Native Speaker Meaning ~UPD~
Nicoletta Monjure
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.
Language instruction is very important to me, and not all because of doing it. I do not teach languages. I try to learn them, so that I can make polite small talk with people, and talk with desk clerks, ticket vendors, and taxi drivers and restaurant workers where I go. My actual colleagues in these places speak English. I do not need to learn the language for them (though I enjoy doing it). And while I would love to master fluent conversational Italian, Bulgarian, and Mandarin, those are not feasible for me any time soon. I just want simple conversation, comprehensible to the people I meet on my own. This makes learning from native speakers important to me, but for nothing like the reasons in the first paragraph of this contribution.
My concern is nothing about "authority regarding how someone should speak a language." I care what I must do so that people do understand me. And I suppose you will agree that learning Mandarin from "elderly, rural male speakers" is a bad idea unless you are going to that specific rural community. Overall, the theoretical, linguistic, historical, and pedagogical discussion in this post seems terrific to me. But, especially that first paragraph, really struck me as disjoint from my concern to get native speakers as teachers.
There is an element of truth in many parts of this piece. Some observations have probably occurred to anyone who thinks about language; others are straining to make a point; others are trivial. In fact, the question of "native speaker" is tightly tied to the question "What is a language?", which is a similarly vexed issue. The novelty here is the attempt to tie this into a postcolonial, poststructural discourse, with all that that entails. (Sometimes I found the deployment of this kind of vocabulary puzzling. What for instance, do they mean by "the low status of Spanish, particularly among racialized groups"? This sense of "racialized" strikes me as an in-group usage, although I might be wrong.)
Returning to the concept of a "language", the idea of a "native speaker", while not unconnected to colonialist discourse, is equally tied to the ideas of "standard national language" and "educated speaker". It's long been the case that some people who are "native speakers" are not regarded as "good speakers" of the language because they have "nonstandard" usages or are not properly "educated". This is particularly important in the teaching of foreign languages, where discrimination of one type or another is rife. You are discriminated against for not being a "native speaker"; you might also be discriminated against for speaking the "wrong" variety natively (this has been applied to varieties that vary from RP or so-called General American), or for not having a proper education. There is nothing new here.
As for the concept of finding native speaker informants for linguistic studies, I don't think this is discriminatory. After all, the choice of the toothed elderly rural speaker is probably a good one if your objective is to capture a particular dialect without too much outside influence. It will at least help provide some kind of benchmark for tracking changes and outside influences in the language of younger speakers. The idea there is no such thing as an "untainted" native speaker is something of a truism. It's common knowledge that even the Queen of England has changed her pronunciation over time. (When I was studying works by the Chinese writer Laoshe, who is famous for depicting the language of "Old Beijing", every so often my teacher would say "No, that's not the language Beijing, that's something that Laoshe picked up when he lived in Sichuan". The point being that everybody is situated somewhere in linguistic space, whether due to their experience, education, social status, attitudes, etc.)
So I'm afraid that I'm not totally convinced by this attempt to tie the concept of "native speaker" into postcolonial, poststructural discourse. The piece simply herds familiar facts into a particular worldview. If you are deep into that world-view you might experience a "Eureka!" moment: "Wow! Even the concept of a native speaker is tied to Western colonialism!" But for anyone who has thought about language much at all, there is nothing terribly new here.
What about the native speaker grammaticality judgement, an important tool for linguistics? In light of the above, I think the native speaker grammaticality judgement is a valid concept but it needs to be better defined.
So, is it therefore true that the native speaker / non-native speaker split is truly binary? Probably not, any more than anything else natural in this world (humans are messy). I made my definition above on an extremely fuzzy basis. I also think it's true that some people end up without native speaker competency, for one reason or another.
It's certainly true that there's usually a clear difference between what someone who has spoken a language from childhood "knows" about their language, and what most adult learners know. But the concept of "native speaker of X" covers a lot of ground, and can become less useful or even problematic as soon as the discussion goes beyond simple things.
My impression, admittedly not founded on adequate historical research, is that the "native speaker" idea originated a few hundred years ago as a quasi-democratic replacement for feudal ideas like "the King's English", in association with the development of nation states.
The idea of the native speaker contrasts with more artificial notions of correctness, whether it's the formal diktats of a language board or less systematic attempts to ape an accepted standard body (Cicero, the Tanakh, etc.).
Why academe is obsessed with taking obviously imperfect but broadly correct and exceedlingly useful notions, like that of the native speaking community here, and attempting to deconstruct, problematize, and otherwise needlessly confound them with marginal cases, and especially attempt to draw rather far flung implications and associations that are neverthless sufficiently scandalous to warrant response is something that has eluded me yet.
I suspect their challenge goes deeper than "native speaker judgements". Grammatical judgements on "standard English" by "native speakers" are part of the tyranny. This mishmash of challenges to the privileged status of "native speakers of English" is virtually a challenge to the whole idea of "native spoken English". To rephrase words from an old song:
When I reached this paragraph, "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", my reaction was that they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Bringing in edge cases like this just seems silly.
There are many aspects to this question that this article glosses over. One is the seeming implication that non-native speakers of English (English heavily influenced by other languages) are somehow equally valid as speakers of English. Yet research has shown that children brought up by parents who natively speak another language are not helped by the parents' efforts to speak exclusively in English. Fluency comes to the child from interacting with a wide range of "native speakers" in the community. The parents would be better concentrating their efforts on teaching the child their native language. This would make a greater contribution to the conservation of "cultural heritage" than the blurring of lines that this article seems to be attempting.
Second, German has V2 order anyway, so a native speaker of German can just take it for granted, may not even notice it, and may not need to be explicitly taught it. (I think I was, but very cursorily.)
Response : one swallow most definitely does not a summer make, but I know of one (American) family where a child was taught Finnish as a 2nd L1 by a parent who was not a native Finnish speaker (it was the only language in which he ever spoke to her), and I understand that the tuition was very successful.
I also have to express some surprise at the claim that the concept of "native speaker" was developed with colonialism in mind. Nationalism, sure, but colonialism? In, like, 18th-century Germany?
Also the abstract for Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics and Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics, which takes the view that "From the insider's perspective of the speaker, there is only his or her full idiolect or repertoire, which belongs only to the speaker, not to any named language." So the bilingual doesn't speak "English and Spanish" (or whatever), she has only her "full idiolect or repertoire, which belongs only to the speaker". All of these are firmly within the postmodern, postcolonialist, poststructuralist, paradigm that (in my humble opinion) seeks to "deconstruct" history and repackage it within a fixed ideological framework. Not political correctness run amok, but definitely a subtle way of bending facts into a particular viewpoint, resulting in the breathtaking telescoping/simplification/distortion of history in those first few paragraphs.
I shared DM's surprise at the implication that the concept of "native speaker" was developed with colonialism in mind in 18th-century Germany. And what of Spanish and French, or the newer national languages of eastern Europe? A review of their first citation can be found here: The emergence of the English native speaker: a chapter in nineteenth-century linguistic thought, which is, indeed, all about English.
You can see the significance of native speaker use of a language from looking at a selection of items written by those who are NOT "native speakers", as for instance in the large LINCOM library of texts on linguistics. It is clear that there are sentences in many of these texts that no competent "native" English speaker would write: this is not to say that the sentences are unintelligible, merely that they are not quite English, as with use or omission of articles.
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