on bilingualism

Those of us who haven't grow up speaking two languages I suspect have all asked ourselves the question "when do I get to call myself bilingual?"

I think this is a very personal question with as many answers as speakers and it's also something that's very important because ultimately we're not just asking about our skill level - we're asking about our identity.

My guess is that ~adult language learners who are primarily learning the language with the hope of one day speaking it - and this includes the majority of high school language learners - have a very high standard of what it means to be bilingual. I speak my first language with this level of (quite frankly extravangant) competency and ease; I can only be bilingual when I speak my second language with the same comptency and ease.

And this is a legit definition of bilingualism because isn't it basically what people who are bilingual from birth (or near enough) do?

Well, maybe. Without doing any empirical research whatsoever or even checking wikipedia I'm pretty sure that lots of bilingual-from-birth-ers do not actually speak both languages equally well. One language gets stronger from being used more often; one language has been used for academic things; one language is spoken with lots of code-switching to the other; etc.

Personally, I would love to be as fluent in Welsh as I am in English - which, let's be honest, is not exactly a perfect level of fluency at the best of times, let alone when I'm tired or excited or a little bit tipsy or wearing new shoes or its raining or I need to go to the toilet.

Nevertheless I am nowhere near that level of perfect dysfluency in Welsh. But, shortly after I came back from The Big Welsh Holiday Of 2013, I decided that I had had too many interesting conversations about a range of topics - regardless of how slowly I spoke, how slowly I was spoken to, how many repetitions I needed, or how many words I fudged - to not call myself bilingual.

My idea of what I considered necessary for bilingualism is different because I have been able to focus on "communicate now" rather than "speak one day".

I think of course there are some situations where you can sort of measure how fluent you are in your second language and there's a standard to be attained - for example, getting a job in your second language, or passing a particular language exam. But if you aren't fluent enough for that standard, it doesn't mean you're not bilingual - it just means you aren't fluent enough for that standard. (Yet.)

You can be bilingual with just a few words in your second language. I work with kids who are considered bilingual and who are pretty rubbish in both their langauges, and that's absolutely fine and it's also really important to acknowledge that they are still bilingual.

I think something happens when you call yourself bilingual - I'm not sure what yet, but it has something to do with how long some of us have been wanting to speak a second language and how it feels to be suddenly a member of the non-monolingual world and how important language is to our lives and given that importance, how we now see our linguistic identity.

So kids, when do you get to call yourself bilingual?