The native speaker: a border marker of the standard, the nation, and variation

ABSTRACT

The study compares the uses of the native-speaker concept as a legitimizing resource in language-standard ideologies and normative discourse in five languages of European origin. Much research and international discussion has focused on the native speaker of English, a symbolically international language. We aim to show how the native-speaker concept may function differently in national-standard ideologies. The study entails a concise comparison of five European standardization ideologies, a closer look at three such ideologies, and a case study of the native speakers’ function in the normative discourse on a syntactic construction of a national language, namely Swedish. Much language planning and standardizing relies on academic linguistics for legitimacy, and native speakers’ judgments are an irrefutable data source in theoretical linguistics. However, the concept of the native speaker as a judge of linguistic material is recontextualized in normative discourse. Drawing on analyses of national-standard ideologies and standardizing discourse, results indicate that the native speaker may have different repercussions depending on the heterogeneity of the speech community and the standard ideology. We argue that the native speaker may function as a border marker of the standard language, but in national languages also of what is considered intralingual variation, and thus in symbolic terms the nation.

KEYWORDS:

• Native speaker
• non-native speaker
• standard-language ideology
• national language
• syntactic purism
• normative discourse

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Professor Olle Josephson for invaluable guidance and comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. We also wish to thank the seminar at the Nord-Europa Institut at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the seminar at the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University, as well as two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 indispensable for correct German.

2 straight and reversed being the terms used to describe word-order phenomena caused by Germanic V2, straight referring to SVO, reversed to the subject’s placement after the verb, when another clause element occupies the first position XVS.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the Language Council of Sweden, part of Isof (the Institute for Language and Folklore).

Notes on contributors

Maria Bylin

Maria Bylin is a researcher at the Language Council of Sweden. Her publications concern syntax and standardization.

Sofia Tingsell

Sofia Tingsell is a researcher at the Language Council of Sweden. Her previous work focuses multilingualism and grammar.