What does “Native speaker” mean, anyway?
Language Log 2021-05-29
Below is a guest post by Devin Grammon and Anna Babel.
Both linguists and non-linguists commonly use the term “native speaker” to describe someone who grew up speaking a particular language and who is fully proficient in that language. Often, we invest native speakers with authority regarding how someone should speak a language – for example, native speakers are often preferred as instructors in the second-language classroom, or sought after as linguistic informants for field methods classes or as research assistants for fieldwork or analysis of linguistic data. Indeed, the idea of being a native speaker is tied to ideas of authenticity, as in the commonly held dialectological wisdom that elderly, rural male speakers with all their teeth are the best informants. But where does the term come from, and what does it really mean?
The idea of the “native speaker” originated within the context of European nationalism and colonialism in the 19th century. It proved useful both as a way of conceptualizing and labeling a particular linguistic identity tied to a nation and to differentiate between social groups within a colonial hierarchy.1,2 The emergence of the native speaker in intellectual and public discourses linked it to notions of mother tongue, nation, and race, with first language acquisition constituting the basis of this link. By asserting their status as native speakers, Europeans justified their ownership of their national languages in the face of colonized subjects who also learned these languages but spoke them in ways that they deemed to be inferior as illegitimate offspring.
The native speaker label not only creates a conceptualization of a person as an “ideal” speaker of a language, but also moves in lockstep with the standardization and scientific study of languages as bounded linguistic objects that exist apart from speakers and contexts of language use. Accordingly, the languages spoken by native speakers are understood to be comprised of essential lexical and grammatical features that can be objectively evaluated, separated, and codified in dictionaries and grammars. Given this essentialized understanding of languages, it appears logical that native speakers can be distinguished from non-native speakers of a language based on their linguistic knowledge and abilities. However, this expectation is challenged by the fact that all languages are social constructs; their boundaries and membership are not established on the basis of lexical and structural features, but by the ways in which people are recognized as speakers – or not.3 This means that providing a categorical definition of the native speaker according to structural criteria tied to a specific language is at best circular and at worst hopelessly flawed.
The term native speaker gained particular prominence in linguistics following the emergence of the Chomskian approach to linguistic competence in the 1960s and 1970s.4 However, the idealization of the native speaker began to be questioned within a few years, with some scholars asserting that an ideal native speaker has never existed5 and that the topic be approached instead through the lens of more precise terms like expertise, inheritance and affiliation.6 These critiques have been further elaborated within applied linguistics, where use of the term created impossible dilemmas. For example, scholars have argued that the term native speaker was coopted in the field of English language acquisition to conflate language and race – namely, white speakers are considered more authoritative than non-white speakers of English, and white or colonial national varieties are considered more legitimate than non-white national varieties.7
Cases of “near-native speakers” and “exceptional second language learners” further complicate the idea that the competence of native speakers is clearly distinguishable from that of non-native, second-language speakers. The common observation that adult language learners almost always retain an identifiable foreign accent has long been used as evidence of a critical period in second language acquisition. However, a growing body of research casts doubt on the existence of a strict neurobiological window that closes around late adolescence and impedes native-like phonological development. Numerous studies report that some non-native adult learners develop accents in their second languages that native listeners judge to be native-like, and that some of these learners are able to more accurately discriminate varieties of their non-native languages in listening tasks than native speakers in control groups8,9. This research suggests that adult learners’ experiences and motivations are more significant than age of onset in developing native-like abilities in an additional language.
Beyond second language acquisition, there are many additional examples of the complications that the term “native speaker” creates in linguistic research as well as lived personal experience. For example, people may find themselves cut off from their speech communities of origin due to emigration and no longer speak their mother tongue on a regular basis. In these cases, their dominance in a language learned later in life may affect the phonetic realization of words in their first language and lead others to perceive them as non-native speakers with a foreign accent.10 Likewise, many people experience language attrition due to stoke or neurodegenerative diseases. While these individuals may lack a high level of competence in all domains of their first language, they are rarely if ever described as non-native speakers.
The competence of adult emigrants who experience first language attrition has a parallel in the experience of many dual-culture bilinguals, or 1.5-generation immigrants, who are immersed in a new language and setting at a younger age. Their competence in their “native” language may be truncated in several domains, and they often report feeling like they speak poorly or like children. Heritage speakers of Spanish in the U.S., for example, describe not being considered fully native speakers of Spanish due in part to their lack of formal education in the language and the low status of Spanish, particularly among racialized groups, in U.S. society.11 In such cases, the “ideal” language and the “ideal language speaker” are understood to reside somewhere else, in a discursive move that erases bi- and multilingualism as part of the reality of language use and as part of the lived reality of language speakers.12
Likewise, speakers of indigenous languages undergoing shift may find that they are compared unfavorably with idealized monolingual speakers, even if such speakers never existed. In popular discourses, indigenous languages are considered to have been “corrupted” by contact with European and other colonial languages, but these discourses are seldom placed in the context of the fact that languages are always shaped by contact. Because speakers may be labeled as semi-speakers or lacking in full native-like competence, their language skills are often devalued.13 As in the case of Spanish as a heritage language, an ideal speaker of an indigenous language may be framed as monolingual and as distant in time and/or space – someone from a previous generation, or from a distant geographic region, in which the contaminating effects of contact are presumed not to have occurred.
