Who is a native speaker and what is it they speak?

I do not believe in worrying endlessly about definitions, but some preliminary

demarcation of the field of discourse is, obviously, both necessary and desirable.

Fishman (1989:5)

1. Introduction

The term "native speaker" is pivotal in a number of areas. Firstly, even in generative
linguistics, the concept of an "ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech
community" (Chomsky, 1965:3) is crucial. While idealising from the data is both
permissible and necessary, vagueness about the terms "speaker-listener" and "speech
community" may leave us uncertain as to exactly what data we are idealising, which then
casts doubts on such generative shibboleths as "competence and performance" and "core
and periphery". Secondly, it goes without saying that the term "native speaker" and its
associated terms "mother tongue" and "member of a speech community" are of primary
importance for sociolinguistics. On a more practical note, in the language teaching
profession, being classed as a native speaker is the key to status, expanded job
opportunities and higher pay, which naturally creates a heated debate (one I do not intend
to venture into). Finally, the question has important cultural and political implications,
particularly for ethnic minorities, emerging nations and speakers of English as an
"international language" (Pennycook, 1994).

Uncritical use of the term "native speaker" begs two questions. The first is the question of
what it is one may be a native speaker of. Words like "language" and "dialect" are
themselves ill-defined. This has led sociolinguists to prefer the term "speech community",
but, as I shall argue, this simply moves the vagueness into a different area. Secondly,
even if there is no ambiguity about the language, dialect or whatever, the word "native" is
not only vague, but has non-linguistic connotations which are by no means culturally or
politically neutral.

Problems in defining these terms do not arise from mere lack of rigour; they are inherent
in the very concepts we are attempting to define. In this essay, I shall thus adopt more of
a philosophical than an ethnographic approach to the problem, and, rather than reviewing
the literature and then attempting to show who has the "best" definitions, shall examine
the various concepts in turn, picking out examples which illustrate the problems involved,
and then offering suggestions for an alternative approach to their categorisation.

2. What does a native speak?

As stated earlier, there is no point in describing someone as a native speaker unless we

are sure what it is they are a native speaker of. If we say "Susan Chang is a native speaker
of English", are we referring to British, American or Singapore English, for example? In
the case of Singapore English, is this Standard Singapore English, Vernacular Singapore
English or both? Can she also be regarded as a native speaker of, say, Cantonese, and if
so, is Cantonese a language or a dialect of Chinese? These questions, though somewhat
hoary, are by no means insignificant when attempting to understand the native speaker
concept.

2.1. Language versus dialect

One the face of it, Saussure's (1915) famous distinction of langue and parole looks
uncomplicated. If parole is the totality of utterances by the speakers of a language, then
langue is "a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary
conventions that have been adapted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that
faculty" (1915:61), which involves abstraction from parole (Ellis, 1993:104). However,
isolating a langue from a confusing plethora of language examples requires first that we
be selective about which utterances we abstract from. If we wish to describe, say, French,
we would not include data from Breton, but would we include the French spoken by
people who also speak Breton? Would we also include speakers of French outside France,
for example French-speaking Swiss or Canadians? Conversely, would we only accept as
French, language approved by the Académie Française?

It seems that even determining the most basic object of study in linguistics - a language -
involves sociolinguistic, and even political, considerations. It is perhaps surprising, then,
that even many sociolinguists accept "language" as a given (Le Page & Tabouret-Keller,
1985:1). Languages are notoriously hard to define, hence Max Weinreich's oft-quoted
tongue-in-cheek definition: "A language is a dialect with its own army and navy." Outside
linguistics departments, there is a pervasive attitude that "nation = language = territory =
state" (Lunt, 1986:729, in Rudin & Eminov, 1993), and the assumptions of nationalism
have profoundly influenced our thinking about what is and is not a language (Fishman,
1989, Williams, 1992).

A case study of the controversial status of "national language" is provided by Kurdish.

