4mo ago

At what point when learning a new language does someone become bilingual?

Obviously learning a couple of words in another language doesn't really make you bilingual, or being able to say a few phrases. But there's also clearly some point before full fluency where you can be considered bilingual, but how is it determined (formally or informally)? Is it purely vibes based, you'll know when you see it kind of thing?

I'm vaguely familiar with the CEFR levels measuring how much of a language you speak, but if there's a cutoff point for counting as bilingual in there somewhere I don't know where.

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As someone who never quite reached this level myself, I feel like it's when you start being able to think in the second language inside your head.
I only got to the point where I had flashes of this happen for specific topics that didn't translate well. For everything else I kept thinking in English, even if I then needed to convert it back mentally after.
- Idk, I'm bilingual and I only ever think in English. It doesn't really seem to make a difference though, saying things out loud vs in my head.
  I'm learning a third language now and can just barely communicate with others (worked with a taxi driver!). That said, I wouldn't consider myself truly trilingual yet. I could think in that language but it doesn't really feel like it changes anything - I still only know the same words in my head
- My thoughts aren't in a language, so this always confused me as a benchmark.

I'd say: When you can communicate with other speakers of that language. Then, since you can communicate in two languages you'd be bi-lingual.

It's complicated; different people put the cut-off point in different places. And to complicate it further language proficiency isn't just one but at least two (production vs. reception), if not four (hearing, speaking, reading, writing).
That said, in my personal and subjective view, a person is proficient enough in a language to say "I speak it" when they're able to use it for a simple conversation about a topic that they know, without too much effort or reliance on external tools.

When you can speak and think in the new language without translating to your native language in your head, maybe? That can actually happen pretty fast. You don't have to become anywhere near fluent.

At what point when accumulating grains of sand do they become a heap?

I think I am basically 95% bilingual, my native language is not English, but it was thought in school from first grade (age 5 or 6) all the way to high school (17 years old), and then in post-highschool education, I also had 2 mandatory English courses. The thing is having learned so early is I was too young to realize when I could start entertaining a conversation in English without thinking because it was almost always like that for me.
I do think though that when you can think in your 2nd language without having to mentally translate in your head to your native language is when you've reached a level of fluency that is good enough to be called bilingual. I would probably say, if you can understand jokes and plays on words in your second language, that's probably a good indicator that you are fluent

I felt I was bilingual when I started thinking in spanish. I'm not completely fluent but I speak well and can understand most things with context if I don't know the words.

When you can dream in the language
- Well, then I'm nolingual, I guess.
  
  I like to say that English is my second language. I have no first language.
- I don't think that dreams are a good threshold. Mostly based on personal anecdote - sometimes I dream with random stuff in Talian, for example, and I'm definitively not proficient in it. (Including some shitty bilingual jokes, like an angry pig surrounded by bananas praying to the sky.)
- In high school while studying Katakana one of the coolest things was having a dream of walking around Tokyo and reading the Katakana everywhere.

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.]
  Native proficiency is a result of a language acquisition ability that is not well understood and disappears early into child development.
  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.

One practical way to informally assess your bilingual level:
You are bilingual when you have a friend who can only speak your second language.
- People with no friends confirmed as nihillingual. /s

This is not a word that has a strict definition nor is certified by any agency or standard. As you can see by this thread, there may be a variety of personal opinions about what should count. But it’s like asking at what point in learning to ride a bike do you become a bicyclist? Is it enough to just know how to ride? It’s a semantic question, which, if you’re not familiar with that term, just means that it all depends on what you want to call something and is not a question of any objective criteria.

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