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79 NATIVE SPEAKER
while a speaker may be able to tell you that more than one of I haven’t a car, I
don’t have a car and I haven’t got a car sound reasonable, they probably cannot
tell you precisely how to distinguish them. When it comes to phonetic/phonological
facts such as when or how often to say /�ŋkaind/ rather than
/�nkaind/, any overt information provided by a native speaker is likely to be
misleading.
We must remember, too, that even where native speakers are able to make
judgements appropriately, they may not do so for external reasons: the desire
not to contradict the linguist, the desire to provide an answer even when they
are guessing, the desire to seem confident where they are not.
Are there different definitions of ‘native speaker’?
Unfortunately, there are occasions when the term ‘native speaker’ is, in any
case, used in a rather different sense from the one most often intended by linguists.
For example, in Singapore people are assigned a native language or,
rather, a ‘mother tongue’, of which they may then be considered native speakers,
independent of their actual speech habits (Lim & Foley 2004: 5). A speaker
of Hokkien may be designated a mother-tongue speaker of Mandarin, for
example, since only standardised variants are recognised as languages which
may function as a ‘mother tongue’. Here we may just need a richer terminology:
there can be mother tongues, first languages, community languages and
heritage languages, any of which may or may not coincide with a native language
(if we can define that term). A mother tongue is quite literally the
tongue learned from one’s mother (though in most cases, that language will be
modified by the language of the speaker’s peers); a first language is the language
the speaker feels most comfortable using — usually, but not necessarily
the mother tongue; a community language is the language used by a particular
community, perhaps a small community functioning within a larger one, as
is the case with groups of immigrants in a foreign country; a heritage language
is a language which may not be spoken at all, but in which some important
facets of the local culture are encoded and which has some historical and
emotional tie for people, even if they do not speak it. Italian might be a heritage
language for monolingual English speakers descended from Italians in some
parts of the USA or Australia, for example.
Conclusion
The notion of native speaker, and also the notion of native language, are not as
simple as they might seem. In this section, more questions have been asked than
have been answered. The intention is to draw attention to possible problems
with a term which is often used glibly. This does not necessarily mean that the