Speaking multiple languages is less impressive if you learnt them growing up.

Speaking multiple languages is great. It's something everyone should endeavor to achieve even if you're brought up monolingual. You're opening up a whole new world of connections. I also think learning a language to fluency as a teen or adult is very impressive and requires a lot of dedication and confidence.

However, I have at times encountered people who seem to think they are superior to monolinguals because they learnt multiple languages growing up. This bugs me because learning a second language as a young child is vastly less impressive than doing so as a teen/ adult because you're essentially having the language drilled into your brain at the same time you developed your first language.

I'm an English speaker, I don't consider learning English to have been one of my life achievements because it just developed naturally as a product of the environment I was raised in. And in the same way, someone raised in a heavily bilingual+ environment is gaining said languages in the same way.

To be fair, yes, they still have to deal with 2 different languages. But.. They didn't have to go out of their way to learn the Second language so it's not nearly as impressive as putting in the effort to learn it as an adult and using it as a point of superiority over monolinguals is silly.

So yeah. That type of person just rubs me the wrong way.