Native Speaker Dead

THOMAS M.
PAIKEDAY
THE NATIVE SPEAKER IS DEAD!

An informal discussion of a linguistic myth with Noam Chomsky and other linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and lexicographers
LEXICOGRAPHY, INC. (formerly Paikeday Publishing Inc.) Toronto & New York
T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 3
Published by Lexicography, Inc. (formerly Paikeday Publishing Inc.) Lexicographers of The New York Times Everyday Dictionary The Penguin Canadian Dictionary, & The Users Webster Dictionary Copyright 2003 by Lexicography, Inc. 83 Sunny Meadow Blvd., Brampton, Ont. L6R 2Z3
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Paikeday, Thomas M. The native speaker is dead! Bibliography: p. ISBN 0-920865-00-3 (pbk). 1. Native language. 2. Linguistics -Philosophy. I. Title. P125.P34 1985 401 C85-090158-8
Manufactured in Canada 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
CONTENTS
6 Preface 12 Acknowledgements 14 The Subject of the enquiry: Is the Native Speaker a Myth Propagated by Linguists? 15 Native Speaker dead or alive? 17 Native speaker as a legal fiction 20 What Quirk & Quine think 23 The two senses of native speaker 27 Chomsky on grammaticalness & grammaticality 33 Is a native speaker born or made? 38 How a linguist diagnosed Indian English 42 Aristocracys squeezed and bleating sound 45 Anyone met a native dishwasher? 49 How George Kurien lost his mother tongue 52 Explain away native-speaker errors 57 Labov, Dorian & semi-speakers 62 Enter Chomsky 64 Following Chomskys red herring without losing the scent 71 The native speaker as a terminal case 76 Hallidays comment 81 I couldnt make love in English. 86 An excursion with Eleanor Rosch 88 A linguistic apartheid 93 Chomskys reply 96 As Pilate said, What is truth? 100 Noam Chomsky recant? 102 Wanted: a Copernican revolution 104 106 108 111 112 Appendix 1. Song of the Native Speaker Appendix 2. Anyone Met a Native Speaker? References About Noam Chomsky About the Author
PREFACE PREFACE
For the benefit of the police who may be wondering, the subtitle of the book notwithstanding, whether I have been up to some criminal activity against the native peoples of this continent, as when the Beothuks of Newfoundland were exterminated in the last century, let me explain that we are a mostly academic group of men and women trying to thrash out a basic concept of linguistics, the so-called native speaker as the arbiter of grammaticality and acceptability of language. I am indebted to Prof. Noam Chomsky for coming out as the protagonist of the action and graciously agreeing to be quoted. I am also grateful to the other authorities in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and lexicography who have taken part in the discussion and lent their names to it. I must clarify at this point that I started the ball rolling with a memo entitled Anyone met a native speaker? (Appendix 2) by which I only meant to study a question that had bothered me for nearly twenty-five years. The most I had in mind was writing something for one of those learned societies from whom I receive a call for papers every now and then. But the responses I received to my memo were so varied and occasionally also a bit woolly that I had a hard time finding my way through them. It was like a free-for-all of ideas and opinions on a subject which I thought almost everyone had taken for granted, like the belief, to borrow an analogy from Prof. Paul Christophersen, that the sun goes round the earth! The first thing to do, it seemed to me, was to give the subject a good airing. For this purpose, I orchestrated the responses to my memo in Socratic style placing myself in the role of an inquirer or interlocutor asking questions and encouraging my respondents to talk. When the resulting arrangement was distributed to the original round table for further comments, everyone seemed to like what I was doing, quite a few even suggesting that I have the whole thing
published. Thus, this inquiry may be said to be a work of my own art in regard to its format. We should not forget, however, that its content is unexpurgated truth uttered in a very natural and uninhibited fashion, with hardly an expletive deleted. (Care has also been taken to preserve the spelling, punctuation, etc. of quoted matter in accordance with standard scholarly practice.) Although none of the more than forty scholars involved have had anything but praise for the format of this discussion, Prof. Chomsky and others have requested me to make it clear that what they have written was not meant for publication as is. If they had been writing for publication, their scholarship would of course have manifested itself differently. Personally, I find much of modern linguistics, as seen in journals like Language, somewhat impenetrable and, when you begin to understand it, of mainly theoretical and academic significance. But there is a peculiar ring of truth about spontaneous and unrehearsed utterances made person-to-person, as when someone is talking to you during a coffee break between sessions of the learned societies or putting down some thoughts in a private letter. There is also a certain informality of style that goes easy on jargon and other impediments to understanding. I waited over seven months after inviting the participants to make whatever changes in the script they wished, transpose their comments if they thought the context in which they were quoted was not appropriate, make further comments or a recantation if anyone thought fit to do so, or simply send me their imprimaturs. Everyone took it in stride except one aging scholar who simply picked up his marbles (some 200 words of obiter dicta) and left without a word of explanation. I was left with an interdict in my hand and hiatuses in my Socratic dialogue. This made me wonder what some of the others from whom I was waiting to hear were thinking.
Since the subject of my inquiry is a rather delicate matter and a cardinal tenet of our linguistic faith, I thought I should adjourn for a while and study the question of quotability of correspondence, at least for my own peace of mind, before proceeding further with the publication. I therefore submitted it to a jury of twelve good men and true who have been presidents of some of the learned societies that most of us have been members of (the Linguistic Society of America, the American Dialect Society, etc.) or had held positions of responsibility in scholarly publishing and who were not involved in the discussion. Their responses reassured me that not only does scholarly practice allow one to quote from correspondence but that asking for permission is mostly courtesy. Here are the questions I asked and a sampling of the answers received. QUESTION 1: If a fellow member of one of the learned societies writes and asks what you meant by a particular term (i.e. native speaker) which you used in a published piece of writing, is your explanation normally supposed to be privileged and therefore not for publication? Professors Winfred P. Lehmann and A. Murray Kinloch responded with an unqualified No. I will quote two explanatory answers. Prof. Archibald A. Hill: A letter, whether to a fellow member of a learned society, or to someone unknown, is not privileged .... A letter that contained confidential information, stated to be confidential by the author, would be privileged. Prof. Charles F. Hockett: I would expect to be asked by the recipient before any such publication, but would normally, when asked, agree. If I didnt agree, it would be because the views to be quoted were outdated, or were poorly expressed and needed rewriting, and in the latter case I might offer to do the rewriting. QUESTION 2: If you didnt care one way or the other about the above, but the fellow member takes the trouble to show you the draft of a monograph he would like to publish quoting your
use of the term in question, and for some reason (probably because you find yourself at a disadvantage) you dont like the stuff or the point he is trying to make, would you therefore feel justified in refusing permission to quote you without giving any reasons whatsoever? Again, Kinloch and Lehmann answered No without reservations. Prof. Hill: If a monograph is to be published about me, I would wait until publication before objecting, and then do it in print if necessary. It is to be remembered that scholarship demands discussion and difference of opinion, preferably carried on with restraint. And Prof. Hockett: I dont think I would do that. I believe that as scholars we are privileged to peer over one anothers shoulders and be as critical - positively or negatively - as we are impelled to be. If I felt someone shouldnt quote me just as planned, I would at least explain my reservations - not give a blanket refusal. QUESTION 3: If you had volunteered additional comments (beyond explaining your use of the term in question) which are quoted by the fellow member in his draft monograph, would you prohibit him from quoting such comments? Again, Lehmann and Kinloch answered in the negative, Hockett and Hill indicating that they had already answered the question. Professors John Algeo, Thomas Creswell, Eric Hamp, William Kretzschmar, and others gave substantially the same answers to the three questions. That lifted a small weight off my conscience. However, I decided, as far as possible, to represent only by proxy (Doctors A, B, C, etc.) those who were withholding their permission for some reason best known to themselves. They had been good friends of mine over the years and I did not wish to risk their goodwill by quoting against their wishes, although the views they expressed seemed typical of current thinking on the subject and hence not to be ignored.
And now, a word about this publication. Times Books of New York had an option on this book, but I thought it too important to be offered for consideration by any commercial or academic publisher. Since it deals with our linguistic outlook, in which, in the opinion of Christophersen and others, a Copernican revolution is required, I decided to do a thorough job myself, exploring all aspects of the question with the help of the best authorities and consultants I could get, and give it personal handling through the various stages of publication. It is being published more in the interests of scholarship than for personal gain and more for the benefit of reviews by periodicals than for hitting the best-seller lists. I would like to hear not only from the learned periodicals in the social sciences and humanities, the fields of learning in which native speaker seems to run rampant, but also the more popular ones since we are up against a high-frequency term occurring in the media and one that has not yet been entered in our dictionaries of record. Finally, it may be asked whether I think I have succeeded in my inquiry, the object of which was to identify the referent of the term native speaker. My contention was that the term in its linguistic sense represents an ideal, a convenient fiction, or a shibboleth rather than a reality like Dick or Jane. Since words are mere symbols, their etymologies academic in regard to meaning and usage, usage alone being the arbiter to whom belongs the rule and law, the government of tongues, as Horace has laid down, what could be the meaning of native speaker corresponding to a real referent? I have offered an explanation that seems to fit the facts of usage. Philosopher Willard Quine agrees with my contention and veteran linguists and lexicographers such as Archibald Hill (who was the last to read the book in manuscript) and Frederic Cassidy have expressed agreement with my definition, i.e. proficient user of the specified language. I even have a hunch that by extension of meaning, proficient user may come to be applied
also to nonspoken skills, so that it may be idiomatic to say that Tom or Mary is a native speaker of a dead language such as West Saxon (Baron, 1982), sign language, or a subject like engineering or cooking. However that may be, I have no doubt that native speaker in the linguists sense of arbiter of grammaticality and acceptability of language is quite dead. Prof. Chomskys explanations seem to me systematically misleading in a broader sense than what Gilbert Ryle means by it. Actually, as I have tried to show, the native speaker in the mistaken sense never even existed; there is no real corpus delicti. In any case, requiescat in pace. THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY 18 April 1985
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CONTRIBUTORS. I am grateful to the following persons for their willing comments on various aspects of the question of native speaker, especially to Paul Christophersen of Cambridge, England, who has been my chief moral support from academe in this inquiry, and to David Guralnik, my lexicographer friend. Both were prompt and generous with wise counsel whenever I wrote to them during the past nine months that I have been busy with the publication of this monograph.
