But lets be fair: most reputable linguists would define native language , as Leonard Bloomfield did in his book Language, as the first language a person learns, the language of his childhood home, or words to that effect, Nevertheless, Bloomfield went on to say that a persons adult language is not necessarily the same as his native language, of which he may have forgotten all but a smattering . Bloomfield was thinking in particular of children of immigrants to America, but similar cases occur in Britain and elsewhere. Yet almost in the same breath Bloomfield defined a bilingual as one who has native-like control of two languages , and I am quite sure he did not mean to suggest that a bilingual person may only remember a smattering of his two languages which would indeed disqualify him as a bilingual.
This curious contradiction or confusion is a fallacy to which most linguists seem prone. They choose to indicate a high degree of proficiency in the use of a language by referring to what a so-called native speaker of that language is thought to know, well aware though they are that some adults remember little or nothing of their native language , having for one reason or another abandoned it at an early age in favour of another language. Moreover, those same ex- native speakers of one language will most often have attained a degree of proficiency in their second-learnt language which equals that of native speakers .
In practice we all have a fairly clear idea of what is meant by native-like control . We mean the proficiency of somebody who is fully at home in the language, is confident in his use of it and is able to make judgments about usage with which other members of the language community will normally agree. We generally expect him to be a cultured person familiar with both spoken and written usage. Such at least is the usual picture, but of course there are native speakers of substandard varieties and regional dialects as well, and this last point introduces an element of fuzziness: can an original dialect speaker be accepted as a native speaker of the standard? Another cause of fuzziness is that linguists are becoming increasingly aware nowadays that native speakers sometimes differ considerably in their judgment of what is acceptable usage. Standard languages have been found to be less monolithic than they were traditionally assumed to be.
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