The classical taxonomy is set out by Hassanpour (1993:107): "Kurdish is a member of
the Iranian group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of
languages." On the ground, however, the situation is much more complex. In the
Southeast of Turkey, there are at least two "languages" that could reasonably be classed
as Kurdish: Kürtçe and Zazaca. Of these, the former is regarded by most Kurdish
nationalists in Turkey as "Kurdish", whereas there are good grounds for regarding Zazaca
as closer to the Northern Iranian "Kurdish" of the philologists. Kürtçe could perhaps
be better seen as a creole which arose when the Ottomans encouraged the migration of
Arabs and Kurds into Southeast Anatolia as a way of keeping the nomadic (and heretical)
Turks of the region under political and religious control (Turner, N., personal
communication, 1996). This is not to say that it could not become a national language in
the unlikely event of the Turkish Kurds attaining political independence. One difficulty in
obtaining reliable information on Kurdish is that linguistic statements have political
consequences, and almost all sources are biased one way or another. Hassanpour (1993),
while informative, is somewhat propagandist (on the Kurdish side), while Turkish
sources are usually even worse, often echoing the (now officially abandoned) line that the
Kurds are "mountainous Turks" who have forgotten their own language. For an extreme
Turkish nationalist there is no Kurdish language as such, merely dialects of Turkish
and/or Persian, while for a Kurdish nationalist, Kurdish is a "pure" language which was
corrupted by centuries of Ottoman and Persian domination.

The test of mutual intelligibility is also suspect. While Kürtçe and Zazaca share a similar
grammar, a speaker of the former would have extreme difficulty in understanding the
latter. On the other hand, Serbian and Croatian are prominent recent examples of
mutually intelligible "dialects" of the same "language" emerging as separate "languages",
with archaisms and provincialisms being adopted to "purify" the language (Gee, 1997;
Woodard, 1996). There is also now "an attempt in Bosnia to adopt officially religious and
social terms associated with Muslim faith and values" (Gee, 1997), these largely deriving
from Turkish, or from Arabic via Turkish. The same process has been well-documented
in the case of Hindi and Urdu (see, for example, Khubchandani, 1991). When a new state
is formed (or even just demanded) we see what Fishman (1972(a):46) describes as "the
conscious cultivation of once lowly vernaculars ... as independent languages, as
languages suitable for all higher purposes, and as languages of state-building and state-
deserving nationalities" (emphasis original).

The most celebrated case of the failure of the mutual intelligibility test is that of Chinese
"dialects". Hokkien and Cantonese, for example, are probably regarded as dialects of
Chinese not because they are mutually intelligible (which they are to only a very limited
degree), but because their speakers share a similar culture, and were for most of their
history part of the same state (even though they are not now; depending on how you
define Hokkien, a large minority or a small majority of its speakers are found outside
Mainland China, notably in Taiwan). Perhaps most importantly, educated speakers also
know the same official variety (Mandarin) and write in the same ideograms (Hanzi).

2.2. Language loyalty and standardisation

A language is thus, to a large extent, whatever it is perceived to be. In a striking case,

Çavuş (1986:67, in Rudin & Eminov, 1993:46) gives a selection of "Turkish" words
which were proscribed by the Bulgarian government as part of its assimilation policy.
These include rapor, burs (both French), and kütüphane ("library", Persian). A
significant factor is "language loyalty" (Gumperz, 1972), which normally links regional
dialects to a national language of which they are seen as variant forms. However,
sometimes a group may regard itself as speaking one language, when their dialect is
linguistically closer to another, and language loyalty may also confuse the issue of mutual
intelligibility (Gumperz, 1972:228-229).

