How Many Languages Can You Learn in Your Lifetime?

Knowing 6+ languages is something to be proud of

Fun fact before getting started [Source]:

• There are nearly 7,000 languages today.
• Roughly 40% of the world's population only speaks 1 language.
• Only three percent of people around the world can speak over four languages.
• Less than one percent of people worldwide are proficient in 5 or more languages.

People learn languages for a hobby, for convenience, for work, or really even for necessity. There are so many reasons to learn a language, and everyone’s reasons are different. I learn languages because the linguistics aspect is interesting, and I love learning about other cultures. My brother learns a language to be able to communicate with his employees more clearly. The amount of languages that one can learn within their lifetime, is dependent on a lot of factors including their natural ability, what languages they choose to learn, and the degree that they choose to learn them.

Aside from motivation and dedication, there are other factors that can influence how many languages you can learn in your lifetime. Romance languages specifically — they are so closely related. Lexically speaking, French and Italian are 80–90% similar; however, this doesn’t mean they are mutually intelligible. Learning French might make learning the basics of Italian much easier, but big differences in pronunciation and syntax will make the fluency process must more difficult.

Another aspect that weighs in favor of learning many languages is Metalinguistic awareness, which is essentially the ability to talk about, analyze, and think about language independent of the concrete meaning of each word. This skill allows you to compare and contrast languages and remember that in language X you do a-b-c, whereas, in language Z, the rule is c-a-b.

In Italian, sentence structure generally follows this order: subject (who’s doing the action), verb (the action), object (who the action is being done to) — also known as SVO. Standard Arabic is VSO. Realizing that Italian is SVO, you could make the same correlation to other romance languages; and for Standard Arabic being VSO, you could assume that Egyptian is the same. Knowing this makes understanding the linguistics portion of Language Learning much easier.

Getting mathematical with it. I took an average amongst the 4 categories that the Foreign Service Institute breaks out for us — Category I being languages that are more similar to English and Category 4 being Languages that are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers. That average is 1,238 hours (rounded up). Say you want to speak 8 languages, 2 from each category. That’s about 10,000 hours of study. If language learning is a hobby, let’s average 1–2 hours a day of study (14 hours a week). That’s about 14 years, of completely dedicated studying without a break.

Now, factor in breaks (which are healthy) and other oddball scenarios that you can’t predict… let’s round up to 20 years for 8 languages. Needless to say, that’s pretty good. Say for your entire adult life from 20 years old to 80 years of age, you studied 24 languages to an advanced degree, that’s awesome. The only thing you have to worry about at that point is maintaining every one of them to such a high level.

Doing some research online, other people and bloggers agree that a dedicated person can learn about 10 languages in their lifetime (and maintain them equally) — that qualifies you as a Hyper Polyglot. If you go above 15, I’d qualify you as a professional polyglot; i.e., that’s what you do for a living (or you should do that for a living, lol).

Simply put, about 10; but knowing 6+ languages is something to be proud of.

How many languages do you know?