@ Sujay --
You are absolutely correct that it is not necessary that one be born to a particular country in order to [eventually] attain native fluency in whatever language is the dominant or the official language of that country. There are many immigrants who live in England, Scotland, the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other English-speaking countries who have attained native-level fluency in English. There are persons who live in countries such as India who speak English with bilingual fluency.
You say that the reason you have listed your own level of English fluency as "Native" is because (I am quoting you verbatim): "I am confident of that." Well, your "confidence" in the general principle that I have outlined in the paragraph above is all well and good. However, if, by "confident," you actually mean to imply that you are "confident" that the above principle is correctly applied in your specific case, then you are quite mistaken. While you may, someday, achieve native or near-native fluency in English, your writing demonstrates un-mistakably that, as of today, you are not even "Fluent" in English, let alone "Native/Bi-lingual." Your English is at a "Conversational" level. (Actually, the English in your Profile is arguably "Fluent," but the English in your posting above is more at a "Conversational" level. So maybe you are "Fluent" when you have unlimited time for review and corrections. -?-)
There is nothing wrong with speaking English conversationally. I speak French fluently, but I speak German only conversationally. I speak Russian only at the halting level of a two-year-old. It would be ridiculous for me to claim that I can speak German at a native/bilingual level, just because I can muddle my way through Hesse with the aid of a good dictionary, and because I could make my way through a Munich train station or a Berlin bakery even if no else one there spoke English or French.(Or if there were no two-year-old Russians available to translate for me...)
There is nothing wrong with speaking a language at a conversational level. There is something very disingenuous and irritating about someone else's manifestly false claim of native fluency in one's own language. It would be as if someone competent in math only through fractions tried to bluff his way into my algebra class, claiming that he could explain things to my students. Fractions are a lovely and important part of math--but they're not at the level of algebra.