An influence on language loyalty is standardisation; a dialect is often perceived as a

variant form of a language because that language possesses a standard form which is
accepted by speakers of the dialect in question. Standardisation occurs through a number
of processes, such as urbanisation, increasing use of a "court language" (e.g. "the King's
English"), increasing commercial, legal and literary use, and planned language reforms.
None of these automatically produce standardisation, however, as can be seen in the case
of Turkish. The court and literary language of the Ottoman Empire was essentially a
sophisticated creole which never became fully standardised because an educated speaker
of Ottoman Turkish would also be fluent in Arabic and Persian; code-switching was the
norm rather than the exception. With the founding of the Republic, language reforms
purged Turkish of thousands of loan-words; standardisation in this case did not involve
the spreading of the language of the educated elite, but rather the attempt to create a
"new" language based largely on the Central Anatolian vernacular, accompanied by
Europeanisation in scientific and technical fields (Fishman, 1989:314-315). Language
planning has also experienced a number of U-turns throughout the history of the
Republic, leading to furious debates about what is "real Turkish", beside which the letters
to the Times on "correct" English pale into insignificance, and it is only with the spread
of the mass media that anything approaching a "Standard Turkish" has become a reality
rather than an ideal.

We might rephrase Heinrich by saying that these days a language is a dialect with its own
newspaper and TV channel.

2.3. Speech community

In an attempt to avoid the terminological confusion surrounding such words as "dialect"

and "language", most sociolinguists prefer to adopt the idea of "speech community".
However, this is, if anything, harder to define. Saville-Troike (1989:16) states that "since
the focus of the ethnography of communication is on the speech community, and on the
way communication is patterned and organizes within that unit, clearly its definition is of
central importance", then goes on to list no less than five different definitions[6]. This
then means that, for example, "questions arise in deciding if speakers of English from
Britain and the United States (or Canada and Australia, or India and Nigeria) are
members of the same speech community" (Saville-Troike, 1989:17). In others words, we
seem to have a similar problem with "speech community" as we did with "language" and
"dialect"

In addition, the criteria for membership of a speech community are by no means well-
defined, as the following example shows:

Ordinarily the question of the speech community of the Wishram Chinook would be
discussed as a question as to whether or not the linguistic differences (few) between the
Wishram village and that of the Wasco across the river, and perhaps those of others down
the river, sufficed to constitute separate dialects, or only one. On the basis of Wishram
culture, however, an ethnographic approach must realise three speech communities
within the Wishram village itself. One such community consisted of normal adults and
children past babyhood; a second comprised babies, dogs, coyotes, and guardian spirits
Dog and Coyote; a third comprised those whose guardian spirit experience had granted
them the power of being able to interpret the language of the spirits.

(Hymes, 1972a:28).
The terms "native speaker" and "member of a speech community" are not
interchangeable, but the latter depends, to an extent, on the former. By classing Coyote as
a member of a particular Wishram Chinook speech community, we are assuming that this
mythical entity is a speaker of "Wishram Chinook". Incidentally, classifying mythical
beings as members of speech communities is by no means frivolous. The prototypical
speaker of RP or the "cheerful cockney sparrer" of the Ealing comedies may well be just
as mythical as Coyote.

The concept of speech community may be a useful research tool: "Most groups of any
permanence, be they small bands bounded by face-to-face contact, modern nations
divisible into smaller subregions, or even occupational associations or neighbourhood
gangs, may be treated as speech communities, provided they show linguistic peculiarities
that warrant special study" (Gumperz, 1972:219, emphasis added). “Speech
community†is thus analogous to the “population†of the medical and social
sciences. However, this does not remove the problem of "language".

Many attempts have been made to define a language in social terms, such as "The
language of Community X"; but when we have to devise a test for membership of
Community X it frequently includes ... speaking Language X, and the definition therefore
becomes circular.

