It's understood that you can have "parallelism" by running two copies of your program using basic system facilities like fork(), or even by buying several compu

It's understood that you can have "parallelism" by running two copies of your program using basic system facilities like fork(), or even by buying several computers and running one instance of your program on each of them. That's not what is meant by a language "supporting parallelism". If it was, then every language ever designed supports parallelism and so the term is meaningless. To claim that a language "supports parallelism", it has to do something more to facilitate parallel programming. I would say that parallel threads of computation with shared memory and system resources is the bare minimum. You can go the extra mile and support transactional memory or other "nice" abstractions which make parallel programming easier. Saying that Python support parallelism because it has a fork() wrapper is like saying that Posix shell is a strongly typed language because it has strings and string is a type.