Not sure if this is the right place to post this, so I apologise if it isn't.
I'm not sure what my native language is. I live in an anglophone country, and have done all education in English. I have been speaking English since I was four. I would consider myself a native speaker of English, since I have no accent and know just about the same stuff as any other native speaker.
However, I have been speaking Mandarin Chinese my whole life, and I speak it at home with my family. I sound like a native speaker in the sense that I have no accent and can speak fluently, but I hardly know of any sophisticated idioms that any real native speaker would know. I can read comfortably, albeit slower than the average native speaker. I'm basically like a quasi-native speaker of Mandarin Chinese.
I can think in both languages, but I'm definitely more educated in English. After doing a search on Google and reading a post on this sub, I found that linguists consider your native language to be the first language you learned or spoke at home (which would be Chinese for me), but I always thought that your native language was the language you spoke best (in my case English). I would not consider myself a full and legit native speaker of Chinese, even though it's the first language I learned, but I'm also unsure if English would meet the rigourous definition of "native speaker" for me. What do you guys think?
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