Scholars have repeatedly pointed out that certain speakers experience marginality in their ‘perpetual falling short of the imagined ideal of “perfect” homogeneous English’ (Piller Reference Piller2016: 203) and that among multilinguals the search for native-like fluency keeps being elusive (Romaine Reference Romaine, Darquennes, Salmons and Vandenbussche2019: 267). As a matter of fact, the concept of native speaker has been so widely contested in applied linguistics that bringing up the issues around it has become an easy social gel among researchers. Yet there is still a lot to say about this contentious term particularly when considering that not only many societies but also a number of linguistic subfields are partly blind to these issues. This edited volume puts together studies that collectively question the usefulness of the concept of native speaker for the understanding of the complexity of our multilingual world and warn against its potential domineering force. It also offers a variety of perspectives that depict the notion as changing, some of which are in fact not questioning it entirely. The book, therefore, while aiming at debunking nativist approaches to multilingual repertoires, is an agora where many voices can be heard, thereby giving a broader and more detailed treatment of the dangers of nativespeakerism and its correlates. Reading this volume can raise awareness of these dangers also (and perhaps especially) when studying English speakers, in light of the pervasiveness of the English language around the globe as well as the power asymmetries connected to its use.
The volume is divided into three parts. Part I is dedicated to conceptual discussions and starts immediately with a chapter that does not sugar-coat its critical stance: ‘Why the mythical “native speaker” has mud on its face’, by Jean-Marc Dewaele, Thomas H. Bak and Lourdes Ortega (pp. 25–45). It even defines native and non-native speakers as outright toxic terms that should be discarded in favour of L1 and LX users, deemed as more neutral alternatives. It illustrates the historical trajectory of the term native speaker, highlighting various problems including those related to epistemological tensions. In the second chapter, ‘The multilingual and multicompetent native speaker’ (pp. 47–70), Ulrike Jessner, Barbara Hofer and Emese Malzer-Papp continue this conceptual exploration taking issue with the use of the ideal monolingual native speaker as a benchmark for every other type of language user. The authors provide more references that criticise the notion of native speaker from different perspectives, e.g. political, social, linguistic etc. They also propose a dynamic model of multilingualism that stresses the emergence of the speakers’ abilities that stem from a holistic approach to multilingual language acquisition, management, maintenance and, more generally, use. The problem is not so much nativeness but the ideological burden that comes with it. The section concludes with Joan Pujolar's introduction of the category of ‘new speaker’, a type of speaker who acquires a minority language in a structured setting rather than the home (‘New speakers: New linguistic subjects’, pp. 71–100). These speakers are appropriately made relevant in this volume in that their lived experience with languages challenges ideas of authenticity, belonging and accentedness that are intertwined with the notion of native speaker. The chapter also raises questions in relation to the crossing of linguistic boundaries in light of the relevance of linguistic identities in interaction.
Part II focuses on practices and representations. The first contribution, ‘Is there a native speaker in the class? A didactic view of a problematic notion’, by Jean-François de Pietro (pp. 103–32), provides examples from French-speaking Switzerland to illustrate how the notion of native speaker is not always pertinent for the understanding of multilingual interaction but at times keeps its relevance for speakers. It calls for greater attention to the speakers’ representations before doing away with the notion of native speaker or that of language altogether. In the following chapter, we move to Greece among descendants of refugees from Asia Minor, of whom some were monolingual Turkish speakers before moving to Greece: ‘On the paradox of being native speakers of two “competing” languages: Turkish as the mother or the father tongue of Greek nationals’ (pp. 133–53). This fascinating study by Maria Zerva shows that speakers may alternatively use expressions such as mother tongue and father tongue with reference to Turkish, while undermining their positive acceptations, or do not describe Turkish as their mother tongue at all, or even couch their variety of Turkish as a form of resistance. Next, in ‘What kind of speakers are these? Placing heritage speakers of Russian on a continuum’ (pp. 155–78), Olga Kagan, Miriam Minkov, Ekaterina Protassova and Mila Schwartz look at speakers of Russian who come from families that migrated to the US, Israel, Germany and Finland. Looking at teenagers who speak Russian, the authors stress that, while these speakers do not align with so-called standard varieties, they can be classified as heritage speakers of Russian and thus claim the language as theirs. The term heritage language is indeed widespread, particularly among researchers in North America, while other terms are also in use there and elsewhere (Ortega Reference Ortega2020). The section continues with Sofia Stratilaki-Klein's piece, ‘The out-of-sight of “native speaker”: A critical journey through models of social representations of plurilingual identities’ (pp. 179–208), which deals with processes of inclusion or exclusion of multilingual children in the French school system, arguing that their specific experiences of migration need to be taken into account. In this sense, devaluing home languages on the part of the school system could come together with the striving towards a monolingual model of perfection which pupils might take up. On the contrary, valuing plurilingual and pluricultural competences would be beneficial in many ways. In the final chapter of this section, ‘Practice-proof concepts? Rethinking linguistic borders and families in multilingual communication: Exploiting the relationship between intercomprehension and translanguaging’ by Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer (pp. 209–30), we see three online chats where participants are each asked to write in a Romance language, even when such a language is not shared. The excerpts show that intercomprehension among Romance languages is not to be taken for granted and that language users do not follow the rigid instructions of using their own language or a mix of them when interacting with others. They also seem to challenge the defenestration of some concepts such as named languages, language families and language borders, which some applied linguists are indeed trying to question.
