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At what point when learning a new language does someone become bilingual?
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this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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Bilingualism is a bit overloaded nowadays, which I find kinda annoying given that word “polyglot” exists.
Anyways, if you can freely use another language in an informal exchange with a few people of different sobriety levels while failing to remember key words and recovering from that - you’re a fluent polyglot. Ability to exchange information is a key part of what language is, and that’s how you measures your proficiency.
Bilingual can also mean “natively proficient in two languages”. And if you’re older than three years old and are not native speakers of multiple languages already, the chances of you becoming one are slim.
Native proficiency is a result of a language acquisition ability that is not well understood and disappears early into child development. It results in a level of effortless mastery that seems to be impossible to achieve as an adult, i.e. a dedicated or merely attentive native speaker will be able to recognize that you are not one.
[Caveat lector: I'm not from language acquisition, my main area of knowledge within Linguistics is Historical Linguistics.]
That's the critical period hypothesis. It's more complicated than it looks like, and academically divisive; some say that it's simply the result of people having higher exposure and incentive to learn a language before they're 12yo, while some claim that it's due to changes in cerebral structures over time.
And then there's people like Chomsky who claim that the so-called "window of opportunity" is to learn Language as a human faculty, not to learn a specific language like Mandarin, Spanish, English etc.
I’ve legitimately never heard polyglot used to mean “speaks two languages”, I thought it meant “speaks three or more languages.” I can understand it being useful to have a specific term for people raised with two languages from birth/very early childhood though.