(Le Page & Keller, 1985:191)

Le Page and Kellner (1985) actually give four senses in which the word "language" is
used. The first sense is that of "a supposed property of an individual, his "native
language" (or dialect)" (1985:188). Although this is more political and cultural than
linguistic, it is easily confused with Chomskyan "i-language" (Chomsky, 1986:22), which
it most certainly is not. The second sense of "language" "is used to refer to the actual
behaviour of people ... the data of linguistic behaviour, of performance" (1985:190), or in
other words, Saussurean parole. Thirdly, there is "the kind of description made by
linguists using data from Sense 2 performance ... [In this sense] there can never be two
descriptions of "a language" that are in complete agreement" (1985:190). Finally, there is
the sense of "systems assumed to be inherent in the linguistic behaviour of a community
and in their literature .... [This language] is inaccessible and indefinable; each of us has
only partial experience of it†(1985:190-191). It is this last "indefinable" sense which
the authors identify with what the layman means by "a language" such as English or
Swahili. It is perhaps ironic that linguists proclaim to the public that they study language,
but, since what the public mean by "language" is "indefinable", often go on to study other
things, and call them Language (the worst offenders here being the faculty of MIT). It
would be decidedly odd for a biologist to say (pace Star Trek) "Well, biology is the study
of life, but of course not life as we know it."

3. Who is a native?

I have gone into the subject of "language" before discussing the term "native speaker"
because, as I have stated, the two are mutually interdependent. A native speaker is a type
of speaker of a particular language, but our idea of what constitutes a language is
dependent on assumptions about who is a native speaker of that language. The term
"native", however, seems to be about as clear as the terms "language" or "dialect"; like St.
Augustine's "time", "we understand it until we start to think about it" (Ellis, 1993:78).

3.1. Native and non-native

To talk about native and non-native speakers is to possess an assumption (or

assumptions) about natives and non-natives per se. The terms themselves are perhaps
unfortunate in a discussion of language, since the word "native", as its etymology
suggests, implies birth into a specific community, or in a particular place, the two usually
being regarded as identical. In fact, cases where being born in a particular place
automatically entails membership of a specific community and knowledge of a particular
language may well be the exception rather than the norm. It is fair to say that, at least up
to the 1930's, someone born in a particular spot in the New Guinea Highlands was
virtually certain to be a member of, say, the Mundugumor tribe, and would thus speak
only their language, so it would be equally reasonable to call him or her "a native speaker
of Mundugumor". Margaret Mead, on the other hand, would be a "non-native speaker of
Mundugumor" (Mead, 1980). However, if we assume for the sake of argument that none
of the Mundugumor learnt more than a few words of the neighbouring Arapesh or
Tchambuli languages (and vice versa), the native/non-native issue only arrives on the
scene with the first anthropologist.

In most of the world, however, community does not equal territory and language does not
equal either of these. Someone born in Wales may or may not regard him- or herself as
Welsh, and may speak Welsh as a "first", "second" or sole language, or not at all
(Grillo,1989:55-60,93-96). "Nativeness" is only a very rough and ready guide to "native
speakerness".

3.2. "Hearth and home"; the "mother-tongue" debate

In bilingual or "diglossic" communities, the question of "mother-tongue" arises (for

discussion of the terms "bilingual" and "diglossic", see Ferguson, 1959, Saville-Troicke,
1989:54, or Williams, 1996:104). In these contexts, "mother tongue" is used as a
convenient reference for determining who is a native speaker of a particular language or
dialect; it is usually taken to be the language a speaker heard as a child, normally uses at
home, or both. However, problems arise here as elsewhere. Language loyalty is again a
factor in perception of "mother-tongue", as Le Page and Tabouret-Keller point out:

In Singapore, because of the enormous importance attached by Chinese to the written

language, "mother tongue" is used - quite arbitrarily - to refer to that spoken language
(Mandarin) which is culturally most closely connected with written Chinese, regardless
of the fact that most Singapore Chinese speak Hokkien or Teochew or Hakka or
Cantonese or Hainanese, i.e. languages from the south of China. Even these are likely to
be spoken in a mixed, Singaporean way (1985:189).
What "language" is actually spoken at home is by no means obvious, since code-
switching applies at home as much as anywhere else; language domains are not rigid. The
concept of domains (e.g. Fishman, 1972a) is another of those criteria which are useful so
long as one remembers that they are merely research devices and does not assume that
they are "real". It is true that different codes prevail in different environments, but that
does not imply a definite boundary between them. For example, I generally speak English
at work and Turkish at home, but code-switch regularly in both domains.

