I call bs. people say bilingual like its a either you are or not condition. bilingualism is a spectrum. just because you can read a few words in english or malay (helps that they both use latin script) and utter a few sentences does not make you functionally bilingual. even in cosmopolitan KV we have islands of people who are effectively monolingual. even worse outside.

those who say oh sjkc kids all can speak 3 languages no problem are either banana who never wented there or were in the upper grades / smarter kids class. there is a reason Singapore stream their kids into who can take higher Chinese while the rest learn nerf chinese.

those who say "oh look at european countries they all learn multiple languages" failed to consider that they are really learning dialects of the same latin language (like we don't consider ppl here who know cantonese hokkien and mandarin truly multilingual). far fewer would be multilingual if they had to learn separate language families.