“I speak seven languages, three of which are English”

That is how I start off sometimes when I'm doing a talk on dictionaries or language learning. The four foreign ones are French (OK), German (OK-ish), Chinese (coming on) and Russian (vestigial). I'll come back in a later post to what we mean by 'speak a language'

The three Englishes are:

1. The Northern English variety that I grew up with (West Yorkshire) with absent final 't' sounds in words like 'COAT' and with a horrible mismatch of 'u' related vowels compared to 'standard English'
2. 'standard English', or my best approximation of it, 'u' vowels excepted
3. Teacher English - with all the simplifications and non-native structures and self-censorships that a few months in the classroom can provoke. I'm not saying it's good, but it happens.

I don't think there is anything wrong with this kind of Zelig-ness. It's natural to take your cues from your environment and to meet people half way. And if you are in danger of being completely misunderstood by your fellow English-speakers you will do a lot to avoid that embarrassment. I once spent a summer working in Rotherham and had to crank up my Northern accent to well past the end of the dial just to be adequately understood.

Even these three Englishes can be further subdivided or augmented as the occasion requires. If I visit my roots in the West of Ireland, I can feel novel inflections and sentence sound-patterns coming up unbidden. If I am visiting the US, I know I will self-censor British vocab and will add in the US English words of which I am aware.

I am also aware - but not proud - that there is an in-house dictionary cant which is not always strictly necessary and which must serve some of the same function that is served by, say, academic-speak such as 'issues around X' . I admit it is not necessary for me to say "the lexis need to push collocational disambiguation and be a bit less splitty". But sometimes if feels right.

So what about you - if you had to count up all your native languages, never mind the foreign ones, how would you dice it?