New Englishes and the native speaker debate
Research highlights
► Structural criteria as evidence for ‘nativeness’ are not totally adequate. ► Language shift provides a better window into the flexible limits of nativeness. ► Elite bilingualism also shows the problematic nature of defining the native speaker as a monolingual person. ► An elite variety of Indian English is perhaps the first “New English” to enter the circle of Standard Englishes of the world, whilst emerging from a fully multilingual context.
Section snippets
Introduction and history
The field of New Englishes or World Englishes is concerned with varieties that arose as second or foreign languages as English spread as a world language. This spread was initiated in the first instance under British expansionism from the 17th century on, with the setting up of plantations in the American South and the Caribbean, worked largely by African slaves, but also by indentured workers of Irish descent (Rickford, 1986). The main linguistic outcome of this era was the demise of local
Singh’s critique of the concept of native speaker
The critique of the concept of the native speaker is not new: the line of enquirers and dissenters include Paikeday, 1985, Davies, 1991, Singh, 1998, etc. The collection in Singh (1998) includes voices for and against the idea that a speaker’s native language is ‘the dialect acquired from the crib … [a]cquired incidentally, stored implicitly, and available for automatic use’ (Paradis, 1998, p. 207). Singh’s position, which is a particularly trenchant one, was restated at a recent conference
The quest for structural criteria
In this Section 1 will raise issues that connect with Singh’s strong claims that ‘there is no feature α such that α occurs in every alleged native variety and in no alleged non-native variety’ and that conversely ‘there is no feature β such that β occurs in every alleged non-native variety and in no alleged native variety’ (let us call these Singh’s formulations, which I am rephrasing slightly here). Singh’s formulations are probably too rigid for human languages, with their essence being in
Evidence from language shift and elite bilingualism
In my original response to Singh’s paper (Mesthrie, 2007) I raised the question whether the manner of introduction of English in the colonies could have influenced its characteristics there. A relevant notion of language here is that of an aggregate of acoustic speech signals, whose defining feature is being continuous (or indiscrete). Everyone, by virtue of being human and interacting in a human community, has the ability to process at least one language holistically, i.e. without segmenting
Conclusion
‘Native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’ are no longer transparent terms in the sociology of English. Sociolinguists have long known that it is not the mother (or father) whose norms count in language transmission, but the norms of their child’s peer group (especially the norms of those a year or two older). Where a child sounds like her mum (or dad) it is by a co-incidence of the neighbourhood norms with those of the parents. The criterial case is of course when the parents are immigrants to the
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