Prof. Richard W. Bailey, Dept. of English, The University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). Prof. A. L. Basham, Centre for Religious Studies, University of Toronto. Prof. James D. Benson, Dept. of English, York University, Toronto. Prof. Ronald R. Butters, Dept. of English, Duke University, Durham, NC. Prof.JohnB.Carroll,SeniorResearchPsychologist(Retd.),EducationalTestingService,Princeton,NJ. Prof. Robbie Case, Dept. of Psychology, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto. Prof. Frederic G. Cassidy, Chief Editor, Dictionary of American Regional English, University of Wisconsin (Madison). Prof. J. K. Chambers, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Toronto. Prof. R. L. Chapman, Dept. of English, Drew University, Madison, NJ. Prof. William S. Chisholm, Dept. of English, Cleveland State University. Prof. Noam Chomsky, Dept. of Linguistics & Philosophy, M.I.T., Cambridge, MA. Prof. Paul Christophersen, Professor Emeritus of English, University of Ulster. A. P. Cowie, Director, Oxford Lexical Research Unit, The University of Leeds. Prof. David Crystal, Dept. of Linguistic Science, University of Reading, UK. Prof. Nancy C. Dorian, Depts. of German &Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA. Prof. L. W. Forguson, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Toronto. Dean Victoria A. Fromkin, Graduate Division, University of California (Los Angeles). Prof. Paul L. Garvin, Dept. of Linguistics, S.U.N.Y. (Buffalo). Prof. J. Edward Gates, Dept. of English, Indiana State University. Prof.A. C. Gimson, Dept. of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College, London. (ob. 1985) Prof. H. A. Gleason, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Toronto. David B. Guralnik, Editor in Chief, Websters New World Dictionaries, Cleveland, OH. Prof. M. A. K. Halliday, Head, Linguistics Department, The University of Sydney. Patrick Hanks (Editor, Collins English Dictionary), University of Birmingham, UK. Prof. William Labov, Linguistics Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia). Prof. Raven I. McDavid, Jr., Professor Emeritus of English & Linguistics, University of Chicago. (ob. 1984) William T. McLeod, Managing Editor, Wm Collins Sons & Co., Glasgow. Prof. James W. Ney, Dept. of English, Arizona State University. Prof. Willard V. Quine, Dept. of Philosophy, Harvard University. Prof. Sir Randolph Quirk, Vice-Chancellor, University of London. Dr. Christopher H. Stinson, Solaster Software Corporation, Seattle,WA. Prof. Lise Winer, Dept. of Linguistics, Southern Illinois University (Carbondale). Dr.H.BosleyWoolf,EditorialDirectorofDictionaries(Retd.),Merriam-WebsterInc.,Springfield,MA.
CONSULTANTS: My sincerest thanks to the following persons for commenting on portions of the manuscript, advising on various related issues, or referring my questions to the proper persons for advice. The list includes those who have not objected to their comments being used, while not actively participating in the discussion. Such comments have been inserted as of Doctors A, B, C, etc., as explained in the Preface.
John H. Bailey Esq., Barrister & Solicitor, Toronto. Rosemary Courtney, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto. G. C. Eglington Esq., Eglington, Watt, Guay & Baston, Barristers & Solicitors, Ottawa. Stuart B. Flexner, Editor in Chief, Reference Books, Random House, New York. Senator Eugene Forsey (Retd.), Ottawa, Ontario. Geoff S. F. Fromow, Maclean Hunter Ltd., Toronto. Prof. William S. Greaves, Dept. of English, York University, Toronto. Prof. Archibald A. Hill, Emeritus Professor of English, Linguistics & Education, University of Texas. Prof. Brad Inwood, Dept. of Classics, University of Toronto. Gopi V. P. Kumar, Willowdale, Ontario. Prof. John T. Lamendella, Linguistics Program, San Jose State University. Sidney I. Landau, Editor in Chief, IDMB, John Wiley, New York. Prof. Nollaig MacKenzie, Dept. of Philosophy, York University, Toronto. Prof. Stuart Martin, Dept. of Philosophy, Boston College. Robert Nusca, St. Augustines Seminary, Toronto. Rev. John Le Pine, S.J., Professor Emeritus of History, Campion College, Regina, Sask. Prof. Allen Walker Read, Professor Emeritus of English, Columbia University. Prof. J. M. Sinclair, Dept. of English, University of Birmingham, UK. Rev. Thomas Thottumkal, Professor of Religion, Toronto School of Theology. Prof. Zacharias P. Thundy, Dept. of English, Northern Michigan University. Prof. T. Venkatacharya, Professor of Sanskrit, University of Toronto. Jacob (Zac) Zacharias, North Bellmore, N.Y.
INQUIRY THE SUBJECT OF THE INQUIRY

Is the Native Speaker a Myth Propagated by Linguists?
The sentences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker. (Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures, 1957) There are two basic requirements for a definer: he should be a native speaker of English and he should have at least a bachelors degree from a reputable college or university.... (H. B. Woolf, Editorial Director of Dictionaries, Merriam-Webster Inc., 1972) Many pages have their share of printing errors; and most of the text seems not to have been checked by a native speaker of English. (Jef Verschuerens review of Teun A. van Dijks Studies in the pragmatics of discourse, Language, March 1984)
NATIVE NATIVE SPEAKER, DEAD OR ALIVE?

INQUIRER: Dr. Gleason, can you give me a definition of the term native speaker as used by linguists? It is not in the dictionary you used to work for, Websters Third, you know. PROF. GLEASON: Oh, that is a very difficult term to define. Viola Waterhouse once wrote a paper on the subject. I think it was in the Fifties. It seems some Mexican children learn Spanish as first language and their mother tongue as second language. INQUIRER: Native speaker has perplexed this lexicographer for well nigh 25 years. It seems a household word among linguists and taken as self-evident by dictionaries of record such as OED and Websters Third which have room for more obvious terms such as mother tongue. PROF. GATES: If mother tongue is obvious, perhaps native speaker can be defined as one who speaks a language as his/her mother tongue. INQUIRER: That certainly is an obvious definition. But there is more to it than that. In linguistic usage, as we will see below and as you ought to recognize, native speaker means someone gifted with special and often infallible grammatical insights into the specified language. Like Allan Gleason, I think we have to keep an open mind on this. To start on a clean slate, native speaker could mean someone who speaks a native language (as an Algonquian or Athabaskan), which is the definition I received from an untutored lay person, the same authority who told me on another occasion that a conversationalist must be a list of conversations! For a more widely read person, such as a senior librarian of the Metropolitan Toronto Public Library, it is a buzzword used by linguists, buzzword having the usual connotation that the term in question is devoid of much meaning. In its primary meaning, native speaker is also a matter of some consequence for people in general. For instance, the first of many citations of the term I found in a newspaper database refers to Claude Ryan, Quebecs former Liberal leader, presenting a policy paper on language at the University of Montreal: Abuses in the Quebec governments Charter of the French Language must be done away with, said Ryan, who has often argued that any native speaker of English should be permitted to attend English schools. (Canadian Press newswire, 6 Apr 1978). Two dictionaries that define native speaker dont do justice to the linguistic meaning: a person having a specified native language (Collins, 1979); native speakers of English = those who learn English as their first T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 15
language, esp. in Britain, America, Australia, etc. (Longman, 1978) MR. GURALNIK: Longmans use of etc. leaves some unanswered questions. And by their definition, a Hispanic kid in the Southwest who doesnt learn English until the age of three is not a native speaker. An interesting paradox is created by the revised definition of native in the OED Supplement: one belonging to a non-European race [sic] in a country in which Europeans hold political power. Therefore, in South Africa, a Bantu may be a native speaker of English, but a Boer may not be. PROF. GATES: It strikes me as irrelevant to apply the OED Supplement sense about non-Europeans to the phrase native speaker. INQUIRER: I wouldnt call it irrelevant, maybe irreverent. But lets see if we can get some reactions from the dictionary publishers who have recognized the term as a lexical item. MR. MCLEOD: I think the [Collins] definition is accurate. A native speaker of a language in the usual and general sense in which that term is used denotes someone who has learned the language from his earliest days by virtue of having been born in the country in which it is spoken. INQUIRER: When you say by virtue of having been born in the country in which it is spoken, I think you are implying that if an English mother delivers and brings up her child in Hong Kong, the child would be a native speaker of Chinese rather than English. But Patrick Hanks seems to have a different view of the matter. MR. HANKS: I think there may be some merit in viewing native speaker as a theoretical construct rather than as flesh and bone. INQUIRER: That certainly helps to put native speaker in its proper place. PROF. GATES: I concur with Mr. Hanks that this term, like so many, represents a concept. Native speaker is a useful artifact of thought, but if one starts probing its boundaries, one finds them fuzzy, as one does of even such concrete objects as cup or table. INQUIRER: Dont all words represent concepts? Even function words such as prepositions and conjunctions embody concepts of relationship. And concepts are necessarily fuzzy because they are universals with formal existence only in the mind. But particular objects are not fuzzy. I havent seen a fuzzy cup or table. A native speaker should not be fuzzy either, unless you recognize it as a figment of the imagination. PROF. GATES: One would like to be able to assign each and every individual to one class or other (here, to native or non-native speaker), but the situation does not allow it. Reality is a continuum; the boundaries of the concept are arbitrary and may even be fuzzy. INQUIRER: Concepts are fuzzy but individuals represented by a concept should not be. As for reality, if you mean things that are real, and not the quality or state of being real, then I think reality is not a T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 16
continuum. Continuums (e.g. space and time) exist in the mind as abstractions based on discrete individuals (spatial objects, a period or moment in time, etc.) which are neither arbitrary nor fuzzy. And how you relate a concept in the mind to the reality as it exists outside is usually by applying the concept to particular objects, as when you say This is a cup, but that is not. If the concept is that of a quality or state such as tallness, sobriety, or grammatical competence, we should be able to specify its degree or a standard by which a person or thing to which the quality inheres or the state belongs may be said to be tall, sober, having grammatical competence, etc. The linguist cannot validly say in his linguistic sense: Jack is a native speaker of English, but Jean is not. As I will try to show later, native speaker is as arbitrary and elusive a concept as Abominable Snowman, except, of course, there is nothing illogical or improbable about the Snowman becoming a reality some day, which I believe will never happen to the native speaker as conceived by the linguist.
