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

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.

  • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
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    28 days ago

    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.