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If being highly literate is the standard for knowing a language, then the vast majority of people in the world do not even know their native language. This is not to mention cases where someone's mother tongue lacks a literary tradition or even a writing system. It seems to me that in practice most people equate "speaking a language" with something like a B1 level on the CEFR, though your typical Anglophone would probably start saying they speak Spanish or French at an even lower level than that.
I do agree that most people underestimate how hard it is to get from that basic level to high literacy e.g. it would probably be easier for me to learn half a dozen (related) languages to B1 than to get to C2 in my heritage language despite the enormous head start of having literally spoken it at home my entire life. At the end of the day though, language is a tool, and what matters is if it serves its purpose i.e. if you can sing lullabies to your children in your mother tongue, haggle at the market in your local trade language, and read a book in the literary language of your imperial overlords, then you can have a fine life without bothering to "fully learn" any of them.
You are spot on with the difficulty of b1->c2 and Anglos seemingly thinking they know a language at about a2 level. Passport bro Spanish might as we’ll be a new creole at this point.
But I don’t agree at all that language is just a tool. Obviously it can be wielded like one when necessary, but for most people the significance of the languages they speak and teach their children is that your language determines your group identity much better than any other marker. You literally cannot be part of a society if you cannot speak its languages to the desired degrees (in modern nation states this is often a single language spoken to native level, but historically it can be multiple languages spoken at different levels like my example of the Ottoman Greek). Any shift in culture and identity must go hand in hand with language shifts. If your children don’t speak the same languages as you you can bet they will find your culture foreign.
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