What is fluency anyway? :)
Many people claim this word easily without acknowledging the subtleties and finer shades that each language harbors amidst its peoples, culture, and ever-changing societies.
Two years of living in France overrode an entire decade of textbook-rich studies; it decapitated my entire notion of the "fluency" I claimed to have by year 7. After so many years studying, I realized I knew nothing of what I claimed to know.
Another year traveling to and performing (I was once an opera singer) in Italy gave me the tools to debunk any formal "fluency" ideologies I had in my head about Italian, but it wasn't until I met a real Italian and became good friends with them that my eyes opened to the complicated nature of what mastery of a language is! How can one really be fluent in a language with a subset of hundreds of dialects?
As an American, I'm automatically classified fluent/native in English, but are you, really, when you have social media shaking up the entire linguistic #system? Are you, really, when you have an entire continent-sized country with a history rich in immigration and a mosaic of cultures in one? Am I, really, when a New Yorker, who speaks completely different from a Georgian in the south, uses five different words for the same object?
As an American with a Colombian family (and some years studying in Colombia as a child), and a constant use of Spanish all around me around all types of friends and family members, am I really classified fluent when I know colloquial Spanish street words like the palm of my hand and the Academic Dictionary on every Colombian kid's desk like my own face, but am not living, breathing, eating the culture and the changing modisms every day?
Tough to answer, really, since I'm always trying to ride the constant surge and dip of the eternally changing ways of "English", "Spanish", "Italian", and "French".
-Lorena :)