Laurie Bauer - WordPress.com — Get a Free Blog Here

14
Native speaker
The native speaker of a language has been given great status by both structuralist
and generative linguists, in both theoretical and applied linguistics. The
notion of ‘native speaker’ is highly problematic, though this has largely gone
unnoticed.
For many of us, there is no apparent problem at all. I grew up in an environment
which was (to all intents and purposes) monolingual. I was literate in
English before I learnt any other language. In the course of my formal education,
I acquired, to various degrees, a number of extra languages. Some of these
I can speak reasonably fluently, well enough to be taken on superficial acquaintance
as a member of the relevant language community. Despite this facility, it
is still less tiring for me to spend an evening talking to friends in English than
in any other language, I can use English in a wider range of circumstances
(including writing) than I can use any other language, I can read English more
quickly and efficiently than I can read any other language, and I feel confident
about what is or is not English over a wider range of constructions than I feel
confident about in any other language. There are tasks which I can carry out in
English that I can carry out only with great difficulty in any other language
(performing arithmetical calculations, for instance). Even if I had chosen to
spend the larger part of my life in a country where English was not the major
language of interaction, and had learnt to function well in that environment, I
feel that this imbalance would have remained. I am a native speaker of English.
Even within these parameters, we can question what exactly I am a native
speaker of. My parents grew up in different parts of the United Kingdom, and
I was brought up in a third. Thus I was exposed to three varieties of English
from early in my life. My grandmothers spoke different varieties again. I have
lived for extended periods in three different English-speaking countries, being