Language Sciences 32 (2010) 589–593

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Language Sciences

journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate / langsci

The native speaker and the mother tongue

Nigel Love a,⇑, Umberto Ansaldo b

a Department of Linguistics, University of Cape Town, 7701 Rondebosch, South Africab Department of Linguistics, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong

a r t i c l e i n f o

Keywords:Language and identity

MonolingualismMother tongueMultilingualismNative speakerOwnership of languages

0388-0001/$ - see front matter � 2010 Published bdoi:10.1016/j.langsci.2010.09.003

⇑ Corresponding author.E-mail address: Nigel.love@uct.ac.za (N. Love).

1 This suggestion is made by Davies (2003, p. ix).2 For recent discussion, see e.g. Paikeday, 1985; Ra

a b s t r a c t

This article presents a historical account of the role and function in linguistic theorising ofthe concepts ‘‘native speaker” and ‘‘mother tongue”, and serves to introduce a number ofarticles (Language Sciences vol. 32 no. 6) raising questions about various aspects of theidealised monolingualism that underlies much modern linguistics.

� 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

If you were born and brought up from birth to speak a given language, for preference in a family where the parents orother adults had the same experience with the same language, then you are a native speaker of that language, which is yourmother tongue.

The term ‘native speaker’, and this simple account of what a native speaker is, seem to have been introduced into modernlinguistics by Bloomfield (1935 [1933], p. 43).1 Since Bloomfield’s time, whether all or even most linguistic communities, con-temporary or historical, are structured in such a way as to leave room for the concepts ‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’ toplay a useful role; indeed, whether there is any such thing as a native speaker or a mother tongue, in this or any other proposedsenses of these terms, have been hotly debated questions.2

A number of the articles in this issue of Language Sciences are contributions to the debate. Rajend Mesthrie questions‘‘whether the traditional concept of the native speaker of English has any relevance in the globalized world”, and contendsthat ‘‘‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’ are no longer transparent terms in the sociology of English”. Chaise LaDousa ob-serves that students of language variation in India have been especially alive to the bewildering range of meanings and usesof the notion ‘‘mother tongue”, and quotes Pattanayak (1981, pp. 47–48) on the changing meaning of ‘‘mother tongue” inquestions asked in successive Indian government censuses, where it went from being defined as ‘‘the language spoken bythe individual from the cradle”, to ‘‘parent tongue” to ‘‘language ordinarily spoken in the household” to ‘‘language ordinarilyused”. This strongly suggests that ‘‘mother tongue” was not a term well adapted for use in the Indian language situation inthe first place. Umberto Ansaldo offers reasons for thinking that ‘‘we might want to start considering notions such as nativespeaker, mother tongue as well as ‘normal’ transmission as peculiar products of monolingual acquisition under normativepressure typical of the modern era”, and maintains that these ‘‘are rather exotic communicative ecologies in the historyof human language evolution, and the lessons derived from their study, albeit significant, could well end up being potentiallyexceptional, maybe even peripheral to the construction of general theories of language”.

That may be putting it mildly. For the fact is that this exotic communicative ecology was only ever a normative ideal evenin those societies that tacitly upheld or uphold it (see Love, 2009). Singh (this issue) quotes Chomsky (2000, p. 43), as admit-

y Elsevier Ltd.

mpton, 1990; Cook, 1999; Ricento, 2000; Davies, 2003.

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ting that, in the real world, monolingualism (i.e. the consistent and exclusive use of one determinate linguistic system) is‘‘almost unimaginable” – presumably even in those nation states of post-Renaissance western Europe that have done theirbest to impose it. Nonetheless, the monolingual native speaker of a mother tongue has played a key role in the linguistictheories that have flourished in such societies. As Davies (2003) quotes C. A. Ferguson as putting it: ‘‘Linguists have long gi-ven a special place to the native speaker as the only true and reliable source of language data”.

