Novak Djokovic beats Federer in record Wimbledon final.

[Carmody]

Novak Djokovic beat Federer in record Wimbledon final.

Djokovic is a self-described fan of languages, speaking

Serbian,
English,
French,
German, and
Italian.

[lavengro]

Wimbledon polyglot finale: I have seen claims that Federer speaks four languages fluently (Swiss German, German, French and English) and has a little Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Afrikaans.

[Iversen]

Finally some relevant information about those tennis stars...

[Cèid Donn]

Judge for yourself. While it's clear he's not really proficient in some of these languages, kudos to him for being brave enough to do all this in front of cameras:



To me, he definitely sounds like he works with an English tutor as his English sounds very coached to me. That's perfectly fine, he probably doesn't want to be on English-language TV talking with a strong Serbian accent. I found his French and Spanish easy to understand, but his Serbian accent can be heard in the German clip and I had some trouble understanding some of it. I'm surprised there's nothing on the internet that I can find to suggest he speaks much Russian--there was a Serbian enclave in the US city where I went to high school, and all of them knew some Russian and were very close the Russian Orthodox community in the area even though they had their own church and clergy there. Maybe Djokovic being of a younger generation didn't grow up thinking learning Russian was as important.

Speaking of Serbs in the public sphere, Serbia-Canadian actress Stana Katic is also multilingual. I know she speaks Serbian, Italian, English and French, but in many of things she's acted in she's spoken Russian dialogue quite convincingly. Not sure if she's fluent or just good at sounding like it.

[Saim]

I found his French and Spanish easy to understand, but his Serbian accent can be heard in the German clip and I had some trouble understanding some of it.

His Spanish may have been easy to understand but half of it was Italian (ritorna... eh... volver)/French (a'hoy) and he was stalling after almost every word. Maybe he was just rusty. Anyway there's no shame in speaking Italian quite well, and French somewhat well and "only" having notions of Spanish.

[aokoye]

To me, he definitely sounds like he works with an English tutor as his English sounds very coached to me. That's perfectly fine, he probably doesn't want to be on English-language TV talking with a strong Serbian accent. I found his French and Spanish easy to understand, but his Serbian accent can be heard in the German clip and I had some trouble understanding some of it.

There's nothing wrong with having an accent - it's pretty normal actually and not a sign of not having good command of a language. I didn't find his German especially hard to understand, but he also said that he's forgotten a lot of words.

[Cèid Donn]

To me, he definitely sounds like he works with an English tutor as his English sounds very coached to me. That's perfectly fine, he probably doesn't want to be on English-language TV talking with a strong Serbian accent. I found his French and Spanish easy to understand, but his Serbian accent can be heard in the German clip and I had some trouble understanding some of it.

There's nothing wrong with having an accent - it's pretty normal actually and not a sign of not having good command of a language.

I didn't mean to imply there was something wrong with having an accent. I just know from my years of being an English writing tutor that L2 speakers can be very self-conscious about having an accent. I even had an Ukrainian student who broke down in tears when someone complimented her on her accent and a South African student who got very insulted when someone asked her about hers. it can be touchy, depending on the indvidual's background. There's been a lot of change in social attitudes about accents to where people are more accepting, although not universally--where I live, there are families who still shame their kids over having a Spanish accent when speaking English and I've seen more than my fair share of white people being ugly and insulting to Latinx L2 speakers over their accents even when their English is perfectly fine, so it's still a problem. Consequently, there are still many learners and L2 speakers who feel it's a stigma or a sign of poor ability, even though it shouldn't be. I understand that, that's all.