Native speaker as a legal fiction

PROF. CHAPMAN: To the extent that I have ever thought about the term, I have regarded native speaker as, and used it as, a legal fiction, as in Websters Third, fiction, 4a: an assumption of a possible thing as a fact irrespective of the question of its truth.... Its sort of like such terms as medieval man, the Renaissance ideal, courtly love, which I ordinarily use with intonational quotation marks to show that I want to get on to something at the moment more important than the (probably impossible) exact definition of the term. Or think of it as the Saussurean hypothetical entity that incorporates langue. At any rate, I am and have been content not to dwell on it in the stage where I am trying to understand or teach the methods of transformational grammar or of semantics. In Bloomfieldian structuralism, of course, the native speaker is not a legal fiction at all, but an actual bod, carefully selected and described. But that sort of grammar has not been as productive for persons desiring to solve mysteries or enwrap themselves in heuristic muddles, as has been the transformational with its (in my mind) precisely Saussurean basis. MR. HANKS: Traditionally, native speaker designates any member of a language community whose judgments about what is and what is not good English / French / Japanese / Athabaskan are to be taken seriously by lexicographers and linguists. Since no two speakers of any language, I guess, will make precisely the same judgments about every borderline case, the judgments of one speaker are worthless for descriptive purposes. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 17
The interest arises when the judgments of two or more speakers coincide. We then have something that looks suspiciously like the sort of convention about meaning, syntax, or pronunciation that descriptive linguists and lexicographers are (or ought to be) attempting to describe. The area of judgmental agreement on conventions can be defined as the language spoken by the (theoretical) native speaker. PROF. GATES: I think that Mr. Hanks is talking not about whether or not one is a native speaker but whether or not one is a reliable informant. One doesnt assign one to a class native speaker on the basis of his conformity to the language conventions of the group - though if one makes some kinds of mistakes, one might judge the speaker to be a foreigner. INQUIRER: I think that would be a snap judgment: a kind of quantum jump from the particular to the general. It is a common enough fallacy. Several others, as you will see later in the discussion, share Mr. Hankss opinion which I think is valid if native speaker is understood and redefined in the proper sense. MR. HANKS: A consequence of this view is that native speakers can be identified negatively. Anybody whose judgments are consistently at odds on a number of disputed points with those of other members of the language community may be said not to be a native speaker of the language of that community. The question might then arise, what is he a native speaker of? Presumably in some cases such people will be native speakers of, say, a language close to standard English (Chinese, Athabaskan, Cornish dialect, or whatever), but not actually members of that language community. Such individuals may be perfectly able to use their eccentric idiolect for communicative purposes, but their judgments are worthless for the descriptive linguist. MR. MCLEOD: I cannot think that you are right in attaching a value judgement to the term native speaker. This must be an invention of the fraternity of linguists. I agree with [Collins English Dictionary] when it states, or perhaps implies, that anyone who has a native language is a native speaker of that language, and the degree of validity of their judgements about it does not enter into the question. PROF. CASSIDY: Except perhaps negatively. MR. MCLEOD: If a specialist linguistic sense is sufficiently important, then it should be recognized in a separate definition. INQUIRER: That is exactly what I have done, as you will see below. MR. COWIE: I think it vital in using the term not to extend its reference to various linguistic attributes which are commonly, though not necessarily or exclusively, found in speakers who grow up using a particular language T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 18
from an early stage. In other words, I would limit the application of the term to a particular sub-class of users of a given language those who learn it as a (possibly joint) first language during their linguistically formative years. INQUIRER: Since the special linguistic attributes are not exclusive to those for whom the language in question is their first language, I think it would be more sound linguistically and lexicographically to recognize the term as having acquired an extended meaning, like North American native for the term Indian. Extension of meaning, as we all know, is a fact of life for languages. In English, for example, extension of meaning has affected words from abaca (which, since 1818 according to OED, has been used to refer to the palm first and then to its fibre) to zymosis (which refers to fermentation in the first place and has been extended to mean also zymotic disease). But what is to be proved is whether the language users of the sub-class you refer to qualify as native speakers by virtue of their formative years or because of their individual aptitudes for acquiring language proficiency. MR. COWIE: Possibly joint is intended to suggest that a person may be a native speaker of more than one language, provided conditions exist for their acquisition before formal schooling begins. One knows of various polyglot Europeans or ex-Europeans of whom this could be said, including for example [Cambridge professor] George Steiner, trilingual from an early stage in English, French, and German (Steiner, 1975). The role of the mother is not vital in the development of a native speaker, as I have attempted to define the term. As is well known, fluent bilinguals can from childhood acquire facility in one language from the mother and in the other from the father. The continuing and strictly inaccurate use of mother tongue as a synonym for first language is a tacit acknowledgement of the role of the mother, in many societies, in first-language development. INQUIRER: Personally, I would not synonymize mother- tongue or first-language user and native speaker in the linguistic sense of proficient user (as I propose to define that sense of native speaker). There seems a clear distinction between what the first pair denotes and what is denoted by native speaker. One could have a mother tongue and as many first languages as circumstances permit and never be able to use any of them as a native speaker because of lack of aptitude for language learning, lack of educational opportunity, displacement from ones native land, etc. At the same time, one could become proficient in all of them, as in George Steiners case. However, as Prof. Christophersen points out in his book, mother tongue, native language, and first language are often used as T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 19
unambiguous terms. Prof. R. Lado, for instance, is quoted by Christophersen as having used first language in two different senses (i.e. first-learned language and primary medium) within the same sentence. For purposes of this discussion, I am using mother tongue (in the sense of ones mothers language, not, of course, as a mother of languages) as equivalent to native language. I use first language normally in the sense of first-learned language. Where primary medium is meant, the context should make it clear as in the case of any polysemous word. Longman has not responded to a query I addressed to Editor Paul Procter, but we are privileged to hear on the main question from Prof. Sir Randolph Quirk who is the Director of the British Survey of English Usage and was the chief advisor on the Longman dictionary.
What Quirk & Quine think

PROF. QUIRK: The Survey of English Usage is just celebrating its 25th anniversary and your interesting questions come at a fitting moment. The objects of the SEU are to describe English grammar as manifested by the (spoken and written) output - both corpus and elicitation-test evoked material - of the mature educated native speaker. This limitation in no way entails our belief that a 10-year-olds repertoire is always deficient; nor that a docker who left school at 15 or 16 deviates from the educated in every relevant linguistic feature; nor that a Japanese professor of English has an inevitably imperfect command of the subject hes paid to profess. But given that (a) experience shows that some 10year-olds ..., some dockers ..., some Japanese professors ...; and that (b) we have millions of linguistic subjects who fall outside these limits, why take the risk? [ellipses as in original]. INQUIRER: Still, I wonder if that is sufficient reason for excluding members of disadvantaged groups as a class instead of considering them on individual merits. I believe even the mature educated native speaker is often a poor risk (though not as a class) in regard to trustworthiness of spoken and written evidence of grammaticality and acceptability. PROF. QUIRK: Equally, our limitation in no way entails that every adult who has had a university education and who was brought up using English as his first language is a perfect model for the descriptive linguist. But for reasons given in our many publications on the theory of the SEU, we are confident that the linguist can more securely rely on the usage, reactions, precepts, and intuitions of a satisfactory sample of such subjects than on a sample otherwise constituted. PROF. CASSIDY: Satisfactory sample begs the question. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 20
PROF. FORGUSON: I think Prof. Quirk means statistically satisfactory: meeting the demands of sampling for statistical validity. PROF. GATES: We seem to be fighting the realist / nominalist controversy again! (In more modern terms, in linguistics, the Gods truth vs. the hocus-pocus theory - discussed in linguistic literature in respect especially to the phoneme). I take a nominalist position myself. You [Inquirer] seem to assume the realist side. You ask, What really is a native speaker? while I ask When people use the term native speaker what do they mean? .... The term unicorn has no reference at all, but everyone (educated) knows what unicorn means. INQUIRER: Your unicorn is a much neater example than my Abominable Snowman. But I think what a unicorn really is and what the word means are both important questions. When defining words for a dictionary, I am usually content with asking the second question - a dictionary definer couldnt be bothered about the nature of things, what really is represented by words like unicorn, angel, mermaid, God, heaven, and what have you. However, in the case of native speaker, I think the nature of the referent is an important question because linguists invoke the native speaker (which to me is largely a unicorn) as the arbiter of grammaticality and use battalions of such unicorns as informants gifted with intuition in support of their theses. For the linguist, the unicorn not only exists but is also a much better animal than your average horse (i.e. any competent user of a language). PROF. QUIRK: But although my answer to the first question in your Section 7 [Appendix 2] is therefore a resounding No, I would readily agree that none of us yet knows enough about language acquisition, bi(or multi-)lingualism, the neurology of language encoding, etc., etc. I am well aware, too, that there are fuzzy edges: foreigners who are apparently indistinguishable from natives; natives who through early and prolonged uprooting are better performers in some other language than their mother tongue. But none of this is reason to challenge, let alone dismiss, the essential validity of the native speaker concept. PROF. CASSIDY: That merely says I accept the concept, but does not come to grips with the presumed reality. INQUIRER: In Section 7 of my memo sheet I had asked: Is native speaker merely an ideal or a convenient linguistic fiction - myth, shibboleth, sacred cow - an etherlike concept with no objective reality to it, albeit embodied in a quasi-privileged class of speakers of each language? The answer of Philosopher Willard Quine seems to be Yes. After Prof. Quirks resounding No, I thought I would ask for a second opinion from someone who, in the words of Encyclopaedia Britannica, has attempted to clarify the meaning of the Kantian a priori theory of knowledge and show the T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 21
limitations of meaning placed on categorical statements. PROF. QUINE: I had not appreciated how murky the notion of native speaker is. Surely those using the term have nothing clearer in mind than you and I have, nor, for the most part, more awareness of the problem than I have had. As I see it, the term has been used without definition as a vague term whose denotata grade off from paradigm cases. The paradigm might be specified ideally as an educated person who acquired the language as his first language while growing up in a monoglot community of speakers of that language. Better require also that his parents grew up there and never strayed. The rest of the denotata grade off from the paradigm in degrees of decreasing similarity of verbal behavior. This does not have the makings of a lexicographic entry, but it perhaps fits the usage. Perhaps [Section] 7 on your sheet comes nearest to this. INQUIRER: Thank you, Prof. Quine. I would like to add that this lack of sufficient knowledge at the present time on some of the moot questions relevant to our discussion, which Prof. Quirk has referred to, and the notable exceptions to the rule which we daily see around us should at least give us pause when we are tempted to apply the concept native speaker to members of certain classes of people while excluding others. PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: I want to take up the cudgels for my friend Randolph Quirks adherence to the native / non-native distinction in the Survey. In essence the Survey is a sociological investigation: how do certain fairly well-defined groups of people use English? As in all research, it is important to exclude extraneous factors which may influence the result. All sociologists do the same; but the limitation of, say, an inquiry into truancy to a particular age-group or social background does not by itself imply an assumption that other age-groups and children from other backgrounds are essentially different and never the twain shall meet. INQUIRER: I think that is a new perspective on the use of socalled native speakers in linguistic research. Other linguists may want to take note. PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: What I object to about the native speaker concept is the way a difference in background is invested with a mystical significance, as if one were to claim - quite unscientifically - that unless a person is imbued with truancy from earliest childhood, he will never become truly truant. He may appear to be truant, but deep down there will be a difference. INQUIRER: I wonder what the geneticists and neurologists think about that. But let us get back to the lexicographers and the dictionaries of record. MERRIAM-WEBSTER: [No comment]. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 22
INQUIRER: I guess that is the proper reaction when you are suddenly caught napping. Merriam-Webster recently put out their Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary with a whole raft of entries missing: baby boom, baby boomer, bar code, bargaining chip, barn burner, bubble memory, checkbook journalism, computerist, entitlements, fast lane, MX missile, no-frills, revolving-door, right-to-die, riot shield, rubber-chicken, rumble strip, spreadsheet, toxic shock, vertical integration, voice mail, worst-case, X-rated - the list is practically endless. As I mentioned in an edit-page article in The Wall Street Journal and papers given to a couple of the learned societies (see References), some of those words could have made the Eighth Collegiate (1973); so I dont blame them for missing out on native speaker. Moreover, they have atoned for their sins of omission by committing a few. Neologisms of the eighties which could have waited till the Tenth New Collegiate have already been entered. OXFORD: [No comment]. INQUIRER: That should read No comment received, I suppose, since, as a professor of linguistics pointed out from Edinburgh, the usual interpretation of No comment would be that the person concerned has been asked to comment and has formally stated that he does not wish to do so. But I hope the square brackets will take care of the exact meaning. I think Oxford has also been caught napping. As I have pointed out in several review articles and papers (see References), Oxford and Merriam-Webster have been trying to hang on to the horse-and-buggy system of data collection handed down by Samuel Johnson. At least Oxford is now atoning for it with a firm purpose of amendment; they have just invested in some state-of-the-art technology, thanks to IBM and the University ofaterloo. The Toronto Globe & Mail carried the news under the heading Oxford Meets Its Waterloo. But Oxford should have better luck this time than when they tried the resources of Stanford University a few years back. I also hope the next time Oxford and Merriam go to press they will recognize native speaker as a noun phrase that calls for definition as a separate entry.