Additionally, speakers of languages or dialects that are marginalized or undergoing shift are often told that they are not “good” or good enough speakers of a language.14 This is because the languages or dialects that they speak are not recognized as legitimate varieties of language, as is often the case with creole languages15 and minoritized language varieties like African American English16,17 or Turkish German speakers.18 These stigmatizing discourses are also aimed at speakers of indigenous minority languages, as in the case of Mexican indigenous languages which are termed dialectos despite having no relationship with Spanish. The label dialecto implies that they are less than fully-formed languages. A speaker of a dialecto may feel (or be made to feel) that they cannot claim status as a legitimate language speaker.19
Ultimately, a closer examination reveals that the concept of the “native” speaker is tightly connected to discriminatory logics. Linguists and members of the public alike share a common-sense feeling for the concept of the “native speaker.” However, it is clear that this concept is historically situated in nationalist discourses and colonial regimes of languages, nations, and peoples, and is often used to exclude or to police the boundaries of speakerhood and, ultimately, personhood. The concept of the “native speaker” draws on deep-rooted assumptions regarding who is worthy of being a speaker and which languages are worthy of being recognized as such.
References:
1Hackert, S. (2012). The emergence of the English native speaker: A chapter in nineteenth-century linguistic thought. Walter de Gruyter.
2Mufwene, S. (1994). New Englishes and criteria for naming them. World Englishes, 13(1), 21-31.
3Otheguy, R., García, O., & Reid, W. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review, 6(3), 281-307.
4 Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax Cambridge. Multilingual Matters: MIT Press.
5Paikeday, T. M. (1985). The native speaker is dead! An informal discussion of a linguistic myth with Noam Chomsky and other linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and lexicographers. Paikeday Publishing Inc.
6Rampton, M. B. H. (1990). Displacing the ‘native speaker’: Expertise, affiliation, and inheritance. ELT Journal, 44(2), 97-101.
7Norton, B. (2013). Identity and Second Language Acquisition. The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Blackwell.
8 Ioup, G., Boustagi, E., El Tigi, M., and Moselle, M. (1994). Re-examining the critical period hypothesis: A case study of successful adult SLA in a naturalistic environment. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 73 – 98.
9 Moyer, A. (2013) Accent and age. Foreign Accent: The Phenomenon of Non-native Speech. Cambridge University Press.
10Major, R. (1993) Sociolinguistic factors in loss and acquisition of phonology. In K. Hyltenstam and A. Viberg (Eds.), Progression and regression in language: Sociocultural, neuropsychological and linguistic perspectives (463 – 78). Cambridge University Press.
11García, O. (2019). Decolonizing foreign, second, heritage, and first languages. In D. Macedo (Ed.), Decolonizing foreign language education: The misteaching of English and other colonial languages, 152-168. Routledge.
12Gómez Seibane, Sara (2021): “El bilingüismo desde la perspectiva social”, Blog del grupo Español en Contacto. Recuperado de: http://espanolcontacto.fe.uam.es/wordpress/el-bilinguismo-desde-la-perspectiva-social-nueva-entrada-de-blog-escrita-por-sara-gomez-seibane-parte-2/
13Boltokova, D. (2017). “Will the Real Semi-Speaker Please Stand Up?” Language Vitality, Semi-Speakers, and Problems of Enumeration in the Canadian North. Anthropologica, 59(1), 12-27.
14Leonard, W. Y. (2008). When is an “extinct language” not extinct. In K Kendall et al. (Eds.), Sustaining linguistic diversity: Endangered and minority languages and language varieties, 23-33. Georgetown University Press.
15DeGraff, M. (2005). Linguists' most dangerous myth: The fallacy of Creole Exceptionalism. Language in society, 34(4), 533-591.
16Rickford, R. J. (2000). Spoken soul: The story of black English. John Wiley & Sons Inc.
17Smitherman, G. (1986). Talkin and testifyin: The language of Black America (Vol. 51). Wayne State University Press.
18Kern, F. (2015). Turkish German. Language and Linguistics Compass, 9(5), 219-233.
19Hill, J. H., & Hill, K. C. (1986). Speaking Mexicano: Dynamics of syncretic language in central Mexico. University of Arizona Press.
Above is a guest post by Devin Grammon and Anna Babel.