Native Speakers and World English
Any science needs to ensure that the concepts with which it operates and the terms that are used to express those concepts are clear and precise. From time to time, as a science progresses, a spring-cleaning of its conceptual equipment and terminology may become necessary. So also in linguistics, and one term that is overdue for compulsory retirement is native as used in phrases like native language and native speaker .
Used in this way native must surely be one of the most misleading and confusing terms ever employed in technical or semi-technical argumentation. Two other terms, partly synonymous with it, run it a close second or third: mother tongue and first language. A persons mother tongue is not necessarily his mothers tongue; nor is not necessarily his first language always that which he learnt first, because first can mean first in importance as well as first in time and, alas, the two meanings are sometimes run together as if they were one and the same. All three terms, moreover, are surrounded by an aura of mystique and are heavily loaded with emotional connotations inimical to sober scientific investigation. However, in writings by linguists the most commonly used phrase is native language . The nativeness of native
The phrase has a long history. It arose in medieval times, when scholars writing in Latin would sometimes use expressions like natal idiom and lingua native. In fairness it should be pointed out that those terms made better sense in earlier times, because for centuries it was commonly believed or suspected that language was in some way biologically inherited. We know now that no human baby is born with an innate knowledge of any particular language; all normal babies learn the language of the environment. Yet the traditional use of native language continues and appears at times to convey a latent element of the earlier meaning, implying that we come into this world not in utter nakedness but trailing, each of us, the rudiments of some specific language. Many laymen and indeed some linguists distinguish between a native language and an acquired one as if they were not, both of them, post-natal acquisitions learnt from the environment.
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