The two senses of native speaker

On the basis of the evidence I have examined, I would tentatively define native speaker in two senses: A popular sense would be, as in Longman and Collins: a person who has a specified language as the mother tongue or first-learned language, the sense obtaining in the Claude Ryan citation and in the following: (1) The second-ever Indigenous Peoples Theatre Celebration began T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 23
on Saturday with a pow-wow at the Curve Lake Reserve.... Roberts, sporting a thick British accent, suggested a new schedule be worked out by tea-time. Several Canadian Indians hooted tea-time in derisory chorus, assuming Roberts was an anglophone parachuted in from Rosedale. In fact, the bewildered Roberts is a native speaker of Welsh, an endangered language.... I never knew that Welsh people had this problem, said the editor of Ontario Indian magazine, who was deeply impressed by their show. (Conlogue, 1982) (2) There are two basic requirements for a definer: he should be a native speaker of English and he should have at least a bachelors degree from a reputable college or university.... (Woolf, 1972) Perhaps Dr. Woolf would like to comment on the meaning in which he has used native speaker in the above quotation. DR. WOOLF: I must say that I am surprised that my meaning isnt clear. It is what you will find in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English [with etc. deleted]. INQUIRER: The Longman dictionary comes in very handy. But from my knowledge of Dr. Woolf as a thoroughgoing lexicographer, I would venture to suggest that what he really means by native speaker is competent user because I believe that, other things being equal, he would probably hire a definer who has a good grasp of English idiom over someone who may have had English as his first-learned language. The second definition I would suggest is: One who is a competent speaker of a specified language and who uses it idiomatically. By idiomatically I mean in the usual way in which the words of a particular language are joined together to express thought (Websters New World, idiom, 2) or in the syntactical, grammatical, or structural form peculiar to a language (Websters New Ninth Collegiate, idiom, 1b). Such a definition should cover all professional linguistic uses. I will not bother with illustrative quotations (these are discussed below in connection with the linguistic concept) but would like to cite a few passages that throw interesting sidelights on the linguists native speaker: (1) It should not be forgotten that so-called native speakers often have surprising lacunae in their knowledge of the language, and yet we react differently to these. We may be amused: Fancy not knowing that! But we let the mistake pass because, After all, it is his own language! With a foreigner, the expectation that sooner or later he is going to slip up sometimes leads to the presumption of mistakes which do not exist. (Christophersen, 1973) (2) The manuscript was read by Iryce Baron, James Hartman, and Joseph B. Trahern, Jr. (himself a native speaker of West Saxon), all of whom made many useful suggestions for its improvement. (Baron, 1982) T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 24
(3) She seems a native speaker of American Sign Language. (Kayamkulam Kochunny, Mississauga, Ontario, uttered 23 Apr 1984) PROF. GATES: I would not accept [competent user] as a definition of native speaker because some people speak English (or whatever) very well as a second language, so however competent they may be, they are not strictly native speakers. I have heard the expression native speaker competence which I believe means competence equivalent to that of a native speaker. Whether or not every single person who grew up speaking English (or whatever) is equally competent is quite irrelevant to the meaning of the term native speaker. By native speaker one simply means the person who has the language as his/her first language, and typically such individuals do have greater competence than those for whom it is a second language. As [lexicographer] Gove (or whoever wrote the section) said in the Merriam Black Books, in defining dog, one need not take into account the three-legged dogs that are running around. INQUIRER: That smacks of elitism. In a scientific inquiry we dont start with assumptions about what is generally meant by something (unless it is a proven fact or you can offer objective proof of it) and then look only at evidence that suits our assumptions. To borrow a thought from Prof. Christophersen, using that method, one could prove that the earth is flat. Dr. Gove may have been very selective about his evidence and even the people he used to hire for sifting the evidence. More about that later. Getting back to the three-legged dog, pace Philip Babcock Gove, I think even the handicapped, whether among dogs or men, should be taken into account in defining a word relating to them, so that when we are defining dog, all individuals perceived by the dog-loving mind as partaking of dogness (based on a hypothesis) should be able to contribute to the definition of the concept embodied in dog. In defining man we dont exclude the ones that are found in wheelchairs; we look for signs of humanness and try to abstract the meaning of the term from human beings of all categories and conditions of humanity. The definition that results should be universally applicable, i.e. to each and every instance of the animal, three-legged ones included. The problem with native speaker is that you cant prove that it has a real-world referent except in its factual sense of mother-tongue or first-language speaker. It exists only as a figment of the linguists imagination. It is more like your earlier example, the unicorn. But whether we are defining a figment like the unicorn or a real creature like the dog, I think we ought to look closely at all the evidence available; in the present case, citations of usage of the term native speaker. If our definition covers all examples of usage, then it is a valid definition. If it covers only some of them because you start with the assumption that you know what is meant by the term and what evidence you want to look at, T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 25
then it is an invalid definition; it limps. We should at least want to consider defining a new meaning to cover other examples of usage than are covered by one definition. Usage should always reign supreme, as in the timehonoured maxim given by Horace in Ars Poetica, 72, which you and I are fond of quoting from time to time and have heard quoted by others ad nauseam: si volet usus, Quem penes arbitrium est et jus et norma loquendi. (If usage wills it so, to whom belongs The rule and law, the government of tongues.) Citations exemplifying the linguistic concept native speaker are available by the hundreds in books and papers on linguistics. Thus, the Language and Language Behavior Abstracts database has 525 references, the Educational Resources Information Center database has over 250, and so on. However, before we study the citations, it seems only logical that we make a preliminary examination to sift out those that are based on the assumption that the native speaker exists. It is exactly like when you are trying to define unicorn, you discard citations of this type: A study using 3,000 unicorns shows that the unicorn does not mate in captivity. Here is one such citation for native speaker: Lehiste submitted the same set of items to 46 Estonian-English bilinguals and noted that bilinguals seem to exhibit the same range of variability as do native English speakers. (Marcoux, 1973) Fair enough. But I think a legitimate inference that could be drawn from the data would have been that Estonian-English bilinguals and native English speakers belong to the same subspecies of Homo loquens, what I would call Homo loquens anglice. Instead, the researcher, under the assumption that socalled native speakers were informants who should be more aware of their language, arrived at the questionable conclusion that gender agreement is not as obvious as has sometimes been assumed. (Ibid.) The common core of meaning contained in the more explicit uses of native speaker, as every linguist knows, is one who has an insight into a specified language or enjoys an intuitive sense of what is grammatical and ungrammatical in regard to its usage, someone whose native instincts qualify him as a touchstone or arbiter on linguistic matters relating to a language, especially if he is an educated native speaker. The existence of this kind of native speaker is the point at issue. Let us listen to Prof. Jack Chambers for a rather extreme position and see how it will bear examination. PROF. CHAMBERS: The meaning of the term is as you have T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 26
[described] it. But it doesnt mean insight into prescriptive rules, or grammatical niceties, necessarily. Just into the language. MR. GURALNIK: What does just into the language mean? PROF. CHAMBERS: Native speaker intuition does NOT qualify anyone to determine the acceptability of split infinitives or Hopefully as a sentential adverb. But it does qualify anyone to determine the acceptability of I took John to the store as opposed to *I went John to the store. And being educated has nothing to do with it. An uneducated native speaker can make grammaticality judgments about his language as easily as an educated one. INQUIRER: Grammaticalities but not grammatical niceties - I think that is a very nice distinction. I hope you are not saying that a nonnative speaker of English couldnt acquire the intuition necessary to determine that *I went John to the store is unacceptable. MR. GURALNIK: What intuition is needed to reject a sentence without meaning for anyone who knows the verbs to go and to take? INQUIRER: In this connection, I have been wondering whether Noam Chomskys use of a noun such as grammaticalness (Aspects) instead of grammaticality as Prof. Chambers and most of us would say, is because of Chomskys lack of familiarity with word formation using Latin stems and suffixes or because of a failure of his intuition as a native speaker of English (which I presume he is in both senses of the term).
