Watching and listening to a woman at work speak in English, Spanish, German and to me in my broken and in her near-perfect French all at the same time. Same conversation. Very fucking impressive. She knows Russian, too, but no one else here does to toss that her way as well.
Whoever that linguist was who said that no one is truly bilingual is a goddamn moron.
Who says that no one is truly bilingual? There are tons of people with more than one native language.
On the other hand, a lot of old theory was based on the idea of the 50/50 bilingual (with no preference for a particular native language and equally competent in all areas in both languages).
That kind of person is pretty rare as most bilingual people find there are areas where they’re more comfortable in one of their languages than the others (in extreme cases they may not be able to use one of their languages at all in particular situations).
I’ve known a bunch of bilingual people and usually they think of one of their native languages as being primary.
I can’t find the link, but this linguist was defining bilingual as “knows every word in the other spoken language.” Which is just ridiculous.
Bilinguality is a spectrum. Comparatively few people are comfortable completely in another culture in which they did not grow up, so I guess if you define it that way then no one is bilingual.
The woman I was writing about is culturally at home in English and German in any context or situation, and extremely competent in French but does not have those cultural ties. (Don’t know about Russian.)