Bi-Lingual Defined

[sulayman]

One term we seldom

discuss is bilingual.  The first time I came across it was in Spain at the age of 11 when they

asked me if I spoke any other languages. "I speak some English", I said. And they answered "Oh, so you are

bilingual". I just stared in surprise, because to me the term bilingual entails that you are native, or native like

in the languages concerned.

[MyDigitalpoint]

From my standpoint, I call bilingual to anyone who speaks two languages regardless the country you are in and what your mother tongue is, and what is your second language.

[lovemwaf]

The word "bilingual" (in English) holds no connotation of advanced fluency in my opinion. It seems to imply some basic conversational skills and creating sentences of your own instead of parroting something back from a phrase book, but there's nothing native or near native about it. That's the way the word has always been used when I've encountered it, not the way I necessarily think it should be used.

[mickey4533]

Yeah, like the people above me said, I don't think you have to be extremely fluent to be considered bilingual. I speak three languages to the point that I can communicate with people efficiently and I consider myself trilingual.

[SpiralArchitect]

As long as you can understand and converse in two languages to some degree than you're bilingual. You don't have to be completely fluent in the two but you should definitely have more than just rudimentary knowledge of the languages.

[Kotro]

In college, during my MA in Translation, we were often reminded not to use the term "bilingual" to describe ourselves. It was explained that bilingual was used to describe someone who had been brought up to learn two languages from birth, such as a child of parents who spoke different languages, or the child of immigrants in another country. If we spoke more than one language, we should refer to ourselves instead as "fluent in more than one language". It was explained that being "bilingual" did not necessarily entail being proficient in either language - thruth be told, we got to experience it first hand, in a class where we had a bilingual foreign exchange student who spoke both English and Portuguese worst that any of us, non-bilingual classmates.

[Baburra]

I'd personally categorize a person as bilingual if he or she is able to hold entire conversations in either languages. Although, not necessarily having to have indepth knowledge with the less used diction like ones used in political or technical discussions.

[sidney]

I would also agree that you don't have to be fluent in 2 languages to be considered as "bilingual", unless you're applying for a job that requires being fluent in another language. As long as you can speak and understand the basic and complicated sentences, even if you're not fluent, then you're already considered bilingual in my book.