Chomsky on grammaticalness & grammaticality

My Reverse Word List (Brown, 1963) has only 350 formations ending in -alness as against 590 that end in -ality. And most of the -alness entries are bastardized forms such as radicalness, periodicalness, philosophicalness, catholicalness, and technicalness collected from Websters Second International Dictionary (1934). I wonder if it would be a proper test of the instincts of a native speaker of English to be asked to choose between two lists of unusual words ending in -alness and -ality respectively. My hunch is that your average educated native speaker would more readily accept formations of Middle English stems with -ness endings such as especialness, prejudicialness, dismalness, seasonalness, usualness, etc. than the same stems with -ality endings. An English speaker with a good grounding in Latin might consider -ality endings more acceptable for unchanged classical stems, whether correctly perceived as such or not, such as physicality, pragmaticality, sesquipedality, ethereality, officiality, and sociality. The late Prof. Marckwardt probably didnt have any locus classicus T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 27
in mind when he wrote the following: There are, for example, several ways of converting adjectives into abstract nouns - the addition of -ness and -ity being just two of them. A person with a native feeling for the language knows that brutality and fertility seem plausible formations, whereas brutalness and fertileness do not. The nonnative teacher of English, aware of the existence of both of these devices in the language, is not likely to possess this Sprachgefhl. (Marckwardt, 1974) It is too late to ask Marckwardt for a comment, but Prof. Chomsky (who will be joining the discussion at a later stage) is at hand with an explanation. PROF. CHOMSKY: About the term grammaticalness, ... I purposely chose a neologism in the hope that it would be understood that the term was to be regarded as a technical term, with exactly the meaning that was given to it, and not assimilated to some term of ordinary discourse with a sense and connotations not to the point in this context. INQUIRER: I thought as much. Actually I dont agree with what Marckwardt seems to imply about persons with a native feeling for the language. Anyone can have certain feelings based on habit but he should be able to override such feelings and opt for something unusual when it suits a legitimate purpose. But the tendency among advocates of the native-speaker theory is to blame departures from the usual usage on the speakers not possessing the Sprachgefhl if the speaker happens to be a nonnative speaker and to attribute them to legitimate causes if the speaker is recognized as a native speaker. Prof. Chambers, could you supply a sentence which only a native speaker could determine as acceptable or unacceptable? PROF. CHAMBERS: No. INQUIRER: I wonder why. And how would you determine who is a native speaker of a language? Does everyone whose mother is identifiable and whose faculties have been unimpaired since birth and speech uninhibited qualify as a native speaker of his or her mother tongue? PROF. CHAMBERS: Yes. INQUIRER: If, then, an Athabaskan mother died in childbirth and the child was brought up by an Algonquian woman, would the child still qualify as a native speaker of Athabaskan? PROF. CHAMBERS: No. Not if the child didnt speak Athabaskan. Most likely, it would be a native speaker of Algonquian. INQUIRER: That probably shows birth has little to do with native speakership. But I have no doubt that having a language as ones first language is a decided advantage in achieving competence in it. It gives T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 28
you a head start. Beyond that, native speakership seems a question of education and individual aptitudes. For example, it doesnt take a professional linguist to say that one of the following specimen passages shows a different handling of grammar from the other - grammar with a degree of confidence born of the fact that English is the first language. That one is the product of undergraduates of reputable North American universities whereas the other is by undergraduates from a Third World country who are learning English as a second language. SPECIMEN A: During the Middle Ages everybody was middle aged.... After a revival of infantile commerce slowly creeped into Europe, merchants appeared. They roamed from town to town exposing themselves and organized big fairies in the countryside.... Finally Europe caught the Black Death. It was spread from port to port by inflected rats.... Theologically, Luther was into reorientation mutation.... Great Brittian, the USA and other European countrys had demicratic leanings. Among the goals of the chartists were universal suferage and an anal parliament.... In 1937 Lenin revolted Russia. Germany was displaced after WWI.... War screeched to an end when a nukuleer explosion was dropped on Heroshima. The last stage is us. (Britannica 1984 Book o f the Year) SPECIMEN B: One day Coldrige eat some tabulets and sleep.... When he was strongly dreaming, he see the pleasure doom in Xanadu and the river Alpha.... When Kubla Khan built a doom, an Abbyseenion maid sang. But there were no connections between them.... These connectionless ideas wandered here and there in the poem.... If Coleridge could find out what she sang, then he would build castles in the air, he would drink honey-due and the Milk of Paradise.... Coldrige remarks that his poetry is written by the psychological curiosity.... The visions he had moved him greatly his curiosity and jarred by the curiosity he published the song.... There is no end of the poem.... He remarks that this poem is A Vision in a Dream; a Fragment. He remarks like this because he is dreaming. (Paikeday, 1961) PROF. GATES: Those are good specimens because the first exhibits the kinds of errors that a native speaker (less educated than the informants Quirk wants) would make, while the second exhibits the kinds of mistakes a non-native speaker makes. In the first case the errors deviate from a standard; in the second they deviate from English. INQUIRER: Thats interesting. A sentence like Lenin revolted Russia is merely nonstandard while There is no end of the poem is just not English. When we have sentences neatly grouped into ones produced by native speakers and ones produced by foreign learners, it is easy to pass judgment according to our preconceptions. I wonder if you can T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 29
distinguish the two groups from the following specimen which is a mixed bag. The sentences, individually numbered for your convenience, are authentic material collected from student writing at an accredited North American university. SPECIMEN C: 1. The house stood at a few feet from where the train had come to a final stop. 2. Before the jurys verdict, the newspaper was careful to state that the accused would have committed the crime. 3. After the interview, I recieved a letter from the company stating that I had got that job. 4. The literature is the study of our imagination, hence method of improving our society. 5. Certain magazines are formed to make aware there views which will help effect society they way they want it to be. 6. To know what she is thinking helps interpretate her problems. 7. Her unconfidence in herself and her mother are her two major problems. 8. It is from humans knowledge of literature to see through the corrupt and choose the right which can help form society better. 9. The accused went to Chicago on July the fifth, 1962. On July the third of that same year, that is two days ago, he had been in Toronto. 10. After taxes, his wife touches $550 a month. INQUIRER: I tested the original batch of 50 sentences on a professor of English as a Second Language at the University of Toronto and the above 10 are ones on which she tripped. She had claimed to be able to tell native-speaker errors from foreign-learner errors, but she picked nearly a dozen sentences incorrectly. In the above specimen, the native-speaker errors are numbers 1, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, the others being foreign-learner. PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: I have come across things in English and American students essays which I could have sworn beforehand would never occur in native writing. Fifteen years ago I should have classified He convinced her to do it as impossible in native writing, a typical foreigners mistake. Nowadays it is so frequent that I suppose it has to be accepted, but it must originally have been introduced by semi-literate people - people who just didnt know any better, not by people who deliberately set out to break the rules. INQUIRER: My friend at the University of Toronto had no problem with sentences in which foreign interference was clearly showing. She wrote: The problem is that foreign-learner errors are made only by foreignlanguage speakers but native-speaker errors can be made by either. Ah ha! Now what does that show? As I see it, the native speaker (in the sense of mother-tongue or first-language speaker) starts learning the language on a clean slate, but the foreign learner starts with one side of the slate already written on. During the early learning stages, the foreign learner trying to write on the other side experiences some interference T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 30
from the first side. But the learner, if he or she is a good learner, soon learns to keep the slate clean and which side of the slate to use and when. Some native speakers, like some foreign learners, never learn or learn only imperfectly. But both types have to learn in order to be grammatical and competent users of a language. Linguists who like to point out what they call typical foreign-learner errors consider only errors natural to the early stages of learning. They also like to shut their eyes to native-speaker errors. In the end, it is all a question of learning. As I have said elsewhere, The errors made by the foreign learner ... cannot be shown to be different in kind from the errors made by the typical ill-educated native-speaking freshman using the same variety of the language. There are differences attributable to learning stages, as when the native-speaking child and the foreign learner begin to learn. The rest seem merely differences of degree, frequently compounded by prejudice on the one hand and lack of tolerance on the other. (Paikeday, 1985b) INQUIRER: Doctor A, may I ask how you would determine who is a native speaker? DOCTOR A: By simply questioning speakers about their origins. Thus, the language I learned from parents, siblings, servants, in the school, etc. was English, so Im a native speaker of a variety thereof. INQUIRER: I have no doubt that you are a native speaker of English in both senses of the term and of more varieties of the language than you would care to admit. But I dont see the need for a biographical inquiry. It seems as useful or relevant as asking an applicant for a keypunch operators job about her marital status. I think we should use more objective tests based on utterances like *I went John to the store, *Lenin revolted Russia, and *One day Coleridge eat some tablets and sleep, although even such tests dont seem very decisive for establishing native speakership in the linguistic sense. MR. GURALNIK: For many, [native speaker] has mystical connotations of intuitions absorbed with mothers milk, but I suppose most users of the term would deny that and offer some psycholinguistic explanation of why those who have not learned through imitation in childhood the basic verb sets, prepositional phrases, and the like, often have difficulty with the idiomatic placement of adverbs or the choice of prepositions. Or they may call attention to the fact that most persons (but certainly not all) who learn a new language after childhood (the age varies) have adjusted the speech apparatus to a certain set of phonemes and, no matter how sophisticated their use of the new language becomes, can never fully readjust the organs to form the new phonemes or allophones precisely the way those who learned it in infancy do. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 31
INQUIRER: Certainly, learning involving organic adjustment becomes more difficult as the learner gets older, although, as you say, the age varies because of varying individual aptitudes for imitating and adapting to new speech sounds. Middle age rather than puberty is probably the limit. PROF. CHAPMAN: But one who learns a language after puberty, after the achievement of bilateralism in the brain, would not qualify (in my mind) as a native speaker. His/her responses to questions would not be so instinctive and automatic. He/she would probably have to think about it, if only for a couple of nonnative nanoseconds. He/she could, of course, be extremely useful for showing up features of the language that the native speaker would miss, not be conscious of. Look, for a couple of instances, at the extraordinary nonnative achievements of Conrad and Nabokov, and your own experience of times when foreigners reveal something to you about the language that you yourself had natively [missed]. INQUIRER: Im afraid my own experience shows quite the opposite and you, Prof. Chapman, would probably see the same facts in a different light if you substituted learner-nonlearner for the native-nonnative distinction which I consider quite gratuitous in regard to language proficiency. MR. GURALNIK: [Im reminded] of an army buddy. Born in Switzerland and perfectly bilingual in French and German, he came to the U.S. at the age of seventeen, with no more than a year or two of highschool English. When I met him, he was 23 or 24, and I knew him for nearly a year before I learned that he was not born here. I would have defied any linguist to discover from his speech that he was not a native. He once told me that he had made a concentrated effort to acquire native fluency, going to movies nightly, listening to radio, and associating as much as possible with those born here and avoiding his foreign-born relatives. INQUIRER: The age of seventeen is rather advanced in years, certainly beyond the normal period of puberty, unless someone can show that puberty is put on hold in anticipation of acquiring English as first language. On questions such as the correct choice of adverbs and prepositions, my experience based on the speech and writing of the generality of socalled educated native speakers is that they are as prone to error as educated nonnative speakers, especially when you look at the less welledited language put out by the media. It might be interesting to compile a list of errors commonly attributed to nonnative speakers and have the so-called native speakers tested on the same points to see if they score any better than the nonnatives. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 32
MR. GURALNIK: I am not sure testing would be as reliable as comparing transcriptions of unself-conscious speech on the wing, if enough could be made available. I am impressionistically aware of differences in use of verbal aspect, syntax, and the like between even uneducated native speakers of English from infancy and some educated learners of English at a later age. Of course, nativity has nothing to do with it, and these subtleties can be, and frequently are, learned at a later stage as well as in early childhood. But I agree with you that they must be learned.
Is a native speaker born or made?

