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.
This is not a word that has a strict definition nor is certified by any agency or standard. As you can see by this thread, there may be a variety of personal opinions about what should count. But it’s like asking at what point in learning to ride a bike do you become a bicyclist? Is it enough to just know how to ride? It’s a semantic question, which, if you’re not familiar with that term, just means that it all depends on what you want to call something and is not a question of any objective criteria.