An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

6 A SOCIOLINGUISTIC VIEW
Second Language Acquisition (SLA), then, takes the NS as given, in spite of its
consuming interest in what it means. As Preston remarks: ‘from a psycholinguistic
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point of view, nativeness is almost the entire question of SLA’ (1989: 78). But what
of sociolinguistics? There, it seems, variation is so central that there is no interest in
pursuing or defining the NS: to do so would mean the study of every individual,
since everyone is a NS of his/her own idiolect. This no doubt explains why Trudgill
is happy (and cavalier) enough to define the native speaker thus: ‘a speaker who has
a language as their first language’ (2003: 92). This is almost as dismissive as
the famous Lyons-Wales index reference (1972): Competence: 
see
Performance;
Performance: 
see
Competence.
7 THE STANDARD L ANGUAGE
Both the SLA/psycholinguistic/cognitive view and the sociolinguistic conceptual -
isation of the NS are in the end idealisations. Indeed, Trudgill’s definition is not after
all about an individual since no individual has a language as their first language; what
we all have as our first language is an idiolect, our own identifying idiolect which
distinguishes us from everyone else, even from our own siblings. It is in applied
linguistics that real interest in the NS resides, applied linguistics because that is the
field where judgements, goals and norms have a central place (Davies forthcoming)
and where the standard language finds its home. For the standard language is itself
an idealisation, the goal of education both for L1 and L2, taken for granted by SLA
researchers, the prototype for sociolinguistics. We can equate the public persona of
the NS with the standard language: that is what near-nativeness is compared with,
that is the goal of the second-language learner.
As such we can adopt the Barthian position and settle for self-ascription,
buttressed by Ernest Gellner’s functional view of nationalism. Societies, Gellner
argues, are to be explained ‘in terms of the synchronic interaction of institutions
rather than in terms of the past’ (Gellner 1997: 92). For applied linguistics, then, we
can explain the native speaker as the embodiment of the standard language, itself
maintained and demonstrated by the synchronic interaction of institutions and
available through education both to NNS and to NSs.