Part III is dedicated to policies and controversies and starts with Mariana Bono's work, ‘Provenance and possession: Rethinking the mother tongue’ (pp. 233–52), based on accounts of languaging experiences among first-year students in a US university, which in parts reads almost like a manifesto. It begins from the assumption that the notion of native speaker stems from a flawed monolingual paradigm. It then finds specifications of this among students who were introduced to the concept of mother tongue and its complications. The following chapter, ‘The pluricentricity and ownership of English’, by Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu (pp. 253–83), centres around English and its pluricentricity. It is a piece that helps to clarify why the dichotomy native versus non-native does not work well in postcolonial contexts, while assessing theoretical models including the three circles of English paradigm. The concept of ownership of English has a tradition in trying to overcome both the problems of dividing speakers into native and non-native categories and of ascribing them to inner or outer circles (Higgins Reference Higgins2003). In the third work of the section, entitled ‘“I want to be bilingual!” Contested imaginings of bilingualism in New Brunswick, Canada’, by Wendy D. Bokhorst-Heng and Kelle L. Marshall (pp. 285–314), we are introduced to experiences with education policies in a Canadian state, which take the form of rallies organised by Anglophones against the erasure of early French immersion. The chapter's link to the overall theme of the book could have been spelt out more clearly, but it does a good job in speaking to studies that explore the interlockings between education policies and language ideologies in Canada. In the final chapter, ‘Questioning the questions: Institutional and individual perspectives on children's language repertoires’ (pp. 315–45), Nadja Kerschhofer-Puhalo and Nikolay Slavkov attempt to bring together two different contexts by contrasting profiling practices at an institutional level in Canada with multilingualism as a lived experience in Austria. The key finding is that a bottom-up approach to language repertoires is at odds with the conceptualisation of native speaker implied in some top-down data collection at an institutional level. Children themselves find it hard to categorise only one language as their main or native language: their repertoires and practices are complex and changeable and do not appear to be reducible to clear-cut categories.
All in all, the volume stands as a call to meditate on the risk of using the notion of native speaker in a naïve or reductionist way. It does so by providing more insights from different parts of the world where languages coexist and interact, thus offering additional data and viewpoints on this long-standing issue that many applied linguists have been tackling with vehemence. In this sense the presence of the authors’ positionalities is a welcome addition in that it underlines the importance of considering the perspective from where authors speak (Canagarajah Reference Canagarajah2005). The themes brought up in this volume are of particular relevance for scholars focusing on English, a language whose non-native speakers have been shown to be associated with pejorative terms (Lindemann & Moran Reference Lindemann and Moran2017). As the Afterword (pp. 347–52) written by Jim Cummins suggests, the key concern here is to move away from terminological practices that bring with them unfair language-based power relations. If it is true that ‘we are all implicated on a regular basis in the hierarchical structuring of relationships and opportunities that are mediated by our language use and performance’ (p. 347), then we need to be careful when we handle commonly used notions, and think things through before deciding to retain, abandon or modify them, or even use inverted commas to encase them.
