What would you say is the precentage of multilingual IM's and GM's? I think it should be higher than the average of general population, but maybe a little lower than airline pilots.

Is there a statistics available somewhere for a later check?

I couldn't find any details on FIDE page(when looking at the profile for certain player).

I think that must super Gm's can speak english plus their country's language.

Most international arbiters would also be multilingual

I just thought it would be interesting to know. Great chessplayers have a high IQ, its the nature of the game afterall. I would assume that being multilingual would be an asset for a travelling GM.

It's an asset for anyone with a globally oriented career, not just chess masters. I don't see how chess itself would correlate with language skills, but intelligence certainly correlates with both. Generally speaking, it's true that intelligent people are more likely to excel in languages and chess separately: there must be many linguistic geniuses who probably don't even play chess, and I'm sure that many chess masters from English-speaking countries only speak one language. But out of those people, you'll certainly find an amount that excel in both.

The one to ask is Pavel Votruba

It is interesting that u bring up being mutilingual: Because, with chess, people who do, may not speak the same language (verbally), understand the universal language (the rules) of chess.  The rules r all the same, no matter the language, yet, without language, we communicate through our chess moves; games.  That's multilingual; 2 an extent.  All IM's & GM's, r 2 an extent, multilingual.

SZ.

¿What does the poster mean with "multilingial"? And then he says that airline pilots are multilingiual. . .

Airpilots (and ship commander as far as that goes) as well as flight (tower) controlers DO NOT HAVE TO BE MULTILINGUALS. . . they only have to know a small set of standard words to interact verbally.

Same with chess players. Of course, being above average intelligent it might be easier for them to learn another languague.

Hard to say.  The sort of intelligence that makes a chess IM or GM doesn't seem to correlate well with verbal intelligence (to name but one).  A few considerations, though:

• Chess knows no borders, so many IMs and GMs come from smaller countries where one virtually HAS to know a second, more widespread language just to be understood anywhere a few hundred miles from home.
• The strong presence of chess in the former USSR and Soviet bloc tends to result in players who were obliged to know Russian in addition to their local language.
• Major metropolitan areas are disproportionately where the world-famous chess clubs and strongest opponents are, so again we see many immigrant players (who must often learn a new language).

Also ... this is difficult to express without risking stereotype or uninteded offense, but from Steinitz & Lasker, to Nimzowitsch & Reti, to Kasparov & Fischer, an incredibly disproportionate number of high-level players have had Jewish origins.  Thanks to historical circumstances, Jewish communities have often been obliged to be bi-, tri-, or otherwise polylingual to get by.  Food for thought, perhaps.