Rule of thumb is: sizable minority language + official/ruling language + one international language:

Cantonese / Mandarin / English

Swedish / Finish / English

Tamazighi / Arabic / French

Basque / Castilian / English

I speak 3 and read another 3. My father is fluent in 5 and can bullshit in Russian. My maternal grandmother speaks 7; but she can't read or write :-)

Doesn't that mean you can speak 6?

The Indian subcontinent usually gets complicated, as there are usually a /lot/ of local dialects that people speak, and some of them may arguably deserve to be separate languages - at least, the speakers usually think so :)

No. It's possible to read formal prose in a language without speaking it.

Polite/learned communication, specially in writing, is often contrived and limited, often resembling an archaic form of the language. It's very possible to read formal text in a language, and glean meaning from it based on your expertise in the language family. Though you would be helpless in the street.

Very interesting to hear that. What are the languages that she speaks?

I can read novels in Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish, and Italian, but only hold a meaningful conversation in the first two, so I chose 2 languages in the poll.

I can read without much problems: Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian, Norwegian (nynorsk and bokmål), Danish, Catalan, Portuguese, (and, I discovered by accident, Interlingua, an artificial language - truly a well designed language!), purely because these languages are so similar to the ones I already know.

If you speak Dutch, you also speak accented Flemish and broken Afrikaans. If you speak Danish, you can also understand Swedish and Norwegian.

But sadly, if you speak English, there are no languages that you get for free.

It is true that these languages are really close. But I woudn't say that danes in general understand spoken Norwegian or Swedish (though Norwegians usually do understand the others better). If you speak Danish as a foreign language, I'd be really impressed if you could have anything resembling a natural conversation with a norwegian or a swede.

Scots.

http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots

And that's it. :)

Another fellow I also met in Switzerland says he speaks six languages. He speaks English, French, Serbian, Russian and Romanian that I know of. I don't know what the other one was. His advice? Date women from different countries and learn their language.

Of course, being an anglophone Canadian who only knows a paltry amount of French despite studying it in school for nine years, people like this are just amazing.

I think if I had the occasion to actually use these languages I would have progressed to fluency. As it stands each one just overlays the previous ones. Attempting to speak a Spanish sentence results in something like:

[spanish subject] [spanish verb] [spanish object] [japanese version of the same verb, fully inflected]

Happily, ASL (my current language of study) doesn't conflict with anything else. :)

I do not think I am fluent in english, sure, I can keep a professional, academic or personal conversation in english for any length of time without any real problem. On the other hand, if I meet a native speaker, I notice how much worse than them I am at finding words and how my language does not flow as it does for a native speaker.

(I know english and swedish, knew french and studied spanish and japanese. Would love to study chinese at some point too, I find their writing system very interesting.)

It would help to know the motivation for the poll for my vote to be meaningful e.g. if you're trying to correlate language proficiency with intelligence/business acumen for instance or creativity/flexibility based on different ways of thinking as per the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

Something like the Fluent in 3 Months guy, who has learned 7 foreign languages as an adult:

http://www.fluentin3months.com/

The joke about the linguist Roman Jakobson was that he spoke 30 languages, each with a foreign accent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon

Qapla!

Question: What are you called if you speak 3 languages? A: Trilingual Two ? A: Bilingual One ? A: American ! :)

Sorry.. could not help my self..

Want to learn: Hebrew, German, Russian, Hindi (in that order)

Why do people conflate the two?

Alright, I will start: I am fluent in the language of traffic signs.

I have recently seen a SIAM book that even had it in the title.

I'm all jumpy with glee reading it.

"misclick downvote" ..

Do you realize the up and down buttons are IDENTICAL in "syntax" but different in "semantics"? Isometry :-)