Not sure if I can be considered polyglot, but for me there's a clear heirarchy:
1. English (I feel fully fluent and literate in it - though friends, during parties, claim otherwise)
2. Hindi (capable of halting conversation, reading, watching movies etc and can write but would rather not!)
3. Marathi (even more halting than Hindi, but can read and write, just about.)
4. Malayalam (illiterate, but can understand slow conversations and throw a few words into the conversation.)
5. Gujarati (can almost read - only because of similarity of script to Devanagari, but knowledge of the language is so small as to be almost non-existent.
6. Punjabi, Bengali, Sindhi, Tamil, French (scattered words only. Can 'read' French, but only because it uses the Roman script)
So my second language is clearly Hindi. My 'mother tongue', in the old sense of the word, is Malayalam.
And does any of this make sense?
cheer
the sunshine warrior