Why should that be?The first question is what is meant here by ‘‘language data”. Language data are utterances taken as instantiating abstract

linguistic units belonging to an identifiable language (variety, lect) that have been put together according to that language’srules for grammatical (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic) well-formedness. So is an in-stance of the Standard English (Standard British English, Standard Southern British English. . .) sentence the cat sat on themat and conforms to the grammatical rules of that language. , although there may well be (deemed tobe) a language to which the underlying sentence belongs, does not exemplify a sentence of the language in question and thusis not a datum relevant to establishing its grammatical rules. While is not referable to any recognisedlanguage at all. Note that what is or is not ‘‘true or reliable” language data has nothing to do with actual or potential com-municative efficacy.

Is this not just a laborious, fancy way of stating what could readily be inferred from any traditional grammar of Englishand a dictionary? What is wrong with *the cat sit on the mat is that it has what is presumably to be taken as a 3 sg form of theverb sit that is not sanctioned by the grammar book, while *le cat s’est assis sur le mat contains words absent from any Englishdictionary.

Yes, it is. That this should be so is a matter of the history and politics of linguistics as an academic discipline.3 Westernlinguistics is heir to a two-millennia-old tradition of grammatical study. It inherited the whole complex panoply of grammaticalconcepts and categories that had been developed in that tradition. For Saussure (1922 [1916], p. 153) it was a matter of com-plaint that ‘‘la linguistique travaille sans cesse sur des concepts forgés par les grammairiens”. Chomsky, in contrast, considers(1965, pp. 63–64) ‘‘what a traditional grammar has to say about a simple English sentence”, and finds it ‘‘without question, sub-stantially correct and . . . essential to any account of how the language is used or acquired”. Either way, whatever synchronicdescriptive linguistics was to take as its subject matter, or however it was to differ from traditional grammatical inquiry, itwas committed to using the descriptive and analytic tools inherited from the grammatical tradition. Because they were the onlytools linguists had, and if they were simply abandoned at the outset it was hard to see how synchronic descriptive linguisticscould proceed.

At the same time, modern linguistics aspired to be a science (Love 2009). But the grammarian’s descriptive frameworkwas devised for purposes that had nothing to do with science. They mostly had to do with pedagogy. If you want to learnto write Latin like Cicero, or as a Dutchman to read Swahili, then you need an analytic handle on how Cicero or the Swahiliwriter would or would not express himself. Providing that handle is the chief function of traditional grammar. But learning alanguage in this way is essentially a cultural accomplishment, and does not on the face of it open the way to any sort of sci-entific inquiry.

If language is to be the subject matter of a science, a naturalistic perspective is called for. What is the objectively givenphenomenon, where language is concerned? What are we confronted with, pretheoretically, as part of the world’s furniture,that we can set about investigating scientifically? Human verbal behaviour, which is ultimately to be explained in terms ofhuman biological attributes and endowments and human social and cultural structures. But elaborating grammars of lan-guages does not in and of itself have any necessary or straightforward connection with anything anyone does. For one thing,there cannot be grammars before the advent of writing,4 and yet human beings had language long before the advent of writing.The problem, therefore, was to find a way of making grammatical analysis part of a naturalistic account of verbal behaviour.

One important move was to attempt to draw a clear distinction between description and prescription in grammaticalstudy. But this distinction has always been problematic: a linguistic prescription is not necessarily something other thana description, but may merely be something one does or refrains from doing with a description; while on the other handto describe a language or any part of a language demands the imposition of limits on what falls within its scope, whichmay be seen as an implicitly prescriptive procedure. As C.E. Bazell pointed out, ‘‘[d]escribing a language, like mapping a coun-try, is an affair of cutting and smoothing” (Bazell 1953, p. 93), and what is smoothed away is by implication downgraded,marginalised, or simply rejected.

The insistence on description rather than prescription was reinforced by ‘‘internalising” languages and the grammars oflanguages; that is, locating them in speakers’ heads. This was first proposed by Saussure (1922 [1916]), and the proposalconstitutes Saussure’s main claim to be the founding father of modern linguistics. Saussure took languages to be systemsof cognitive structures, actualised in the form of associations between acoustic images and concepts inside the heads of indi-vidual members of the language community. In fact Saussure’s langue is both a cognitive system in the individual and a socialinstitution in the community. Specifically, the foundation for this lies in the Saussurean doctrine of the linguistic sign, whichexplains the sense in which the rules constraining the language-user come from within the language itself, and not fromsome external source, such as a grammarian. The linguistic sign, according to Saussure, unites a signifier and a signified.

