How many languages do you speak?

[mtosev]

Simple question.

I speak 3. English, Slovenian and Croatian.

[Pentium4User]

German is my native language, English from school and for technical stuff. I also speak a little bit Russian, learned 2 years in school, but I don't have time to improve that.

[Night Wing]

I speak only one language, English. Why? I never saw the need to learn another different language and all through my life, nothing has changed that decision.

[Moonchild]

Native in English and Dutch (bi-lingual)
I also understand Flemish and Afrikaans, am pretty good at speaking Swedish (slowly) and read/write it okay, i can read Danish and Norwegian just fine, have no problem understanding or reading/writing German but not a star at speaking it (but can make myself understood with some patience), and can understand some French (spoken and written) and Spanish (mostly written). On a good day I can even read some Italian and Polish, as I found there are a lot of common patterns in many languages that "click" in my head when I'm having a good day
So that makes... 12? Although probably more like 8 that should be mentionable.

I've always wanted to learn Welsh Gaelic as well (just love the way it sounds) but that never happened.

[Marcus]

Portuguese (native), French, English.
My Italian is too rusty to be included, have to work on that.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

My native language is Italian, I studied English (which I use daily), German and Russian (which I've not practised since a lot of time). I never studied formally and I do not dare to speak or write French, but I can read it. Also I never studied formally Spanish but some 20 years ago I was able to train a laser machine operator in Chile making it up . I can sort of understand other written romance, germanic or slavic languages (at least train timetables )

By the way my goddaughter (dual citizenship, German from the father, Italian from the mother) has both native languages, English from school (in Germany), French and Spanish at university level (and also from the mother who lived in France as a child), would like to learn Dutch or Flemish for her work. I am not sure if she remembers any Swedish (her family lived there for a few years). Very proud of her, this is what I like when I talk of Europe.

[Piotr Kostrzewski]

Polish and English

[somdcomputerguy]

Just English. I took some French and a few Spanish classes in HS, so all I can do is read and understand a little of those languages.

[van p]

One, Englais, purty goode.

[athenian200]

Fluently or at all?

If you mean fluently, then only English. But I know enough Latin to be able to understand mottos, legalese, and various scientific terms, enough Spanish that I can kind of read it if given enough time and say a few greetings, enough Japanese that I can introduce myself, excuse myself and slowly read texts with minimal Kanji, and enough Italian that I recognize it if I hear it and can tell if words come from that language or not.

So essentially, I have one language I'm very fluent in, and a handful of languages I know just enough about to be dangerous. LOL. The thing that's rough is that by the time I understood the potential benefits of language learning and had an idea of what languages I would like to speak, I was already a bit too old to acquire another language easily. There seems to be some kind for critical period of language acquisition, after which you can only hope to acquire so much fluency. So if you're not exposed to a lot of languages when young, it's very hard to "make up for it" with conscious effort later and get anything more than enough of the language for business or tourism.

[Mæstro]

German and English are my best languages. I have a reading knowledge of French adequate for accessing citations in that language, but I have needed use German when in the Alsace and English in Quebec.

[Basilisk-Dev]

I can speak Southern American English fluently, I can understand African-American Vernacular English and can somewhat speak it if I really push myself. I have a hard time understanding the Yankee dialects that are spoken in New England.

In terms of non-English, I can speak and read some Spanish and I can speak and read a very small amount of Norwegian. I also know a few Latin words and a few Japanese Kanji.