INQUIRER: So then it seems safer to assert that a native speaker is made rather than born. PROF. CHAMBERS: No. That would be a contradiction in terms, because native means born. PROF. CASSIDY: Truth by etymology! INQUIRER: Like saying all Indians are from India, otherwise they wouldnt be called Indians. Jack, I think you are using the definiendum in place of a definition. PROF. CHAMBERS: Yes, Indians are from India. Belgians are from Belgium. Belgians and Indians born in Canada are Canadians. Etc. INQUIRER: That line of argument could lead to some injustice to native peoples (and Belgians, etc.) when we are trying to do justice to the concept native speaker. Or do I smell a metaphysical rat (see Chomsky below) in what seems on the surface to be a cavillatio? PROF. WINER: I do think that native speakers are made, not born, but you are in fact including many different levels of dialect, education, awareness, etc. in this overall concept. Just to give what might prove to be a helpful angle or two. There are people who are super-conscious of language and language use - poets, writers, punsters, people who are making up new words either for fun or for a living; and there are people who are, generally speaking, unconscious of their language use or that of other people (although they may be able to characterise someone elses speech as hick or even imitate it, without being able to label or identify elements which lead to that characterisation). Both types have their advantages and disadvantages for the researcher. For example, the former are often more aware of differences and who might use what under what circumstances. The latter might be less likely to be contaminated by awareness of other possible forms. On the other hand, the former may have picked up a lot of forms without distinguishing them, and the latter may have picked up other forms, or half-understood rules, or confuse forms, without realizing it. INQUIRER: Supposing, then, that a native speaker is made rather T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 33
than born, at what age should he have begun to speak the language? I wonder if the Linguistic Society of America has any answers. DEAN FROMKIN: I am responding to your letter to Prof. Abramson, the President of the Linguistic Society of America. [Victoria Fromkin was Secretary-Treasurer]. I found your [questions] very interesting, but I am not sure that you are going to be able to find the acid test you are looking for [Appendix 2, Section 10]. Generally, in linguistic circles, the term native speaker is used to refer to someone whose first language is the one being referred to and who has continued to use this language. It is also sometimes used for a person who has learned the language in question before the completion of the critical age for language acquisition. Of course, no one is quite certain what that critical age is. We would of course be most happy if you would rejoin the Linguistic Society. Clearly you belong with us as your interests dovetail ours. I am enclosing a membership application. INQUIRER: Thank you for your kind response and the uncertainties expressed. I am enclosing a money order for $35.00 and the completed application form. Nice to be back after 15 years. I would be happy to take out a life membership if the Linguistic Society would officially abolish native speaker or offer satisfactory evidence of his or her existence. A question raised in my mind by Dean Fromkins response is, if our native speaker exists and is viable, can she switch from native speaker of one language to that of another if she discontinues using her first language because of changing circumstances, especially domicile, and with the passage of time? Prof. Chambers? PROF. CHAMBERS: No. MR. GURALNIK: I question that. I know ESL speakers whose native proficiency could never be challenged by a panel of native speakers unaware of their origins. INQUIRER: And how about someone who was orphaned and displaced from his motherland as a youth and never got a chance to speak his mother tongue again? MR. GURALNIK: I also know some who, displaced in adolescence half a century ago, have lost the assured competence they had in their youth but have never acquired full native proficiency in English and are, in effect, people without a native tongue, having faulty intuitions in both. INQUIRER: One would have thought all speakers were native speakers of some language or other. The way out of the logical impasse created by speakers who are linguistic orphans under the linguists notion of native speakership may be to rehabilitate them under universal norms of language proficiency. Which makes me ask, are there any self-made T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 34
native speakers or are they necessarily creatures of the environment, similar to natural organisms? PROF. CHAMBERS: Not that anyone knows of. INQUIRER: To hark back for a moment to the Longman definition (which should serve as a starting point for both Oxford and MerriamWebster), under what conditions, may I ask, are native speakers of English found in non-English-speaking countries? PROF. CHAMBERS: With English-speaking parents, in an Englishspeaking subculture - commonly found in India, Zimbabwe, Korea, etc. INQUIRER: I can see the role of a subculture, especially in cases in which English is exclusively used among ones peers or in ones trade or occupation. I dont see how parents being English-speaking or not has anything to do with it. Without having to go to non-English-speaking countries, right in our own cosmopolitan centres of population such as New York, London, and Toronto, we find thousands, perhaps millions, of cases of immigrant parents using a non-English language when talking to each other and to relatives of their age group while their children use English exclusively, any communication gap being bridged by the parents using English as a second language and the children having ears trained to follow what is going on between mom and dad though totally unable to talk to them in the mother tongue. In other cases in which the parents, being innocent of English, have always insisted on talking to their children in the mother tongue, the children seem to grow up as bilinguals, picking up English from their peers when they start going to school. In both types of upbringing, the children, whatever their mother tongue, should be native speakers of English if the linguists term has any meaning, i.e. as far as their insights and intuitions are concerned. By the same token, I would think other bilinguals who exhibit what is called nativelike competence, however or wherever they learned their English, are also native speakers of English. A notable, but not exceptional, instance seems to be Lloyd George, i.e. presuming he spoke the language with a natural English accent. Joseph Conrad, although his mastery of English grammar and vocabulary was faultless, is reputed to have sounded very Polish. The distinction between native and nonnative speaker soon breaks down. Considered in its various applications, I think the linguists native speaker (see Appendix 2, Section 7) is of questionable reality, an etherlike concept which is embodied in a quasi-privileged class of speakers of each language. PROF. CHAMBERS: No. Everyone who is a native speaker has native speaker intuitions, competence, grammar - ceteris paribus. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 35
INQUIRER: I wonder if anyone has bothered to compile a set of typical instances of such intuitions, competence, etc., like the sentence you supplied earlier, so that people supposed to be native speakers of English could be tested to see if they are really any better than or different from nonnative speakers who have acquired a certain degree of proficiency in English. Prof. J. C. Catford of the University of Michigan seems to have come close to furnishing a test of the kind we are talking about. He once wrote: What may prove to be a useful test of high-level ability in English consists of presenting pairs of words that are joined by and in a common phrase and asking the student to select the most likely order of the words in the phrase. With the pair up / down, for instance, he would decide whether the common phrase is up and down or down and up. Other pairs are: hands / feet, this / that, long / short, blue / black, peace / war, Cambridge / Oxford, right / wrong, beans / pork. (Catford, 1975) Prof. Catford, may I know if you have developed any more definitive tests since that one was formulated? PROF. CATFORD: [No comment]. INQUIRER: It seems to me that kind of a test which doesnt involve phrases whose word order is immutably fixed (hue and cry, part and parcel, wear and tear) could be used on native as well as nonnative users of English with a fifty-fifty chance of everyone getting the answers right. But some allowance will have to be made for the influence of old school ties, the desire for elegant variation in choosing ones words and word order, and particular preferences for peace as opposed to war and pork as against beans. PROF. CHAPMAN: I dont think Prof. Catfords test is worth much, if anything. All it does is test a knowledge of idiom. Idiom can be learned and, as you know, cleverer aspirants to speaking a foreign language are always very eager to learn idiom (and slang). Once they learn them, their rate of error need not be significantly different from that of some native speakers. Maybe a better test would be the order of prenominal modifiers, or other instances of what Whorf calls covert rules as distinct from overt rules. But maybe that wouldnt work either. In any event, it would be closer to the bone, as it were, than the idiom test. INQUIRER: On the question of paired words, I have been used to saying his and hers without ever thinking of variation. But nowadays I feel tempted to switch occasionally to hers and his. Perhaps this has more to do with the feminist influence on my linguistic genius than with native speakership. As for a test of the latter, what we could really use is one for telling educated native speakers apart from educated nonnative speakers. PROF. GIMSON: I think that it would indeed be very difficult to T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 36
establish a practical procedure for determining whether or not somebody who has acquired a profound command of, say, English without having it as his first language is to be counted as fully equivalent to someone for whom it is the first language. You can only test the externalised forms of the language - grammar, lexis, pronunciation - and proficiency in the first two items may be indistinguishable as between native and nonnative speaker. Pronunciation may most obviously provide clues for nonnative status, but I know many foreigners for whom English is a lately acquired language who can easily pass as English. INQUIRER: In establishing a testing procedure, I think only externalized linguistic features should be considered and pronunciation should certainly be one, if not the most important of them. After all, we are trying to define the native speaker of a language. Anyone who speaks a dialect according to standards acceptable to the society that speaks it should be considered a native. Testing of externalized features will also make sure that no native speaker gets away with intuitions that are claimed on the basis of nonlinguistic criteria such as birth and country of origin. DOCTOR B: Your inquiry raises one or two tricky issues. I am certainly not competent to assert whether there is a simple notion of native speaker applicable to many situations beyond the monolingual community, but the language teaching fraternity certainly has a notion of learning one language through another, and therefore by inference a notion of one or more original languages. My interest in that question concerns the teaching of communicative competence.... It certainly seems at times likely that a native or nativelike language provides a ceiling for the acquisition of communicative skills in any of a persons languages.... If it could be discovered that one language provides the ceilings for communicative competence, then there is evidence for a distinction. It is possible, however, that evidence can be acquired by another route - indeed I have a memory of some that was never published but seemed to me to be highly significant. Some 20 years ago, a series of experiments were run asking different users of English to fill in blanks in sentences. This was before cloze became a matter of routine, and it was characteristic of the examples used that native speakers (or people identified as such) achieved unanimity or near unanimity in filling the gaps. People identified as second-language speakers also in most cases offered a word which filled the gap grammatically but with nothing like the same unanimity. It was clear that the second group saw the problem in a different way, offered a much wider range of possibilities, and frequently produced sentences which were still grammatical but bizarre in comparison with a perfectly normal native-speaker choice. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 37
PROF. CASSIDY: Again, that begs the question. INQUIRER: Bizarre and normal remind me of the classic scenario of someone being hauled off to the insane asylum and an argument starts about who is insane and who is normal - hauler or haulee? I think group behaviour is involved here even with regard to questions of grammatical competence, especially if all the so-called native speakers happen to be speakers of the same dialect and the second-language speakers hail from various other parts of the English-speaking world. I have noticed, for example, that Americans tend to be more sparing of the definite article than Britons. However, since communicative competence could vary more widely from group to group than grammatical competence might, we should perhaps be satisfied with tests of the latter (besides lexis and pronunciation) in testing native speakership. PROF. BAILEY: If some group thinks you are a native speaker, then you are one. INQUIRER: Identification with a group or speech community is certainly an important consideration provided the group is a recognized one and certifiably sane. A native speaker should not only be a competent user of the specified language but his speech should not betray an accent that reminds you of another language. By the same token, in a more narrow sense, a native speaker of one dialect would be a nonnative speaker of another dialect. President Kennedy, for example, was a native speaker to Bostonians but probably not to the Texan group that sighed when Lyndon Johnson became President that at last they had a President who could speak English without an accent. Perhaps the Texan group should have specified Texas English. PROF. BAILEY: Ethnographers spend quite a lot of time debating the extrinsic definition of social group vs. the intrinsic definition, and thats the issue you face here. Thats whats behind my remark. If I think someone is a native speaker of German because I hear him speaking German, I may be misled. But I can judge who is a native speaker (or has native speaker competence) in English because thats my community and I can form an opinion based on my own intuition of the persons speech.
