So if it is rare to actually find someone who really is "equally competent" in both languages, (not at least because it is hard to know how we should measure "equal competence" in the first place), then what about situations in which people are perceived and perhaps even perceive themselves to be equally bad in both their languages? And what makes speakers feel that they are bad at their own language(s) anyway?
In Germany this subject comes up when discussing issues of alleged "ghettoization" in city schools (especially in Berlin), where large numbers of (mainly) Turkish immigrants live in close-knit communities, and where local schools have large numbers of pupils from Turkish descent. The claim is that some children of these immigrant communities can speak neither German or Turkish "properly" and are therefore doomed to a life with very limited options and not much mobility.
I'm sure similar claims are made about Hispanic communities in the US - or any other larger migrant group worldwide for that matter. Clearly, however, these second generation immigrants can speak and communicate with each other fine. It is not that they somehow are "semilingual" and can't communicate successfully. They aren't cognitively impaired in any way. If you go along to a school in Berlin, you will see kids talking away quite happily. A native German speaker, and a native Turkish speaker may not recognise whatever these kids are speaking as constituting proper German or Turkish, and they may perceive their speaking as constituting a kind of "substandard" language. But why substandard if they are communicating effectively with one another? What is substandard about it?
The question then is, what are they talking? Not having studied the way these children talk, I can't actually say. It is probably some new Berlin dialect. It is only when Turkish or German speakers hear it that it appears as "bad" German or "bad" Turkish.
The response by schools has often been to discourage the use of Turkish at home and to discourage the use of Turkish in the playgrounds. But I think this completely misses the point.The problem is not that these children have Turkish at home, or that they speak Turkish with one another. They should speak whatever they want with one another.
The point is that they need sufficient input and tuition in standard German, and this is the school's responsibility. Schools need to offer specialised formal tuition in standard German for migrant children rather than expect them to acquire the standard version of the language by themselves. Where will they learn it if their social network is not made up of speakers of the standard variety?
If we want children to become literate in the standard language, then we have to provide the facilities and the means to do it. Banning the home language is not the way to do this. Of course offering a good language programme is a question of money and resources, and clearly there is not enough money for this kind of thing. But "integration" (another favourite word in this debate) is a two-way process. And the majority language has to come from the majority. Discouraging the minority language is actually irrelevant in this process, and also symbolically de-values this community's language.
It just made me think that there are some forms of bilingualism that are seen very positively (like my own), and others that are seen quite negatively (for example in migrant contexts). Schools in the UK, for example, offer French or German as a foreign language, rather than languages that are actually spoken in the community (say Urdu or Polish). So there is a definite ranking of languages in order of perceived value or utility. Some forms of bilingualism are seen as really advantageous, whilst others are seen as harmful and hindering successful "integration".
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