading to my sister and me, so we could enjoy the adventures of Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter in Dutch while seeing the words in English. I learned at an early age that "Come on, Jamie" sometimes got my cousin to come along, and picked up essential terms like "helados", "baguette", "merci", "lido", and "parallel fahren" (yes, I am well aware of the obvious selection bias in my vocabulary). The German channels dubbed things, so Bonanza and Daktari were in German, but Dutch TV came with subtitles rather than being dubbed so we watched Flipper, Lassie, and Looney Tunes in English, Poly and Graine d'Ortie in French, and Remi (家なき子) in Japanese. These gave me essential phrases like "They call him Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning", "¡Arriba! ¡Ándale!", "Bleiben Sie stehen!" and "Qui peut dire où va le vent?" 

Partial credit for my comfort with at least European languages also goes to having been instructed at some point or another in Dutch, English, French, German, Latin, ancient Greek, and Spanish. This was with varying degrees of success. 

• My Dutch is native, which I have talked about elsewhere. The subject of taal and later Nederlands covered everything from spelling to grammar to vocabulary to reading comprehension to composition to literature, and was rather thorough and not optional. I can't say I enjoyed all of it (or all my teachers) but most of it stuck with me through 40+ years in the boonies so I suppose it worked.
• English lessons did not start until fifth grade with the picture book Look, Listen, and Learn ("This is Sue. Sue has a hat") but by seventh grade we were dissecting Simon and Garfunkel lyrics and from eighth grade on our teacher would only converse with us in English. It was pretty effective, although when at 16 I spent a week in England away from Dutch speakers I discovered the difference between reasonably conversant and fluent, and doubled down on learning English properly.
• I had gone through an educational progression from my first On Parle Français in seventh grade to La Littérature Française du Moyen Âge in tenth. I thought I got it, and could order Six croissants, s'il vous plaît without ending up with the wrong pastries. Then I had a similar wake-up call when, my senior year, I visited my mom's cousin in a Paris suburb and realized they all spoke French and I didn't. But I winged it.
• German, thanks to its proximity to Dutch, was relatively easy to learn, so I was reading Kafka in German by tenth grade, but I was rather immature about the whole thing and could have learned it much better and enjoyed it more. But I still can recite my aus, außer, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu, gegenüber in my sleep. 
• Very little of the Greek stuck, other than being able to read the alphabet and remembering the first four words of the Odyssey (ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα). However, the alphabet was close enough to the Cyrillic one to help me get around in Russia, so I suppose it wasn't an entire waste. 
• Latin was largely a sentence translation and grammar exercise, an astoundingly inefficient way to waste time rather than actually learning the language. Six full years, you would have thought I'd be speaking it like a priest... But I can still rattle off my bellum, belli, bello, bellum, bello...bella, bellorum, bellis, bella, bellis.
• I took a semester of Spanish when I first moved to Texas, but unfortunately it was an 8am class and my attendance record was not perfect. It wasn't until much later that I became somewhat conversant, due to necessity.

So yeah, I had a geographical advantage and all sorts of tail winds and a lot of effort on top of that. But it's a lot of work with the end result to be average. Because despite all that instruction and exposure and improvisation and confidence and the critical-mass effect that comes from knowing that I can interpolate between all these or wing it in a pinch, and despite Gemini and ChatGPT and Papago and Google Translate, in the end, the answer is still two, as it is for between 40 and 60% of humanity.