The mother-tongue debate also raises questions about the status of standardised
languages. If the standard language (or dialect, if you prefer) is rarely spoken at home,
can anyone really be said to be a native speaker of it? Even in cases where a particular
vernacular has been taken as the standard for a nation (as in the case of Putonghua, where
the Beijing dialect was taken as the standard for the whole of the PRC), this still leaves a
relatively small proportion of the population having the standard version as their "mother-
tongue", and once the dialect has been standardised, the local dialect may drift away from
the standard version. In short, the "hearth and home" attitude exalts one domain at the
expense of others, ignores code-switching, and confuses the issue of standard languages.

3.2. The question of competence

One way to avoid the "native speaker" trap is to speak of "native speaker competence".
Natives of a community have native speaker competence, more or less by definition
(Hymes, 1972c; Fishman, 1972a:49). On the other hand, non-natives may also acquire
native, or near-native competence.

The first problem with the competence idea is the by now familiar one of circular
definition. Native speaker competence can be broadly defined as the ability to conform to
the set of linguistic and sociolinguistic expectations of a particular speech community. As
we have seen, the notion of a speech community implies members by whose linguistic
behaviour the community is defined, so unless we possess a definition of "native speaker"
which is not related to competence, we are back where we started. If, on the other hand,
we do possess such a definition, sociolinguistic competence is, to use Aristotelian terms,
an accidental rather than an essential property of a native speaker.

The second problem is that, unlike Chomskyan "competence", communicative

competence is not an all or nothing affair, and in some areas of competence "non-
natives", such as immigrants, may actually be more competent. If we are talking about
competence in the standard language, what would we make of the sentence "Someone
should learn them Pakis to speak proper" (Leeds taxi driver, personal communication)?
The speaker here is demonstrating both linguistic and sociolinguistic competence for a
working class Leeds speech community, but not with regard to the standard language,
where, say, an Eton and Oxford-educated Pakistani would be regarded as more
competent.

When we look at written language, "native speaker competence", if it has any meaning at
all, would only be appropriate in comparing the writing of "native" and "non-native"
speakers of similar educational backgrounds. Take, for example, this written equivalent
of "Someone should learn them Pakis to speak proper", by a fourteen-year old British
schoolboy:-

There are millions of immigrants from China Pakistan that speak all different languages
and I think if they come to this country they should try to speak the language. Alot [sic]
of the people stay in the [sic] own community and speak the [sic] own language I think
this should not be aloud [sic]. I think they should be chucked out.

(Swann Report, 1985:253, in Grillo, 1989:110-111)

3.3. The critical period hypothesis

A more promising approach comes, perhaps surprisingly, from the generative school. If
we ignore communicative competence and concentrate on the narrower notion of
linguistic competence proposed by Chomsky (1965, 1986), we can make use of the
critical period hypothesis, first proposed by Lenneberg (1976). According to this view,
the syntax of a language is acquired rapidly and effortlessly by young children, but not by
adults; hence there is a "critical period" for language acquisition. A reasonable "rule of
thumb" definition of "native speaker" might thus be someone who acquired the language
during this critical period; a language acquired later would thus be a second, non-native
language, irrespective of the ethnic or speech community the speaker is a nominal
member of.

