An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

5 BARTH ON BOUNDARIES
Let me turn now to a very different approach to categorisation: the anthropological.
Frederik Barth, discussing ethnic groups and boundaries, argues that:
Socially relevant factors alone become diagnostic for membership not the overt
‘objective’ differences which are generated by other factors. It makes no difference
how dissimilar members may be in their overt behaviour – if they say they are A,
in contrast to another cognate category B, they are willing to be treated and let
their own behaviour be interpreted as A’s and not as B’s; in other words, they
describe their allegiance to the shared culture of A’s.
(Barth 1969: 15)
This, claims Barth, follows from what he regards as the primary criterion of
ethnicity: self-ascription: ‘ethnic groups are categories of ascription and identi -
fication by the actors themselves, and thus have the characteristics of organizing
interaction between peoples’ (ibid: 10).
No doubt this explains why public statements such as the following on a
university notice-board are thought to be acceptable: ‘Native Speakers of English
wanted for an experiment in the Speech Laboratory. £5 fee offered.’ Self-ascription
then wins you £5. What Barth is saying is that social categories are defined by their
boundaries, not by what they contain: ‘socially relevant features alone become
diagnostic for membership, not the overt “objective” differences which are generated
by other factors’ (ibid: 15). No prototype gradation here, then, no criteria to
differentiate core and periphery membership. Now from a social point of view, such
a challenge to our concern with the native speaker deserves close attention. After all,
social membership, membership of groups is accepted, taken for granted. There are
exceptions, but in general, boundaries are maintained and the assumed norms within
them followed, national, gender and (less often perhaps) religious.
We take it for granted that we belong to communities within those boundaries,
communities of whose members we have very little personal knowledge or contact.
They are indeed, as Anderson (1991) remarked of the nation, an ‘imagined
community’. Can the same be said of the native speaker? When we say we are native
speakers of X what exactly do we mean, other than our acceptance of a particular
community membership? As Escudero and Sharwood-Smith ruefully remark, we are
quite uncertain as to what we mean: we gloss over a definition, assuming that we
know that we are all talking about the same thing. When Sorace investigates her
near-natives it is noticeable that the NSs she uses as her controls are all educated and
what their education has provided them with is a facility in Standard English. In
other words, her experiments ignore NS variation.