How a linguist diagnosed Indian English

INQUIRER: That reminds me of my friend Ajit Singh. I would like to tell his story here on the assumption that there is probably no essential difference between the transition (in perception as well as in the process of acquisition) from English to a foreign language like German and from one dialect to another of the same language. A professional English-speaking linguist who is not quite an Indian T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 38
(nor even a phonetician; he earns his living as a mathematical linguist) pronounced Mr. Singh a speaker of Indian English, whatever he meant by the term, after a brief personal conversation. He laughed at my suggestion that Ajit Singhs speech had more features of Received Pronunciation than features of Indian English, unless he was talking physiology rather than phonetics, or has a tendency to worship stereotypes. In any case, I thought Ajit Singh would be an interesting case to study and wrote to the Phonetics Department of University College, London, enclosing a tape recording of Mr. Singhs reading style. My referee, Prof. A. C. Gimson (who later joined this discussion), played it over to some of his colleagues without mentioning the name of the speaker. Prof. Gimson reported: [Mr. Singhs] speech is judged to be much nearer to RP than to Indian English - to the extent that on first hearing, some of my colleagues did not spot notably Indian features.... Some identified the accent as being one of the West Indies. Another colleague identified it as having Irish features. Ajit Singh has still to visit both Ireland and the West Indies; he has only casual acquaintances from those parts of the world. Indian English may be only as much of a dialectal entity as Boston English is. Are a few linguistic features sufficient to constitute a dialect? And how do we classify and label dialects and speakers of specific dialects? Or languages for that matter? By use of stereotypes, by vote within a group, or by linguistic tests such as those carried out by a phonetics expert? And to return to the main question, how do we determine native speakership? Should it be based on intrinsic and therefore somewhat subjective criteria (if I understand Prof. Bailey right) or linguistic criteria applied from outside? Is what is valid for ethnography valid in linguistics? Is the question of native speaker tied to a definition of speech community? Is an accepted member of a language community, ipso facto, a native speaker of that language? PROF. BAILEY: While this point is not entirely relevant to your concern, its worth recalling that the definition of language communities tends to be based on traits outside of language. Max Weinreich (the great Yiddishist) is reputed to have said: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. (I got it from one of his students who heard him say it; his son also recalls it, but doesnt know of it in print). PROF. CASSIDY: OK, so, for language, what? PROF. BAILEY: So the boundary between dialect and language is, in large measure, a political one. INQUIRER: I see that quotation in print but without attribution of T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 39
source or specification of context: quoted by Prof. William F. Mackey of Laval University. I can appreciate that the boundary between dialect and language is a political one in a political context; Max Weinreich was probably talking in such a context. Perhaps we should explore that a bit further. Let us ask Prof. Mackey if he can shed some light on the context of that quotation. PROF. MACKEY: [No comment]. INQUIRER: As the author of some two dozen books and 200 articles on language teaching in the context of bilingualism, Prof. Mackey may at least want to tell us how he understands and uses the term native speaker. Prof. Mackey? PROF. MACKEY: [No comment]. INQUIRER: Prof. Mackey, whom I have known since the early sixties, is not alone in not wanting to discuss native speaker. Several other eminent linguists to whom I sent a copy of the memo Anyone met a native speaker? after speaking to them on the phone have refused to comment on it. I havent asked anyone more than twice because I feel I am asking a pretty delicate question, or they may be busy with enterprises of greater pith and moment. One person I wanted to hear from is Prof. Paul Garvin of Buffalo. We had a chat during a coffee break at York University recently during which he referred, in a rather aggrieved manner, to some people considering others as nonnative speakers. So I thought perhaps he might like my second definition of native speaker as doing justice to a wider spectrum of humanity. Here is what Paul Garvin has to say: PROF. GARVIN: The bulk of [this] discussion is predicated on the assumption of the relevance of the role of the notion of native speaker (or, more commonly, of native speaker / hearer) in transformational generative grammar as an authoritative source of grammaticality judgments. If one does not accept this theoretical position as relevant to the study of language (but rather deplores it as one of the many manifestations of scientism in American and American-inspired linguistics, as indicated in the enclosed document from the early sixties), most of the arguments regarding the role of the native speaker and the definition of the notion of native speaker become equally devoid of relevance. INQUIRER: Prof. Garvin is referring to The Transformation Theory, a panel discussion featuring Raimonde Dallaire and others (Dallaire, 1962), which I found very lively but not quite relevant to our discussion. The notion of native speaker is important not merely for Chomskyan linguistics but also in everyday life, as when someone says, Only native speakers need apply. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 40
PROF. GARVIN: In my professional experience, native speaker has served well as a commonsense notion indicating an individual whose command of the language is considered native by the fellow members of his speech community - which again is a commonsense notion indicating a group of people who consider themselves speakers of the same language (needless to say, language is as much of a technically undefined commonsense notion as the earlier ones). INQUIRER: I have no problem with language and native in either popular or technical usage. But I dont think the kind of proprietorship implied in the technical usage of native speaker is either linguistically and socially justifiable or helpful for purposes of clear communication. PROF. GARVIN: The importance of the native speaker in my frame of reference has been his role as a source of data in the kind of field-workoriented discovery procedure that I favor (and that seems to be quite out of fashion with most of my colleagues). The issue of who is an authority in matters of language correctness in my view belongs into the realm of sociolinguistic standard-language theory, and I deplore the absence of references to this in [this] discussion. INQUIRER: That may be an important issue, but how can we discuss the role of the native speaker before we have verified the existence of such a speaker? To return to the subject, I think we must not allow politics, ethnography, etc. to influence our definition of native speaker although, of course, since language is a social phenomenon, the evidence on which we base our definition would have to be drawn from the social sciences and the humanities. PROF. DORIAN: If I were to speak from my own personal feeling as a polyglot, I think I would say that the native speaker is one who does not have to think at all about how to formulate what he wants to say where phonology and grammar are concerned, but only where style and word choice and the like are concerned. This is how I would determine that I have only one native language, despite fluency in others. I find that my fluency in a language such as German, with its excess baggage of agreement and gender, is a matter of coming to be able to reckon out ever more rapidly how I should formulate what I want to say. I can never produce adjective agreement without thinking, despite the fact that Im fluent and have no accent. A rough working definition, for what its worth. INQUIRER: Thought processes seem to go on at different levels and in varying degrees all the time the native speaker is speaking. Pronunciation may be the least conscious element of speech, although you may think twice before pronouncing the word controversy the usual way, i.e. (CON.truh.vur.see), when your colleague has just finished saying he T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 41
doesnt want to get into a (cun.TROV.ur.see). Sounding grammatical in ones native language could also get one into varying degrees of difficulty depending on the complexity of the syntax involved, as when something distracts you after you have saved a certain preposition in the mind to end a clause or sentence with and the preposition happens to be many words removed from the verb concerned. Usage could also lead to reflection, especially if the expression in question happens to be an idiom rather than a loose sequence of words. Is the one, for example, who says It is a whole new ball game more of a native speaker than the one who thinks of making a distinction and says in the less usual way, It is a different ball game altogether?
Aristocracys Aristocracys squeezed and bleating sound

Returning to criteria for determining native speakership, I agree that only linguistic features such as choice of vocabulary, patterns of grammar, and phonetics should be taken into account. And in phonetics, only purely phonetic features should matter, not the physiological ones that may be thought to modify the accent of the generality of RP speakers. PROF. GIMSON: In the last edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary, I tried to avoid Daniel Joness socially bound definition of RP speakers and have preferred to define the accent in phonological and phonetic terms. This involves postulating a phonological system (with a traceable historical pedigree), prescribing the incidence of phonemes in words, but allowing some phonetic tolerances in realizations to allow for our anatomical idiosyncrasies. I note that the majority of present-day BBC news-readers fall easily within my limits - this was not so in the more permissive atmosphere of the 1960s. But the Royal Family exploits my phonetic tolerances to the full. I would include as RP speakers Lord Carrington, Michael Foot, Wedgwood Benn, and Mrs. Thatcher (a good example of acquired RP) but not Mr. Heath, Mr. Callaghan or the new Neil Kinnock. (Some would claim that RP has always been a political disadvantage for the Labour Party). One feature of some RP speakers which I do not take into account is voice quality - a squeezed and bleating sound once associated with the aristocracy, but rare nowadays. INQUIRER: Another nonlinguistic factor that may have a wrong influence on our judgment, though not so badly as a speakers name, looks, and mannerisms, seems to be culture. PROF. GIMSON: The link between the language and a specific culture may reveal discrepancies. Slang of school days, earlier social conventions, etc. may not be accessible to someone who has come late to the language. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 42
On the other hand, similar differences occur between generations of native speakers or, in the case of English, between British and American speakers. It would be interesting to discover whether native and nonnative speakers are capable of acquiring equivalent competence in the language in the sense that they have the same intuitive feeling for what is grammatical and acceptable.... But, judging from the remarkable proficiency in English of a number of foreign friends, I would suspect that it would be difficult to reach a hard-and-fast conclusion. I have often thought that truly bilingual friends were to some extent culturally deficient in one language or both. PROF. CASSIDY: Not necessarily, or not more than some small-range monolinguals. INQUIRER: I wouldnt say so either. And having half a loaf of another language or culture is better than having none. In the more and more pluralistic societies of our expanding universe, why should people be so steeped in their own language and culture as to have little to do with their neighbours? After all, even the so-called native speakers enjoy competence in their own language and culture only in varying degrees, not absolutely. Of course, language and culture cannot be divorced; the more cultured we are in a language the better we are able to understand and use it. MR. GURALNIK: Sapir has stated that language and culture are not necessarily correlated. For example, the Athabaskan languages belong to four distinct culture areas, and the Hupa culture is identical with those of the Yurok and Karok, although their languages are totally unrelated. And yet one cannot deny the effect of a culture on the language of its speakers, and vice versa. I think the effect is variable, depending on how closed and self-contained the society is. In heterogeneous America, I think the correlation is minimal. INQUIRER: So, perhaps, we had better consider only linguistic features when we discuss native speaker and make linguistic proficiency the main criterion of native speakership. PROF. CHAMBERS: One need not be proficient at all - not unusually articulate, or rhetorically gifted, or endowed with a large vocabulary - to be a native speaker. INQUIRER: But, really, does nativity have any more bearing on ones language ability than on ones abililty to walk, run, or swim? Perhaps a distinction could be made in the case of swimming because if an infant is dropped into water, he seems able to survive for a time. But if you put him down on the ground he doesnt try to get up and walk. As we grow older, we seem to need swimming lessons, as though we forgot what we knew at birth or in our prenatal environment. But why we have to T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 43
acquire language is probably not because we forgot our mother tongue or native language; we didnt have it as a native gift in the first place, unless someone can produce evidence to the contrary. Another question is, can the distinction between native and nonnative speaker, especially since it happens to favour one group of speakers of each language against all others, become discriminatory in some of its applications such as hiring for dictionary-editing or languageteaching positions? This was debated at the 1980 MLA Annual Meeting held in Houston. So-called native speakers of English were apparently questioning the preference of foreign-language departments for hiring native speakers rather than American-born instructors. Prof. Herbert Lederer of the University of Connecticut contended that any policy of preference for native speakers is demeaning and destructive to the essence of the language-teaching profession. On the contrary, it was argued, there are subtleties of language so difficult to acquire and employ that native speakers offer undeniable advantages to the student learning their language. In the following year, Lederer again stressed in a journal article that educational philosophy does not justify this preference for native speakers. (Lederer, 1980, 1981) In this connection, I am proud to recall that when I was head of Holt Canadas lexicography division from 1967 to 1973, I used to screen job applicants using a written test of lexicographical aptitude, with the result that, in 1973, for the first time since the company was founded in 1904, a black and a Chinese got on the editorial staff. In 1967 and 1968, a Finnish young lady with a broad accent and a couple of other North Europeans had come in practically unnoticed. The black and the Chinese proved to be as good editors as any of the others. I thought it didnt matter whether they were native speakers or not. However, their jobs didnt last long because the lexicography division was abolished later that year. But three titles we had managed to put out continue to make money for the company. I think the real bottom line should be the social consequences of not defining our terms clearly or of stressing the wrong elements of a definition. I wonder if Stanley J. Reid, current president of Holt, Rinehart & Winston of Canada, would like to comment on the situation I have just referred to. MR. REID: Since what you relate happened during the tenure of another president, I feel that it would be inappropriate for me to comment. INQUIRER: Just the same, your answer serves the purpose I had in mind, thank you. Which reminds me of what Prof. Gates said earlier about Goves three-legged dog. A lexicographer who worked under Editor-in-Chief Gove on Websters Third tells me that during his days there he never saw an T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 44
editorial staffer who was a member of a minority group. PROF. GATES: There was a black woman on the Merriam editorial staff while I was there [1956-1962] and possibly a black man; she was there only a short time .... If there was a man, he didnt last long either. INQUIRER: Sounds like the same kind of domestic tragedy as I witnessed at Holt. Which brings me back to the social consequences of not defining terms correctly.
Anyone met a native dishwasher?