This still leaves us with some unanswered questions, however. The first is the validity of
the hypothesis itself. While there is strong empirical evidence to suggest a critical period
for language acquisition (Bickerton, 1990:115-122), it would still be premature to base a
definition upon a hypothesis, especially when that hypothesis deals with acquisition of
language in general, rather than acquisition of a particular language or language variety.
Secondly, it still skirts the question of what it is that is acquired; once we leave the
rarefied area of a supposedly independent syntax, the problem of defining a language or
dialect remains. An amusing example of this problem comes from Linguist List:

When I was a graduate student in linguistics, I often observed as a prof spent a class
period at the blackboard laying out some new broil of information, winding up with a
flourish and "And the proof that this is correct is that the following sentence cannot occur
in any dialect of English!" He/she would then write on the board the "proof" sentence,
which would turn out to be a perfectly ordinary Ozark English sentence, the like of which
you encounter half a dozen times a day where I come from.
Elgin (1996)

3.4. The status of "second languages"

If communities employ more than one language or dialect (as most do), at what point
does one of these codes become a non-native language for the speakers concerned? The
terms "first" and "second" languages are misleading to the extent that they imply that a
bilingual speaker has a first and a second language, that they are acquired in that order,
and used in that order of ease and frequency. In fact it is perfectly possible to use the
language acquired later with greater frequency and fluency than the "first" language, and
a speaker may even forget much of their "first" language if they stop speaking it after
early childhood. This in turn may be complicated by a conscious attempt to relearn the
first language. Let us say that a child in South-East Anatolia spends the first few years of
her life in a village where the predominant language is a variety of Kurdish, but then goes
to a boarding school where only Turkish is spoken, and forgets most of her Kurdish. On
leaving school she decides to get back to her roots and makes a conscious attempt to
relearn Kurdish (maybe a different variety). What, then, is her "first language"?

Where second languages used as a lingua franca are adopted by an educated elite, they
may produce their own "native" literature. As stated before, Seljuk and Ottoman Turks
frequently wrote in Turkish, Arabic, Persian or a mixture of all three. There is certainly
nothing "non-native" about Celaladdin Rumi's Mesnevi, dictated rapidly and
spontaneously in Persian. As Kachru (1986:12, in Saville-Troike, 1989:105) says of
Indian English literature, "The medium is non-native, but the message is not."

4. An alternative categorisation

Attempts to produce stricter definitions of terms like "language", "dialect" or "native

speaker", often founder because of the assumption that there is a set of native speakers
(or languages, or dialects) with Aristotelean "necessary and sufficient conditions" for
membership. In this ideal set, all members would be equal. Something would either be a
language or it would not, and a person would either be a native speaker of this language
or would not; no native speaker would be more representative than another. As we have
seen, this is not the case, and if we wish to scrutinise these terms, we would be better off
using more sophisticated models of categorisation, such as those proposed by
Wittgenstein (1968), Rosch (1973), Lakoff (1987) or Ellis (1993).

4.1. The "language" category

Traditional language typology is modelled on biological taxonomy. Just as in biology we

have a hierarchy with kingdoms at the top and sub-species at the bottom, in linguistics we
have a hierarchy as follows:-

FAMILY (Indo-European) SUB-FAMILY (Indo-Iranian) GROUP (North Iranian)

LANGUAGE (Kurdish) DIALECT (Zazaca)

However, while in biology it is possible to set up definite taxonomic criteria (e.g. fertile
members of the same species can mate successfully), this is not possible in linguistics
(actually, it isn't quite that simple in biology, but that is another story). "Mutual
intelligibility" can be seen as a failed attempt to provide such a criterion; the problem is
that while two animals either can or cannot mate, two humans understand (or claim to
understand) each other to a certain degree, and in a particular sociolinguistic context.
If, however, we regard "language" as a prototypical category, the problems discussed
earlier do not arise. A prototypical language (i.e. the most representative member of the
set of languages) would have the following characteristics:

1. It is spoken by the vast majority of the population of at least one country;

2. If spoken in more than one country, there are no major linguistic variations
between them;
3. It is not spoken by people outside those countries, except as a "foreign language";
4. It has a standard spoken form, which is grammatically, lexically and
phonologically similar to the versions spoken by virtually all the population, and
is accepted by them as "correct".
5. It has a standard written form, which is grammatically and lexically similar to the
standard spoken form.