3 On this topic see especially Harris (1981, ch. 3).4 Whether there is any good reason to suppose that there might be mentally represented grammars independent of writing is a question that will not be

pursued here.

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But neither signifier nor signified are independently given. The one doesn’t exist without the other. Not only that, but neitherthe signifier, the signified nor the association between them exist except in the context of the particular system of such asso-ciations that constitutes the language. They are created by the language, not external to it.

Saussure thus elevated a feature of everyday thinking about languages to the status of a theoretical postulate. We have aperfectly good and harmless use for expressions like ‘‘We know our native language”, as contrasted, for instance, with otherlanguages that we know only imperfectly or don’t know at all. Of course, like much everyday talk ‘‘We know our native lan-guage” is extremely vague and not to be taken too seriously, in the sense that most people would find it hard to say exactlywhat propositions about languages and their relationships with speakers they thought such a statement committed them to.What Saussure did, in effect, was to show how you can take a particular interpretation of ‘‘we know our native language” andmake it the cornerstone of a theory relating languages to speakers that would allow linguists to continue, as they had donefor millennia, to carry on talking about grammar, while claiming to contribute to a scientific study of linguistic psychology.

Although Saussure does not seem to have used (the French equivalent of) the term, the native speaker, so far as modernlinguistic theory is concerned, starts life as the figment of Saussurean and post-Saussurean structuralism in whose head theinternalised grammar is to be found. Specifically, he (or she) has come to be seen as the sole authoritative source of infor-mation about the language and its grammar.

The main reason the native speaker is an authority is that he has naturalistically acquired (not learnt) the language bymere exposure to and interaction with other native speakers. This doesn’t mean that he is overtly acquainted with the con-cepts of grammatical theory, or able to tell you that such and such is ungrammatical because the noun needs to be in thedative, or because his is not a pro-drop language. What it means is that he has access to the ‘intuitions’ that lead him toaccept or reject sentences of his language as grammatical or ungrammatical and thereby provide the linguist with his database. A native English-speaker probably won’t be able to say that English is a head-last language, but he will be able to saythat *I have a dog big black is unacceptable as an English sentence. Of course, a competent non-native speaker of Englishmay be able to report with equal accuracy that *I have a dog big black is unacceptable, but that is irrelevant because thefact that English doesn’t work that way is likely to have been explicitly taught (‘‘In English adjectives come before theirnouns”) to the non-native. If so, you know this as a fact about something external to yourself. It is on a par with knowingthat Canberra is the capital of Australia. But the native speaker knows it without knowing that he knows it, by havingunconsciously projected the rule from his linguistic experience. In his case the rule is a hypothesis that seeks to explainsomething about his verbal behaviour: the fact that he puts adjectives before their nouns and recognises deviations fromthat as unacceptable.

Here is yet another idealisation. It is a moot point whether there are any human cultures in the real world in which smallchildren are not to some extent, and from a very early age, overtly taught their language, and if that is so the distinctionbetween acquiring a first language and learning a second one becomes blurred (cf. Singh’s comment on ‘‘the somewhat dubi-ous argument that so called Universal Grammar or UG is not available to second-language learners”). At any rate, the idealsubject for naturalistic inquiry would be a first-language speaker who had acquired his language without hearing or engag-ing in any analytic metalinguistic talk about it at all. But we see the ideal realised only in the case of apes, such as Kanzi, thefamous bonobo who is said to have an ability in English equivalent to that of a 2.5 year old child. (See Savage-Rumbaughet al., 1998.) But Kanzi, presumably, knows nothing about those abilities and cannot talk about them. In other words,although non-human apes can be taught language to some extent, it seems likely that they are incapable of engaging inthe kind of reflection on what they do linguistically that would allow them systematically to decontextualise linguistic signsand having done so, treat them as objects of contemplation and inquiry, thereby embarking on the process of constructingwhat human apes know as languages. So there is an irony here. The ideal, metalinguistically uncontaminated native speakerwouldn’t be a speaker of a language at all, because metalinguistic contamination is the essential process by which languagegives rise to languages.

