"How many languages do you speak?"

If you’re anything like me - openly interested in foreign languages from a very young age (or not), and occasionally overheard speaking a few of them - you’ve probably ended up being known, willingly or not, in your small circle of family or friends, at work, or in your tiny rural town, as ✨a polyglot✨.

Whether that’s a good thing or not really depends on what you plan to do with that flattering label. Because, come to think of it, it really is flattering. Most people, fuelled by traumatising memories of language lessons from their school years, are very aware of how intense, long and tedious learning a language is. So the mere idea that you haven’t done it just once, not twice, but several times? Surely that must mean you’re some kind of genius!

It’s hard not to enjoy being on the receiving end of exaggerated praise about the supposed depth of your mind. So when you’re introduced as “the person who speaks tons of languages”, a sentence you mentally footnote immediately if you’re the humble and self-conscious kind, you don’t really know how to respond. Well, actually, you kind of do, because you’re already anticipating the question that almost inevitably follows: “Which languages?” You’re asked with wide eyes and genuine, dazzled interest. And unless you’re either extremely confident in your skills or mildly delusional about them, your next instinct is usually to launch into a brief explanation of fluency levels and why they’re much harder to define than people think.

That is usually when you lose people’s interest.

Because people don’t really want to hear you explain the intricacies of what speaking a language actually means (unlike you, my dear reader. I know you will happily read on). No, what people want is a demonstration. A proof. A performance. A visible token of your brilliance. In their minds, you are now a jukebox, and they are ready to toss the coins. You are a circus monkey doing hula-hoop on a walking globe rolling up onto a platform and back down again. (Something that I mention not for dramatic effect, but because that was the proud final act on my first year of circus school, so I can tell.)

Because what is very likely to happen, if you agree to show off just a little bit, is that someone slightly cheeky will ask you something very specific: oh yeah, you speak Zulu? Then how do you say ‘Government is most stable when its decisions are mistaken for necessity’. Or something equally twisted, pretty much designed to put you on the spot, that son of a b….

And then there is, of course, the risk that someone around you has a complete command of the language you’ve just claimed to speak, whether they’re native or not, and simply wants to switch and chat with you. Not out of malice. Just out of genuine pleasure.

This is where your credibility can collapse dramatically if you’re not quite as good as you may have implied, or as people have generously assumed. You lose instant aura points, as Gen Z would say, and there is no real recovery from that. So better safe than sorry: the safest bet is to never brag about your language skills to begin with, and to not show off when prompted even if you are pretty good. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone, you little monkey.

Even if you’re just asked to say something relatively easy, like “I tried to study and I ate instead.” Speaking on demand is a strange enough concept to make anyone freeze, even when they genuinely can speak. And there is always the added risk that stress will make you stumble over pronunciation, which immediately casts doubt on everything else you’re saying. People start wondering whether you actually speak the language or are just babbling something vaguely foreign-sounding. There is, unfortunately, a strong correlation between pronunciation and the level of mastery people think they’re witnessing.

Which is deeply unfair, when you consider that someone can know a language in depth - its vocabulary, its grammar, its expressions - and still never quite sound the part. Pronunciation carries authority in a way it probably shouldn’t (even though I have argued in an article that aiming for a good pronunciation is paramount to make real progress). Conversely, people with excellent pronunciation are often trusted more, and assumed to speak better than they actually do - a dynamic on which many internet polyglots have built entire careers.

And when you stop to think about it (and thank you for sticking with me, dear reader: I promise I’m about to land this plane), what does it actually mean to speak a language? At what point do you decide that you can speak it? This is a question I ask myself every time I update my CV and have to compress my language skills into painfully narrow categories, usually ranging from “elementary” to “native”, or from “school level” to “professional”. What do those terms even mean?

Because what usually comes after “native” is “fluent”, and what comes after “advanced” is often “intermediate”. So if you happen to have a wide range of linguistic abilities across several languages, where exactly do you put them? Am I only “advanced” in English if I’ve organised my life in such a way that I breathe English every minute of it, even though I wasn’t born into the language and still make occasional pronunciation or wording mistakes? Is my Spanish merely intermediate if I understand everything I listen to and read, yet wouldn’t be able to write articles like this one? Is my Italian only elementary if I intuitively understand most of the content I consume, but hesitate when it comes to actually contributing substance to a conversation, simply for lack of practice?

And when it comes to “school level”, what exactly is implied here? Personally, after three years of high school, with around three hours a week of almost private Russian classes (because the rest of my class was uninterested and most people simply didn’t show up to class), I had reached a level good enough to travel freely in Russia for nine months after high school—and to obtain a TRKI-2 level at the end of that period, which roughly corresponds to a B2. That was quite a measurable progress. Although, if I’m being honest, I don’t think I had actually reached that level—but that’s material for another article, because proficiency tests like the CEFR are, in my opinion, deeply flawed and not especially representative of one’s real abilities.

And finally, “professional” is probably the level that makes the least sense to me. Your job is likely so niche even in your native language that many of your fellow citizens wouldn’t fully understand your jargon and what the heck you are doing everyday. So the idea that you could do the same job, in another language, without friction (if that’s what “professional” is meant to imply) feels slightly absurd. Try asking a bilingual lawyer or a doctor to perform the very same tasks in another language. It’s wildly unrealistic. Even translators and interpreters, whose sole job is to work between two languages they are supposed to master completely, still have to learn new vocabulary every single day, depending on the situation: a conference, a scientific article, a novel.

There are also things you can probably say in one language that you simply can’t in another, regardless of your official level in either. My Turkish is much more lived in than my Spanish, simply because I have (literally) lived in Turkey and never in a Spanish-speaking country. I have also been in a loving relationship in Turkish, fully integrated into the family, and I haven’t experienced that in Spanish. As a result, I comprehend the first on a much deeper level than the second, even though my Spanish is objectively much stronger in academic terms: a very broad vocabulary, a solid command of grammar, but very few cultural references and little emotional attachment to truly feel connected to it.

Once I spent a full week enjoying Baselang’s first free week of unlimited classes in Spanish, where you can book 30-minute lessons with speakers from all across Latin America whenever you like (and I cannot recommend it enough). The first day alone was a blur of back-to-back half-hour sessions in which I struggled constantly and stalled mid-sentence. And yet, by the start of the second day, I was comfortable again and ended up being placed at a C1 level and constantly congratulated on my “neutral” accent and my neat speaking abilities, despite having almost never practised Spanish conversationally in my life.

What really struck me, though, was the realisation that I had very little to say. I knew almost nothing about the cultures of the people I was talking to. I’d seen maybe three films in Spanish in my entire life, at best, and I’d never really listened to music from their countries. I was genuinely stunned to be able to understand and speak freely, using fairly intricate grammar and words I didn’t even know I knew; yet still have so little substance to bring to the conversation.
I’d experienced something similar a few months earlier with my Latin American and Spanish friends. We spoke English at first, because we were in Australia and it simply made more sense - but also because whenever they switched to Spanish, they were usually talking about cultural references I didn’t have access to. My attempts to join in felt awkward to me, and probably just as awkward to them.

What this leaves me with is the feeling that fluency isn’t about how much you can produce, but about whether the language feels like a place you can exist in comfortably. And once you see it that way, the urge to impress people with it mostly disappears.