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77 NATIVE SPEAKER
exposed to people whose English is like mine to very different extents. In some
measure my English changes its characteristics depending on whether the
person I am speaking to comes from one of those areas. It is probable that I am
a speaker of a unique variety, spoken by nobody else in the world. Am I still a
native speaker of English? (See also section 1.)
When we start looking at the concept more widely, and at the uses to which
it is put, the notion of native speaker becomes more difficult to tie down.
Who is a native speaker?
A native speaker of a language must have acquired that language naturally by
growing up in the community in which it is spoken before the age of puberty.
There is some evidence that children whose parents did not also grow up in
the same community show slightly different speech patterns from those whose
parents were already part of the community. So perhaps I am not a native
speaker of anything because I did not grow up in the community in which both
of my parents grew up.
What should we then say about people who grow up in bilingual or multilingual
communities? Such people are more common than monoglots (people
who speak just one language) in the world. Are they native speakers only if both
parents grew up in the same community and speak the same language to the
child within that community? Is it possible for children to grow up as native
speakers of two languages, or can they only be native speakers of one, and if so,
can it be determined by simple principles which language they are native
speakers of? Is it possible for children who arrive in a community near the cutoff
point for language acquisition to forget their chronologically first language
and operate fully in their chronologically second language, and if so do they
then become people who are not native speakers of any language?
Can people lose native-speaker status if they move away from their own community?
Just as interestingly, can people acquire native-speaker status by
staying long enough in a community which is not their original one? After all,
even if I am more confident about what is English than I am about what is
French, I still have intuitions about what sounds like good French (just not
such extensive ones as I have for English). Are those intuitions inevitably
second-class citizens of the intuition world?
We also know that not all people who use a particular language do so with
the same effectiveness. A few people have the ability to produce great works of
literature or to make speeches which move others and stir them to action. Most
of us do not. Some people are more aware of the speech of outsiders than
others. Some find it harder to understand people with a foreign accent than
others do. Are all these people equal in the status as native speakers? Or are
there, perhaps, good native speakers and bad native speakers? And if there are,