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Nativeness or proficiency: Who is a native speaker of English?
As far back as 1985, the notions of ‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’ have been problematized in applied linguistics discourse. This seeming death sentence was provoked by the emergence of new Englishes, the growing phenomenon of bi/multilingualism globally, and the efforts by both descriptive/theoretical linguists as well as applied linguists to answer these questions: Who exactly is a native speaker? What exactly makes one a native speaker? Is it the language of one’s parents even if the offspring cannot speak the so called ‘mother tongue’? Is it the first language one acquires? Or is it the language of one’s immediate community; the language one was born and bred in? Has native speakerness anything to do with geography? Or put simply, is being a native speaker defined and bounded by geography?
Initially, the concepts of ‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’ were defined in terms of age of acquisition. Thus, a native speaker was seen as “a person who has learned a language from an early age and who has full mastery of the language” (Lightbown & Spada, 1999, p.177). For Davis (1991), it is the native speech that one learned at ‘one’s mother’s knee’. Kramsch (1997) cited in Piller (2001), defined the native speaker as “an imaginary construct – a canonically literate monolingual middle-class member of a largely fictional national community whose citizens share a belief in a common history and a common destiny” (p.6). Going by this definition, the determination of native speakerness is not necessarily based on linguistic evidence but such social relations/parameters as nationality, race, heritage or class. In other words, native speaker status is more a matter of social identity and not so much about linguistic competence bearing in mind that identity is (self) performed and (other) perceived (Coppieters, 1987, p.544; Piller, 2001, p.6).
Another issue raised by this construct of a native speaker is that the ideal native speaker is perceived as monolingual which resonates Chomsky’s notion of an ideal native speaker as “The ideal speaker-listener who lives in a homogenous speech community” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 13). This contention is now questionable when we consider that a vast majority of the world’s population is bi- or multilingual (Edwards, 1994, p.33). When we conceive of the ‘native speaker’ as the ideal user of a language, we also intuitively ascribe to the native speaker the arbiter of correct usage as well as the norm-definer. While the native speaker may be supposedly born into the language, the standard is supposedly attained through superior education. In other words, a native speaker of Standard English is in the words of Piller (2001, p.4) “logically impossible”. This is why Coulmas (1997) questions what he calls “the mysterious native speaker or mother tongue speaker” who allegedly has a privileged knowledge of his or her mother tongue and argues that the term rests on two assumptions which he describes as dubious on closer inspection. First, “that there is categorical difference between mother tongue and other forms of language” (p.43) yet, we know that languages do not exist as such except as abstractions and idealizations on the basis of a number of different dialects which inform Max Weinreich to define language as “ a dialect with an army and a navy” (See Romaine, 1994, p.14). Secondly, “that one’s mother tongue is destiny and not decision” (p.43). The truth is that speakers do choose other languages than their First Language (L1) as their native language (s) especially when the discourse of native speaker shifts from ‘who you are’ to ‘what you know’ of the language. Rather than destiny, language use is a matter of choice. That is why Chinua Achebe chose to write his novels in English not Igbo his L1; that is why Wole Soyinka chose to write in English not Yoruba his L1; the same reason Ngugi wa’ Thiong’o wrote in English and later his native Kikuyu; Joseph Conrad chose English as the language of his novels rather than Polish his L1; Salman Rusdie chose to write in English instead of Gujarati his L1; and the list goes on. In spite of the lack, sense of alienation and ambivalence experienced by the choice of a foreign language as the language of expression, language choice is a matter of proficiency and preference. While we recognize the emotional and nationalistic attachments to the terms, ‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’, the reality of the modern world accords with the words of Piller (2001):
Linguistically, the native speaker concept is useless and should therefore be discarded. Socially, the ‘birthright mentality’ that goes with it is debilitating and unfair, and should therefore be discarded, too. As discourse analysts, however, we should carefully examine discourse about native speaker and the mother tongue as instances of the discursive construction of difference, deficit, and dominance (p.14).
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