Of course very few languages meet all of these criteria in full, but something may be
regarded as a language to the extent that it approximates these. Thus Italian is fairly
prototypical, English is less so, and Kurdish is on the fuzzy boundary of the set.
Weakness in one criterion may be compensated for by strength in another; thus French
loses out on criterion 2., but makes up for this with its high degree of standardisation.

A similar prototype could be constructed for "dialect" along the following lines:-

1. It is restricted to a particular region of a country;

2. It is phonologically, lexically or grammatically different to the standard spoken
language of that country (usually in that order), but is nevertheless closer to that
language than to any other;
3. It does not have a standard written form.

We should also remember that some categories in these criteria, such as "country",
themselves display prototype effects.

4.2. The "native speaker" category

The first point to note here is that "native speakers of English" do not comprise the
intersection of the set of natives of England and the set of speakers of English. Firstly, it
is obvious that there is no correspondence between "England" and "English", except
historically and, perhaps, prototypically. Secondly, even if we ignore this, there is a
logical problem. "Turkish delight" is not the intersection of the set of Turks and the set of
delights; the whole may not only be greater than the sum of the parts, it may be quite
different.

Nevertheless, at least in the popular imagination, there is some relation between "being
English" and "speaking English", hence the popular (mis)conception that British English
(by which is normally meant English English, not Welsh or Scottish) is somehow "better"
than other varieties. Again, we are up against a prototypical category. We might set up
some tentative criteria for "prototypical native speaker of language L" as follows:-
 1. He/she was born in a country C where L is the dominant language;
2. He/she acquired L as a child (preferably in C);
3. The inhabitants of C are regarded as speaking the standard form of L;
4. He/she has both grammatical, lexical, phonological and sociolinguistic
competence in the standard spoken form ofL;
5. He/she mainly speaks L at home;
6. He/she is not bilingual, or, if bilingual, does not regularly code-switch between
the standard form of L and a dialect of L, or between L and another language.

We may note here that criteria originally dismissed as irrelevant when attempting to
construct a "strict" (i.e. Aristotelean) definition, are admissible when describing a
prototype.

Obviously not all people who are classed as native speakers have all these characteristics;
some (such as 6.) are of minor importance, while others (such as 4), may suffice for a
non-native (in terms of birth) to be regarded as a native speaker, depending on the context
in, and purpose for which, the native speaker criteria are applied. For peripheral "native
speakers" there appears to be a kind of Turing test in operation; if a "central" native
speaker (i.e. close to the prototype) cannot tell the difference between the speech of that
person and that of another "central" native speaker, that person may be regarded as a
native speaker.

Strictly speaking, this actually only a prototype for “modern natural languageâ€; it
excludes dead languages, liturgical languages (e.g. Latin, Sanskrit) and invented
languages (e.g. Esperanto, Klingon). However, “modern natural language†can itself
be seen as the prototypical member of a category which includes the aforementioned
exceptions as peripheral members. “Language†as a whole is an incredibly complex
category, which seems to involve what Lakoff calls “radial†features.

5. Conclusion

Having shown that terms such as "language" and "native speaker" are somewhat vague
and fuzzy around the edges, the question arises of whether, as linguists, sociolinguists or
language educators, we should abandon them and search for more precise terms. I would
suggest that this is not only unnecessary, but also impracticable. Alternatives to
"language" and "native speaker" such as "speech community" and "member of a speech
community" are, as we have seen, equally problematic, since they take their terms of
reference from the original offending concepts.

