Study of polyglots offers insight on brain's language processing

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3. I am only functional in languages I use with a fair amount of regularity

They are, besides English, Spanish, German, French, Swedish, Dutch, Russian, Italian, Catalan and Schwyzerdütch. Things get complicated with Schwyzerdütch and Dutch, as regional differences are sometimes huge. The Netherlands has huge regional differences just in Holland, and in Belgium, the local version ("Flemish" ) is sometimes so different that people in villages 60 km apart can hardly understand each other. We have a native speaker of Afrikaans in our office in Dallas. He insists on speaking Afrikaans to me, knowing I can only answer him back in Dutch (which he understands perfectly). I can understand maybe 80% of what he says. It's the same in Switzerland. I can hold a conversation with people in Zürich and Basel. Bern is a challenge, and once you get out to Luzern, Appenzell or Uri, I'm pretty much lost. They'll understand my Zürich dialect fine, since it's mostly what you hear on Swiss TV, but they'll answer back with their own version, which bears only a slight resemblance.

I know smatterings of other languages (Tagalog, Turkish), but don't really speak them. My brain isn't that advanced, I'm afraid. I learned what I use, and never really got around to learning ones I don't.