How many languages can fit into a brain?
 

Come on, there must be a ceiling on the amount of languages a person can learn. Surely there are only so many words that can be crammed in there before one of several eventualities is reached:

1) There are so many languages in there that the wires are all entagled and cross talk starts occuring. A person might be speaking Icelandic and suddenly a Hungarian word will spill into a sentence, the speaker simply unable to segretate languages into their own orderly closed off sections anymore, to the confusion of many listeners.
2) Old languages are simply overitten.
3) Worst case scenario. The head and mouth begin involuntarily word hemorrhaging. Kind of like sterotypical Tourette's, but not necessarily shouted, and not only profanities. In severe cases a mouth bottle-neck will occur and words will start coming out of the persons ears.

Do you think there is a limit on the amount of languages a person can retain and use functionally? Where do you think the ballpark is? Who knows the Guinness record for most languages spoke?

Infinity.
If you put your mind into it...

I once had this substitute teacher when my English teacher was out on pregnancy leave. Now, this woman couldn't have been more than 5 feet tall, and she was at least 80 years old. She told us (attentive 6th graders who were still listening to teachers) about how she had survived the Holocaust in an Anne Frank-esque fashion, spending days cooped up in a closet.

Anyway, she was fluent in 13 languages. So, I don't know exactly how many are possible to learn, but it's at least 13.

I think, the more languages you already know, the easier learning new ones becomes (unless they are very different, like Latin versus Vietnamese, or the fuckin Sumerian). I don't know why you think they would be ''overwritten''; it's not like you forget how to brush your teeth when learning how to tie your own shoes. The only limiting factor is the amount of languages that you will be able to actively use often enough not to forget them, which is, probably, not more than ten or so, in most cases.

ps thanks for your post, ''gaming'' ; )

Your head isn't some computer or electronic. You can learn as much as you want. The only limit is your drive to do it. Put your mind to it and you can do learn as many as you want.

I dont know why you think a person will suddenly start crossing signals. Our brain isn't a little primitive CPU. >_> There's no limit or space to your head. When you learn your brain makes new connections. If you need more it makes more connections.

Yeah, the connections between languages make it easier to learn more once you reach a certain point. For example, if you learn one of the 'Romance' languages, it opens up the gate to all the rest of them (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, etc.). Or if you learn a Scandinavian language -- excepting Finnish -- you can basically get around the others.

Keeping that in mind, if the interconnectors in your brain are strong, you can have like, 10 languages down with minimal effort.

You know, there's not really even an infinte amount of languages out there. There are probably thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, but infinity? C'mon now.

But yeah, I agree with Aardark. I took a class in sociolinguistics, and the professor said that languages that are similar (like spanish and italian, for example) or stem from the same roots (english and german, for example) are easier to learn, and that they are stored in the same part of the brain. So in other words, your brain is already separating the languages into different areas of the brain, so I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to learn even hundreds of languages if you worked hard enough at it (of course that probably isn't practical for most people).

I recently the read the book "Native Tongues" by Charles Berlitz and apparently a linguist of the Vatican Library could speak or understand 50 languages! He knew more in written form too somehow.

DAMN!!! i thought my tour guide in Europe spoke a lot. she spoke 7-8 languages. all of them fluently.

Ah, the possibilities. And here I am in a lousy French III class in High School. I will probably never be fluent in another language besides English. What do people do? Take classes? That's a lot of money...I suppose I should just pick up some books and hide in a corner for a couple of years.

I know a man who leads a charity here who speaks 20+ languages fluently. He's from Africa originally, but moved to Europe when he was about 10, and picked up a lot of languages there.

Three and counting on my end.

People have done amazing things with memory in the past. There's no reason someone shouldn't be able to be a perfect polyglot.