Another reason that native speakers are taken as authoritative is that a language is often seen as fundamentally ‘belong-ing to’ them, and some socially high-status subset of native speakers have the privilege of determining what the language‘really’ is or should be – what the permissible words and constructions are, how they should properly be pronounced andspelt, etc. So the native speaker’s pre-eminent role in linguistic theory emerges as an amalgam of the requirement of ‘natural’acquisition and the idea that native speakers own and control their mother tongue.

In this collection Christopher Hutton discusses language ownership with particular reference to legal property rights, ask-ing whether there are juridical principles in terms of which one might obtain a legal right that would constrain non-nativespeakers from learning and speaking a language. Hutton distinguishes a liberal-individualist view of language ownership,according to which ‘‘language is the non-private property of non-individuals, not the collective property of a defined group”from the ‘‘the mother tongue–native speaker tradition”, in which ‘‘a language is the collective property of its native speakers,understood collectively as a Volk or ethnos (‘people’). The Volk is defined as a historically continuous descent group, whichowns a distinct language and has a defined territory. Its language and culture are part of its collective property. Rather thanan open, unstructured space, the language is a highly structured systematic object. It is stamped with the mark of its creatorand owner, the community of native speakers”.

The idea that the native speaker functions to save for naturalistic science the analytic study of grammatical structure isborne out by Rajendra Singh’s contribution. Singh is exercised by the need to maintain a focus on ‘‘linguistic form and archi-tecture” in the face of multilingualism as the ‘‘unmarked case”. As he puts it, this requires ‘‘dispensing with the idea that a

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theory of linguistic form is a theory of the internalised linguistic knowledge of a native speaker in a completely homogenousspeech community”.

But what else might it be? The challenge, says Singh, is to find a theory of linguistic form that embraces the reality ofmultilingualism. For example, vowel epenthesis ‘‘appears everywhere when a language has to deal with unacceptable con-sonantal clusters . . . The appearance of the epenthetic vowel to adapt loan words or to break up unpronounceable consonan-tal clusters shows that epenthesis is not a rule of Punjabi, Hindi, English, or Vulgar Latin but that it is available to all humans.To talk about it as a rule of this or that language is to impose a monolingual view on the multilingual potential of humanspeakers.” As for morphology, ‘‘the morphological system of a speaker who knows a few thousand words of Hindi, Punjabi,and English may in parts look like the morphological systems used in monolingual Hindi, Punjabi, and English communities,but it is her morphological system, presumably shared with other speakers, and it is built with the same bricks as any othermorphological system and, of course, has the same architecture, albeit a minimal one, as any other morphological system.There is no need here to fix her morphological competence in one of these three languages and to talk about her having bor-rowed this or that bit of morphology from the other two languages”.

The question here is whether Singh envisages that the formal architecture will differ depending on the degree or kind ofmultilingualism in different cases, and on the particular languages involved. If so, the demise of the monolingual nativespeaker brings in its train the demise of the idea of a language as a definite cognitive structure owned (‘cognised’) by anyoneat all, even an idealised anyone.

Alternatively, Singh’s challenge is simply a version of the quest for linguistic universals. In which case he may be intriguedby Jan Wawrzyniak’s paper in this collection, a thorough discussion of Anna Wierzbicka’s claim to have identified a universalmother tongue, or at least a set of universal meanings attached to a variety of different forms. According to Wawrzyniak,Wierzbicka’s position is that ‘‘all healthy human beings are from conception equipped with one language, identical withineach individual”. The universal mother tongue is manifest in what Wierzbicka calls ‘‘natural semantic metalanguages”,which are subparts of full (tacitly known) natural languages. Thus an NSM contains linguistic signs the forms of whichare different from the forms of linguistic signs of other NSMs, but the meanings are identical across all the NSMs, therebybeing identical across all languages.

