By fluently, I mean they could talk to someone who speaks that language natively and the native speaker wouldn't notice that they were talking to a non-native speaker.
2007-08-18 06:51:49 · 13 answers · asked by Mark R 2 in Society & Culture ➔ Languages
José Mezzofanti, member of the Vatican. He spoke more than fifty. He was called the living Pentecost because he could speak in his language to every pilgrim who came to the Vatican. He learnt the dialect of an elderly woman in order to confess her.
In kind of a second place, according to his daughter, Henry Schliemann, who discovered the city of Troy, spoke 18 languages
2007-08-18 11:19:11 · answer #1 · answered by nadie 6 · 2⤊ 0⤋
I have no idea of who holds the record, but I study history constantly. History says that Lady Jane Gray spoke English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and classical Greek and Latin. There is no way of knowing how many she would have spoken, if they hadn't chopped off her head at age sixteen.
Mussolini never took a translator with him on official visits in most of Europe.
Cleopatra was believed to speak thirty languages. Many of those may have been dialects, though.
2007-08-18 14:05:55 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
My computer science teacher at school call Mr. Ahmet Dakeev Ulan from Kyrgyzstan speak his native language, English, Turkish, Georgian, Russian, Chinees fluently and little bit of some Nigerian languages
2007-08-18 14:02:10 · answer #3 · answered by stella 1 · 3⤊ 0⤋
I don't know for sure, but my father-in-law speaks 9 (English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Hebrew, Greek, Italian, Aramaic and Latin-even though the last two are dead languages). He is a Bible scholar with two PhD's in Theology and Hebrew studies. He reads ALOT of Bibles. And I know that Aramaic is not a written language but he says that it is similar enough to Hebrew and some Arabic dialects that he can pick it out pretty well.
2007-08-18 14:07:25 · answer #4 · answered by Spencer C 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
The record seems to be held by Cardinal Mezzofanti
who could speak more than 38 languages
fluently. What's even more amazing, he never
left his native Italy. For more information consult
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/mezzofanti/index.html
Second place might go to Heinrich Schliemann,
the person who dug up the ruins of Troy.
He was an accomplished master of 13 languages.
2007-08-18 15:17:13 · answer #5 · answered by steiner1745 7 · 3⤊ 0⤋
25 languages was the record by some woman.
I'm willing to bet that whoever speaks more than 25 are speaking in dialectal variants of the same language or languages from the same family, therefore not qualifying them as separate languages!
2007-08-18 21:10:32 · answer #6 · answered by bryan_q 7 · 0⤊ 1⤋
apparantly, Charles Berlitz (founder of Berlitz language schools) spoke 28 languages fluently and had notions in over 70. I don't.
2007-08-18 15:44:55 · answer #7 · answered by jayoftee 3 · 2⤊ 0⤋
My teacher speaks seven: English, German, Hebrew, Arabic, French, Spanish, and Russian.
2007-08-18 15:08:28 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
there are to many who speaks more than 4 languages
I do speak English french Italian( English level good and good french & italian )
2007-08-21 09:40:43 · answer #9 · answered by sulieman 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Time for the Guinness Book of Records to come out....
2007-08-18 13:57:15 · answer #10 · answered by Charlene 6 · 0⤊ 2⤋