My mother knows five languages fluently, and I know three myself. Funny thing is that now I'm horrible at learning new ones. I learned all 3 when I was a kid, so I just absorbed them since I heard my family speaking them all the time. My primary language was Italian for most of my life, and there are times when I'll be talking to someone and not be able to think of the word in English. So I'll start saying the Italian word over and over to them while I try to remember. Kind of embarassing^^'

Maybe once you've learned every living and dead language there is, you could start making some new ones up. :rolleyes:

Personally, I'm not even properly bi-lingual. I get by to the extent of being able to not starve or offend people in about 5 languages, but I only know "survival phrases". Add to that the one that I'm actually learning, and I'd rate myself at about 1.8 languages.

Seeing a lot of people can speak at least 3 languages, I feel somewhat limited knowing only French and English. Unless knowing "Panzerfaust", "Panzershreck", "Ja", "Nein", "Autobahn" and a few other words makes me fluent in German... I do wish I could learn a few more languages, but unfortunately I don't really have time for that.

Or you could go someplace where French is spoken on a daily basis...like France? That's the best way to immerse yourself in the language, and judging from your country symbol, I doubt you're anywhere near a place that has a heavy French population. If you want to learn a language and become fluent, then you become immersed in it. That's probably why so many Europeans are bilingual at the very least. Well that and they're taught another language at a young age compared to us Americans where it doesn't happen until high school for most.

Our brain is capable of so much, which is only limited to how much you want to do it. Sure some people can pick it up easier than others, though it just takes work, repetition and practice. Use it or you lose it!

That's right. There are a lot of languages which are almost the same. If you know German, it's not a big deal to learn languages like Danish, Dutch or even Swedish. Finnish language is familiar to Hungarian. Bottom line: learning three, four completely different languages can be tougher than learning like 12 languages that have the same roots. Tougher than it is [Cake].

I agree with Musharraf's point that learning a few very different languages can be harder. But it's doable. You can technically learn as many as you will yourself to.

Wow. That's pretty good. I believe that my grandmother spoke 6 languages. In my opinion it just comes down to practice. I'm sure that people could elarn as many languages as they wanted to as long as they put in the effort to study them and practice them.

QFT

Most of the languages based on latin is somewhat similar and knowing one of them, makes learning the others easier. Not a piece of cake, but easier.
For instance, I can understand Swedish and Norwegian, only because they have the same roots. Also dutch, if you know English and some German, dutch can be almost understandable.

However, I once read in a popular science mag, that the brain is only build for two languages.... However, as this is several years ago, I guess it's sort of old news...

Yeah, the builder had exactly 2 in mind when making the brain.

It's not an exact science. I can speak and even think quite well in three different languages.

The head of the linguistics department at my university knows (supposedly) two dozen languages. I really can't imagine knowing that many (I can speak in three and even that's a bit much for me sometimes). I guess it depends on how often you use the language and how much work you're willing to put into it or something.

Please note that it is technically not possible to learn 'as many' languages as you want. The brain has only a limited capacity. This capacity may be huge, but it is obviously limited (easily to see if you know a bit about information theory and how the brain stores information).
This does not mean that you can't learn all the languages spoken on planet earth. Children that have just started speaking have no trouble when being confronted with 4 different languages (and I think even more are possible). But I doubt that it's that easy if you're older. Plus you've to invest a lot of time (even when dealing with the child) - what could become the limiting factor. It's no good knowing all languages if you're dead *g*

I asked my grandmother, who speaks German and English, which language she thought in. She said both. She said that usually nowadays she thinks in English, but when she's thinking about certain subjects or certain people, it switches to German automatically. I found the whole idea very interesting.

I also think there's no real limit to how many you can learn - but I think that most people (with people like that 80 year old woman being an exception) would have a difficult time RETAINING 13 languages, because they surely wouldn't use all of them on a daily basis. I think that languages are much easier to pick up and retain if you are exposed to them and use them on a daily basis. If I sat home and learned 4 languages from a book without ever visiting a country where they are often used, I would probably forget much of the vocabulary right away. I think the ceiling involved in learning is not necessarily how much you can learn, but how much you can retain.

My mate's dad is damn near fluent in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Nigerian and at least 18 Ghanaian dialects which are apparently different enough to count as seperate languages.

My friend says her dad has a natural aptitude for languages, I say he's a spy.