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.
It’s complicated; different people put the cut-off point in different places. And to complicate it further language proficiency isn’t just one but at least two (production vs. reception), if not four (hearing, speaking, reading, writing).
That said, in my personal and subjective view, a person is proficient enough in a language to say “I speak it” when they’re able to use it for a simple conversation about a topic that they know, without too much effort or reliance on external tools.