CMV: It is not really an impressive feat to be multilingual in languages that are really close to each other

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This Tiktok video inspired me to make this post: https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSUdo88K4/

The claim I'm making is quite specific and needs groundwork but ultimately, it is: People who are fluent in French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese should not really consider themselves to have achieved a monumental feat and to consider themselves like 'polyglots' is kind of diluting the term itself.

Supporting this claim are a few premises:

  1. All these languages are self evidently Romance languages and carry by themselves some similar form of coherence in grammar, vocabulary, et cetera.
  2. Obviously, a native Spanish speaker would have a significantly easier time mastering Italian or Portuguese than a person from a non Latin language background.
  3. Apart from French, these languages have largely mutual intelligibility (and even in this case, they would he able to largely guess the overall gist of French by reading, and would not have hard work cut out for them to master it, similarly to Italian and Portuguese).
  4. I, as a Malaysian who can pick up, speak and understand Indonesian, and learn it relatively quickly, does not make me like fluent in Malay and Indonesian. Maybe to word it correctly, if I claim that I am fluent in Malay and Indonesian, I would be scoffed at because the languages are largely similar and it would be embarrassing for me to claim that I am trilingual instead of bilingual.
  5. In the Arab-speaking world, the dialects (like Moroccan or Levantine) are arguably far greater in variance and less mutually comprehensible than in the Romance languages, the only main reason why they are able to communicate with each other is the underlying MSA dialect which is used in official communication but is not rather a colloquial language. An apt comparison would be if the Romance countries decided to have Latin as their 'official communication channel betweent he countries'. An Arab who is fluent in Moroccan Arabic and Gulf Arabic would not be considered multilingual despite how different they are.

Therefore, a person who is fluent in Spanish, Portugues and Italian, should not consider themselves to be really like a 'polyglot' ( I do understand I'm restricting the definition of polyglot but I define it to be having a sense of cross-linguistical expertise). A person who is fluent in Arabic, Spanish and Mandarin has far better claim to the word polyglot and is undoubtedly more impressive.

submitted by /u/OkPreparation5773
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