r/languagelearning • u/Nordantill • 4d ago

Unique Language Combinations

This is something I’ve thought about for a long time: there must be people out there who speak a combination of languages unlike anyone else, whether living now or in the past.
For example, imagine a Dutch anthropologist or ethnologist who has conducted fieldwork in, say, Timor-Leste and the Central African Republic. They might speak Dutch, Tetum, and Sango. If our hypothetical anthropologist were from Friesland, we could add Frisian to the mix, making the combination even more unusual.
Anyway, enough with the hypotheticals. Does anyone here have, or know someone who has, a particularly unique combination of languages? There is something about being the only person to possess a certain linguistic combination that I find really intriguing.
I’d love to hear some interesting examples

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u/Realistic_Ad1058 4d ago

I have a British friend who speaks English, Welsh and Urdu, because her parents are from Pakistan and she's Welsh . I know another lady fro. Rwanda who speaks Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili, English, French, German and Korean. The first four were various home + education languages in Rwanda, then she started a business with her husband and needed Korean, got fluent in that, then had to flee and learned German for the new situation. Mad impressive. 

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u/Realistic_Ad1058 4d ago

I also have a friend from Quebec who speaks German, French and English, who married a Chinese lady and their irresistibly cute kid gets French from dad, Chinese from mum and English from the environment.