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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 78
is this status in any way correlated with literacy in cultures where literacy is a
relevant consideration?
Are all people who speak only one language ipso facto native speakers of that
language? This becomes relevant in countries where, for example, English was
once a colonial language and has been adopted for local use. Some people feel
uncomfortable with the idea that a person who speaks only Indian, Nigerian or
Singaporean English can be a ‘native speaker of English’. This is probably tied
up with rather extravagant ideals about what ‘English’ is, but it becomes a real
political problem in some places, especially when native-speaker status may be
used as a tool of discrimination.
Is there a test which will prove that a person is a native speaker
of a particular language?
The simple answer to the question in the title of this section is ‘No’. A more
complex answer might mention that if any such test is in theory possible, it has
not yet been devised or shown to be accurate in any sense at all. This, of course,
raises the further question of whether ‘native speaker’ is a term which has a
precise definition at all. And this in turn raises the question of whether native
speakers of a particular language are a definite category of people or whether
the notion of native speaker is a prototype, a presupposed perfect model,
which real speakers may resemble more or less closely.
What does a native speaker do?
Native speakers are generally assumed to have reliable intuitions about what is
or is not part of their own language, and to be able to make judgements about
the structures of their language: for example, they can state reliably whether
something is ambiguous, and which parts of the utterance belong together. As
a result of this, they are able to guide linguists in determining the grammar of
their language, even though they themselves do not have conscious access to
their grammar of their own language.
The whole notion of intuition is taken up in a separate section (see section
15). But there is plenty of evidence that intuition is variable, both within the
same speaker and between speakers, at least in the subtler cases. At the level at
which intuitions are probably the most constant, the level at which we judge
that Syntax not my functioning is is not a legitimate sentence of English (even
though it is an occurrent one: I have heard someone say this), we probably do
not need native speakers to bring us the news.
We also need to recall that one of the things we have learnt from late
twentieth-century linguistics is that production is variable. While some of this
may be accessible to introspection, it seems unlikely that all of it is. That is,