Singh’s worry is that a focus on multilingualism will lead to a shift of linguists’ attention from language structure to issuesin the sociology and psychology of language use. And, indeed, three papers in this collection address the concept of a speak-er’s ‘identity’.

Ansaldo argues that ‘‘the evolution of Sri Lanka Malay . . . can be explained as a process of interacting and of negotiatinglinguistic identities in a new environment, as can be seen in the restructured vernacular in which substantial features of Lan-kan grammar combine with a predominantly Malay-derived lexicon”. The linguistic identity of Sri Lankan Malays is definedby multilingualism: their identity is shaped by the plurality of linguistic codes to which they have access.

The outcome of identity realignment in this situation is the creation of a new language by recombination of selectedexisting features of languages into a new grammar. Thus a new linguistic code is created that captures the new culturalprofile that emerges through identity alignment. So ‘‘language creation is the result of a hybridization process within whichidentity alignment in a community is fundamental. Identity alignment involves innovative construction of a new grammarbased on multilingual resources”. ‘‘Identity alignment . . . suggests that language creation is not the result of some excep-tional situation in which speakers were denied the social, cultural or cognitive settings necessary for a ‘normal’ acquisitionof a target; rather, it is a creative process in which speakers have agency in the transmission and transfer of linguisticfeatures”.

On the other hand, Pablé et al. claim that ‘identity’ is not amenable to scientific description, as sign-making and sign-interpreting are ‘private’ and cannot be detached from how an individual integrates the actual situation with his or herown personal experience, and that it doesn’t follow from the fact that we have a word identity in our language that it mustbe possible to detect and to conceptually isolate such identities. ‘‘When one uses the word ‘identity’ one is not referring to aset of fixed meanings proposed by dictionaries, but rather one integrates (in often unpredictable ways) previous personalexperiences with that word, as required by the present situation”. ‘‘It is precisely because of the impossibility of assigningidentity fixed definitive boundaries that identity cannot be accounted for scientifically.” And Alex Kravchenko’s paper mightbe seen as endorsing from personal experience the point that where ‘identity’ is concerned there may be precious few validgeneralisations to be had.

The native speaker rose to his privileged position in modern linguistics in response to a scientisation of the Westerngrammatical tradition whereby languages, once no more than a distillation of the linguistic practices of a literary elite, werereconceptualised as cognitive structures existing inside the head of an idealised monolingual speaker. This scientisation hasalways been problematic in many ways, some of them illustrated in the papers in this collection. But the fundamental prob-lem is the primary focus on languages themselves. Languages are not natural objects, and they do not become natural objectsby theoretical fiat. There has never been agreement as to what a language is or even how we might set about deciding what alanguage is. What counts as a language is a matter of cultural and political context and purposes, and these can vary withoutlimit. As every undergraduate introduction to linguistics points out, there is no justification for distinguishing, say, Swedishand Danish as separate languages while treating Mandarin and Cantonese as variants of the same language. There is no con-sensus as to where one language ends and another begins, either in time or in space or in terms of social differentiation. Wetolerate competing discourses in terms of one of which Latin and Spanish are two different languages but in terms of another,chronologically separated versions of one language. A language, in short, is a second-order cultural construct, and as such it

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can be constructed in as many different ways as the constructors – including linguists – please. Languages, whether ‘‘exter-nal” or theoretically projected as ‘‘internal”, are products of verbal behaviour, not prerequisites for it; and perhaps the mainservice to linguistics performed by this collection is its highlighting of the need to find an alternative to J.R. Firth’s program-matic statement (Firth, 1968 [1957]) that ‘‘the business of linguistics is to describe languages”.

Acknowledgements

The articles in this special issue of Language Sciences arose out a conference on this topic held in Cape Town, December11–13, 2008 (www.cariad.co.za/conference). The organisers are grateful to the University of Cape Town for financialassistance.

References

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