What we can do is define terms more precisely for the field of discourse in which we are
working. There is nothing wrong in saying "For the purposes of this study I shall take the
term 'native speaker' to mean X." Thus the native speaker of the grammarian would be
different from the native speaker of the sociolinguist or the educationalist. This could
lead in each case to various prototypical criteria being elevated to the status of "essential
properties", in order to create a clearly-bounded and uniform set. In practice this is what
all sciences do to an extent; what a botanist means by "fruit" is close to what the rest of
mean by the word, but it is so defined that everything is either "fruit" or "not fruit", and
no "fruit" is more "fruity" than another. The question of what is really "fruit" does not
arise, and should not arise with "native speaker" either.

Robin Turner, 1997/2004

REFERENCES

Bickerton, D. (1990) Language and Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bloomfield, L. (1933) Language. New York: Holt

Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

- (1986) Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. New York: Praetor.

Elgin, S.H. (1996, June 18) [e-mail to Linguist List 7.941] [Online] Available:
http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/issues/html/7-941.html#2

Ellis, J.M. (1993) Language, Thought, and Logic. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press.

Ferguson, C.A. (1959) "Diglossia." Word 15:325-40.

Fishman, J.A. (1972a) "The Sociology of Language." In Pier Paulo Giglioli (ed.)
Language and Social Context. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

- (1972b) The Sociology of Language. Rowley: Newbury House.

- (1989) Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective. Clevedon:

Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Gee, S. (1997, June 5) Re: Serbo-Croat. [e-mail to Robin Turner].

Grillo, R.D. (1989) Dominant Languages: language and hierarchy in Britain and France.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gumperz, J. (1962) "Types of linguistic communities." Anthropological Linguistics

4(1):28-40

- (1972) "The Speech Community". In Pier Paulo Giglioli (ed.) Language and Social
Context. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Hockett, C.F. (1958) A Course in Modern Linguistics. New York: Macmillan.

Hymes, D. (1972a) "Toward Ethnographies of Communication: the analysis of
communicative events". In Pier Paulo Giglioli (ed.) Language and Social Context.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.

- (1972b) "Models of the interaction of language and social life." In John J. Gumperz
and D. Hymes (eds.) Directions in Sociolinguistics: ethnography of communication. New
York: Holt, Rineheart & Winston.

- (1972c) "On communicative competence". In J.B. Pride & J. Holmes (eds.)

Sociolinguistics. London: Penguin.

Kachru, B.B. (1986) The Alchemy of English: the spread, functions and models of non-
native Englishes. Oxford: Pergamon Institute of English.

Khubchandani, L.M. (1991) Language, Culture and Nation-Building: challenges of

modernisation. New Delhi: Manohar Publications.

Labov, W. (1972) "On the mechanism of linguistic change." In John J. Gumperz and D.
Hymes (eds.) Directions in Sociolinguistics: ethnography of communication. New York:
Holt, Rineheart & Winston.

Lakoff, G. (1987) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What categories reveal about the
mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lenneberg, E. (1967) Biological Foundations of Language. New York: John Wiley &
Sons.

Le Page, R.B. & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985) Acts of Identity: Creole-based approaches to

language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mead, M. (1980) Sex and Temperament in three Primitive Societies. New York: Morrow
Quill Paperbacks

Pennycook, A. (1994) The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language.

London: Longman.

Rosch, E. (1973) "Natural Categories". Cognitive Psychology 4: 328-350.

Saussure, F. de (1916). Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally & Albert
Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. 1966.

Saville-Troike, M. (1989) The Ethnography of Communication: an introduction (2nd

ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Sherzer, J. (1975) "Ethnography of Speaking". Manuscript, University of Texas at Austin.

Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations. G.E.M. Anscombe & R. Rhees (eds.),
trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. 3d ed. New York 1968.

Woodard, C. (1996, August 14) Linguistic Balkanisation? [forwarded e-mail to Linguist

List] [Online] Available at: http:/www.udc.es/dep/lx/cac/newlang.html