I have known Thais who grew up in the US in Thai families maintaining their Thai citizenship and who were not immigrants. The parents were their for official or business purposes only. They speak Thai slowly and with something of an accent. Other Thais will remark on their lack of Thai-language ability.
Out of time, Virgil: It’s very possible that the “natives” never spoke English at home and did not learn it in a structured fashion, whereas the “non-natives” had better teachers and got selected for the positions where you found them for their linguistic skills, skills which were taken for granted yet not as strong in the “natives”.
Remind me to tell you about the Welshman who wasn’t considered a native English speaker by our HR (oh wait, I’m doing it), due to having been born in Madrid. Or about the many times I’ve run into someone who started gushing at me in Basque only to be told "erdera, lo siento" (nospeakBasque, sorry). I agree with you in that being born in a place where a language is spoken does not automagically confer the ability to speak it, but true bilingualism does exist and does not require learning the languages involved from infancy.
I majored in German, minored in French, used to speak fluent Spanish. A lot of these have faded from disuse. But in their hayday there were times when I couldn’t think of the English word for a moment and only the foreign language word came to mind.
My German in college was a one year submersion program near Bemidji, MN. I still remember one of my friends talking to her (English speaking) mom about what was going on at school. At one point her mom interrupted her and said “I have no idea what a ‘Yah-boo’ is, but you keep saying that word”. It took my friend a second to realize that while she was speaking English, the word “Jahrbuch” kept popping out instead of “yearbook”.
I can say, however, that while that’s happened to me, I’ve never had my grammar altered. Verbs never flew to the end of the sentence or anything like that.
Her pediatrician didn’t, but my obstetrician did. :smack: Luckily I only take her advice when it comes to my lady bits. Lots of other uninformed people did too.
Who can forget cheese?
The idea that children can learn how to speak a language by osmosis is, by and large, BS. It takes active effort to become proficient in one language, let alone several. Would you take grammar advice from just any native English speaker? Would you pay somebody off the streets of, say, New Orleans to write a manual/book/whatever just because they are native speakers? It’s possible that, while they spoke Thai at home, they weren’t provided with the sort of “training” they got in English (full-immersion - at least at times, books, movies, music, etc.).
Children are human, thus lazy, they resist having to learn many languages, if one does the job why two, and why the hell three?. In our case our daughter knows we share two common languages (English and Spanish, though my husband and I almost never speak Spanish to each other), so she figured “why the extra work?”. When she was a little kid, and although she perfectly understood, she would answer in English when spoken to in Spanish or Danish. A few weeks of “I will ignore you until you speak the correct language” fixed that. It hasn’t been nearly as much work as many an uninformed people assumed, but there is an active effort in our part to get her where she is. We are possibly more strict than your regular parents about grammar errors, misused words, etc. There’ll be time to sound like a brain-damaged teenager, for now, while we can, we learn the correct way.
A friend’s bilingual 5 year old: “but mom, Spanish makes my tongue hurt!”
Here is an extreme example. A colleague of mine left Germany at age 16 (with extreme prejudice) in 1939. He went first to England, then Canada, married an Austrian woman, but they spoke only English at home. He still speaks English with a slight accent. Maybe 20 years ago, he had a research visitor from Germany and I noticed they were speaking English and not just when I was there. I asked him afterwards and he said that after more than 50 years his German was just not fluent. (He added that it was the German of a HS kid at best.) Even in 1971 when I was present at a talk he gave in German in Switzerland, I noticed that he had to ask the audience for some technical words–the one I remember was that he didn’t know the German word for “continuous”).