Back when I was learning PHP, I too didn't believe PHP to be a programming language.
I'm not sure where I picked the idea up, but I learned somewhere that a scripting language is not a programming language. So I applied this thinking to other languages, such as JavaScript and SQL.
Since then I have changed my mind and understand now that there is a spectrum of languages that goes from high level (e.g. PHP, Javascript) to low level (e.g. c, assembler) with things like C# and Java somewhere in between.
