What does it mean to be bilingual?

This week's column is by Language Editor Joanna Westcombe.

2012 will mark my 20th year of living in Munich. To commemorate this, my New Year's resolution relates to our language feature this month. I want to be a better bilingual.

You'd expect my German to be OK, and it is. But 20 years of drinking German water and breathing German air have not stopped me making up words, starting sentences without knowing how (or whether) I'm going to end them, and giving sex changes to unsuspecting nouns.

So, although our article states that bilingualism is a "more or less" thing, and that I can therefore call myself bilingual, too, I still feel uneasy about this. This is especially the case when I think about our "really bilingual" interviewees, who almost certainly don't commit the grammatical sins that I do in either of their languages. While you're reading Spotlight this month, I'll be taking a look at our sister magazine Deutsch perfekt.

To try and convince myself that I am bilingual, though, I list what I do or have done in German. I start with exciting things like talking to my tax adviser and ordering items on the phone. But then I add making music, gossiping with friends, following instructions in a yoga class and having a baby (these last two with my eyes closed). I start to feel better.

I've also experienced some of the feeling of differentness that our bilinguals mention. During this Christmas holiday, for example, spent with German and then English relatives, I experienced from both sides the isolating effect of a parent constantly speaking "the other" language with a child in a room full of adults speaking the home language.

Interestingly, though, the hardest thing was adapting my first language to the situation at home in England. I had to sound intelligent and articulate to the family member who wanted to talk about current affairs and culture, to speak loudly and clearly to the family member who is going deaf, to make allowances for German guests, and not to speak to my child in the same way as to my mum's dog. Perhaps my awareness of needing to do all that means that I am linguistically and socially competent, although these are surely "more or less" things, too.

It is a relief to be back in my comfort zone. This cosy place is peopled by my friends and colleagues — Germans with whom I work, gossip, make music and do yoga, and English-speakers who live in Germany, who quite accept when such words as basteln, Matschhose and Amtsbeschädigung are dropped into conversation, and who — I notice with some relief — make teeny-weeny mistakes, too, occasionally.

Perhaps I'm bilingual after all. Dividing my life up according to language, and experiencing at least a little isolation, frustration, inadequacy, and imbalance? I'm showing all the symptoms. Now, is that der, die or das Symptom?

*Joanna Westcombe co-wrote, with Vivienne Arnold, the language feature "Being bilingual" in the January Spotlight. The article answers several important questions about bilingualism: Is it enough to speak English the way Thomas Gottschalk, Steffi Graf and Heidi Klum do? Can anyone become bilingual? Are there disadvantages as well as advantages to being bilingual? And, finally, what's it like? In short interviews like this one, six more German-English bilinguals of various ages explain the role languages play in their lives. Be sure to get your copy today!