A dishwasher, to take a near-absurd example, in the understanding of some restaurateurs, outside of the machine sense, is not just a person who washes dishes but a person who can wash dishes squeaky clean by virtue of having been raised in North America and thus become immune to the ill effects of common household detergents. The latter part of the definition is not always made so explicit, but it is well known that immigrants and other foreigners are often denied jobs because they lack North American job experience. (It is a Catch-22 situation similar to what young people experience when they first enter the job market.) This kind of discrimination in hiring has been made illegal in most jurisdictions (see Sections 4 and 10 of the Human Rights Code of the Province of Ontario) which I consider no small victory for the advocates of acquired as opposed to native competence, of education as opposed to mere place of birth and parentage. Getting back to linguistics, supposing the difference between native and nonnative speaker is real or legitimate, is it necessarily one of kind or merely of degree, as implied by the frequently used expression educated native speaker? PROF. GATES: Semantically, the concept is absolute. The actual people, of course, have degrees of competence. But competence is not part of the meaning of the term, it is a logical inference from the probability that one who has spoken a language all his life will have greater competence than someone who acquires it as a second language, typically after the critical age - empirical generalizations. INQUIRER: I think they are dangerous generalizations. It is the same kind of logical inference about native and nonnative dishwashers that has been made illegal. MR. COWIE: Since time (early childhood) and place of acquisition (parental home) are central to my understanding of the concept, the difference between native and non-native speakers must be one of degree, as the learning experience of a child brought up in an environment different from that of its parents may approximate in varying degrees to that of the true native. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 45
Chronologically, my wifes first language was French, which she learnt at home from her parents and whose primacy throughout childhood was sustained as the language of intimate family contact. Externally, however, her linguistic environment was entirely English from the beginning, her parents being wartime refugees. As an adult, she is proficient in both languages. Surely we would want to say that my wife is a (competent, educated) native speaker of both languages, even though French had a head start and the early mode of acquisition of English was only partly domestic. I might add that for a limited range of purposes, my proficiency in French surpasses my wifes. But I am not a native speaker, having learnt French formally in school from the age of 11. INQUIRER: I see this as an error of trying to equate native speakership in the basic sense with native speakership in the extended linguistic sense. Native speakership, as I have defined it in the first sense, is a vital statistic and in that sense Mr. Cowie is a native speaker of English and Mrs. Cowie a native speaker of French. A statistic admits of no degree. In the linguists sense, however, native speakership (which, to me, is proficiency in the specified language) should admit of degree. On a scale of 1 to 10, Mr. and Mrs. Cowie could be placed anywhere in both English and French depending on their proficiency in either language and the politics of testing. PROF. CHAMBERS: I dont consider the term to be politically charged, or vague, or elitist. You misunderstand its use by linguists, anthropologists, and educators when you ascribe to them attributions of correctness and proficiency in their use of the term. They mean nothing more than the attribution of useful intuitions to those who are native speakers, i.e. the knowledge that sentences are ambiguous, or meaningful, or anomalous, or paraphrases. INQUIRER: But there are two sides to a coin. When you say that a native speaker has these intuitions by virtue of nativity, you are implying without proof that nonnative speakers as a rule cant have them. My contention, when I refer to proficiency, is that, your native speaker, per se, is not more intuitive linguistically than your nonnative speaker. Linguists who deny nativelike intuitions, competence, grammar, or what have you to nonnatives as a class are setting up a distinction like U and non-U which has only snob value. Social distinctions based on linguistic disabilities are nothing new. In ancient India, the right to speak Sanskrit was reserved to the Brahmins. Low-caste Sudras within the Hindu fold and Mlechchhas of foreign extraction who were outside the fold had to be content with a less pure speech called Prakrit. The present-day native-nonnative distinction is not as bad as distinctions were in ancient India, although sometimes you begin to wonder, when people start recruiting native speakers, of English, T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 46
for example, whether they dont really mean White Anglo-Saxon protestants; Scots, maybe, but no Irish need apply. If our native-nonnative distinction is to be scientifically based, I think it has to be provable, testable, and applicable across the board like any other distinction between opposites - the male-female distinction, for example. PROF. BAILEY: The native-nonnative distinction is more difficult to establish than the male-female distinction. It is more like gender orientation which is acquired behavior somewhat parallel to language. INQUIRER: According to medical authorities, handedness is another characteristic that is acquired rather than being innate: There is now a substantial body of evidence to suggest that human beings are born with a sexual potential and that heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual preferences unfold during the experiences of childhood and adolescence. This is not to say that prenatal and genetic factors are unimportant. A useful analogy given by John A. Money of Johns Hopkins University is that of handedness. A human is born not right- or left-handed but bipotential. Experiences in the first few years of life define whether the individual will develop the right, the left, or both cerebral hemispheres - and handedness. (1981 Britannica Medical and Health Annual) However, both handedness and gender orientation seem relatively easy to establish - just one look, when you get a chance, at how the subject writes, eats, or acts in congress will do! No one can eat at the same time with the fork in the left hand and in the right. The concept of native speaker, however, cannot be predicated one way or the other about an individual at any given moment as you can establish the male-female distinction using a test of chromosome patterns. Native speaker seems a concept that lacks necessary and sufficient conditions for verification. PROF. DORIAN: At the extreme, defining a native speaker is obvious. Its at the low-proficiency end of things, and perhaps also at the deeply fluent bilingual end of things, that the concept becomes tricky. If an intuitive sense of what is right and wrong in a language were required, many of the native speakers of beleaguered minority languages, unwritten and without a standard form, would probably be excluded. PROF. BAILEY: The real problem, as I see it, is what value native speaker intuition has - ones ability to make accurate statements about ones language behavior. INQUIRER: I believe it has only as much value as the intuitions of any other competent user of a language. Linguistic studies based on the intuitions of native speakers seem to be begging the question. MR. COWIE: I have attempted to define native speaker in terms of T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 47
mode of acquisition rather than of level of proficiency. These will normally go together. But by keeping them apart for purposes of defining native speaker, one can account for the proficient foreigner, whose level of competence surpasses that of even educated natives, and of course for the linguistically inadequate native. Linguistic studies based on the intuitions of native speakers are only as reliable as the intuitions that need to be invoked for the purposes of those studies. I find, for example, that when I am testing minimal lexical variation in quasi-idioms, the intuitions of my native-speaker undergraduates are no more informative than the responses of mature foreign learners. INQUIRER: I think the native-foreigner distinction which lies behind the native speaker - foreign learner distinction is itself questionable when used in linguistics, whatever its value in ethnography, politics, law, etc. I believe every human being is born a foreigner in regard to a particular language. What he or she has as a native is the potential ability to acquire languages, whatever the language he or she actually acquires happens to be. And in regard to a language or anything else for that matter that is acquired, the mode of acquisition should be less important than the level of proficiency attained. Speaking of natives and foreigners, even in legal and political use, the distinction seems to be gradually disappearing with the progress of civilization and more enlightened attitudes to the right of people to move about on this earth which humans have inherited in common. The nationality that one has acquired seems to have greater weight these days than what one was born with. Twenty years ago, for example, when you crossed the U.S.-Canada border in either direction, the first question Immigration would ask was Where were you born? but nowadays it is invariably What is your citizenship? Shouldnt that give us linguists food for thought? PROF. MCDAVID: To me, a native speaker is one who has learned a language, or languages, or a variety or varieties of a language from early and continuing exposure rather than from conscious study. MR. GURALNIK: If the term is to have any meaning or meanings at all, that must be one of them. PROF. MCDAVID: That is, I learned by such exposure my own cultivated variety of Up-Country South Carolina speech; at the same time, by childhood associations I learned, tolerably, a couple of locally spoken non-standard varieties. RP, eastern Virginian, Charlestonian, rural Yankee and the like I picked up even more imperfectly, from observation and conscious modification of my phonetic spectrum. Latin, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Burmese, Danish, and Norwegian I learned very imperfectly, by conscious study. INQUIRER: I like your description or explanation of the genesis of T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 48
the native speaker chiefly because you seem to have shot down the concept it embodies by referring to languages and dialects in the plural. It is physically impossible for a person to have more than one mother but, as we have seen earlier, a person may acquire more than one language or dialect and use them with equal facility as if each were his mother tongue or native language. We may call such languages first language, second language, etc. using some point of reference for the numbering but a question such as which of them is the more dominant seems to be purely circumstantial and somewhat academic in regard to native speakership. PROF. BAILEY: George Steiner [as mentioned above] claims not to know what his first language is - German, English, or French. But I think everyone who is more certain about his or her mother tongue is a native speaker of that tongue.
How George Kurien lost his mother tongue

INQUIRER: I know so many people who know what their mother tongues are but who cant speak them very well, like my friend George Kurien. George Kurien was born during the British raj in India, of parents speaking Malayalam as mother tongue. He grew up in the capital city of a princely state listening to lots of English spoken around him, by educated Britons and by his lawyer father who, though a strong nationalist, was fluently bilingual - diglossic would be more correct, I suppose. Kurien started with Malayalam as his first language in school. At about 10, English took over and he had to give up formal study of his mother tongue although he could have kept it as his second language. He opted instead for Sanskrit and stuck to it for the next 10 years. George left his home state when he was 21 and has been back only a few times for a few weeks each during the past 35 years. For 11 years after leaving home, he lived a semi-cloistered life in international communities where the only languages of commerce were English and Latin. He was incidentally training to be a professor of English, but in the process he practically lost the little Malayalam he learned in school. He says there was a three-year period when Latin was the medium of instruction and examination and he was more fluent in it than in his mother tongue. George still speaks his mother tongue with ease to his mother, wife, and other relatives and friends but has a limited vocabulary. He uses it only in jest on his Canadian-born children. When he gets mad at them or indulges in those sweet nothings (he says he uses a clock slightly more advanced than the fifth of Prof. Jooss Five Clocks) he sticks to English while his wife breaks into her native idiom. And George says he is not good T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 49
at writing Malayalam though his wife is not much better; she was trained as an engineer. English is practically George Kuriens first and last language. An exceptional case, the linguist will say, but I think this is one of those exceptions that prove the rule - in the original sense of putting the rule to the test. Since linguists tend to explain away cases of nonnative linguistic proficiency as exceptions to the rule, a digression seems in order to explain the true meaning of the proverb Exception proves the rule. The proverb, as several writers on linguistic myths have pointed out, is one of the most fatuous of its kind if taken in the popular sense but a universally applicable maxim in its true meaning. (See especially, Hayakawa, 1972, and Burnham, 1975). The original meaning of the word proves happens to be, not confirm as the OED glosses it under the entry exception, 1, but put to the test as in the OED entry prove, B, I, 1, although the proverb itself is not cited under this entry. The original meaning is also seen fossilized in current English expressions such as the proof of the pudding and proving ground. In Conan Doyles The Sign of Four, Sherlock Holmes astutely observes to Dr. Watson: I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule. There is no doubt that is the logical and scientific interpretation. The popular meaning apparently stems from a legal sense of exception, as given in OED under exception, 4a: a plea made by a defendant in bar of the plaintiffs action. It seems to have its origin in Roman Law. Cicero (in Pro Balbo, 14.32) said: Quod si exceptio facit, ne liceat, ibi necesse est licere, ubi non est exceptum.... (But if an exception means that it is not permitted, then where there is no exception, it must be permitted). The popular English sense dates (according to OED) from Samuel Collins (1617), who said Exceptio figit regulam, and J. Wilson (1663) who said Exceptio firmat regulam in non exceptis (The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs). The basis of Collinss figit (i.e. fixes) and Wilsons firmat (i.e. affirms) is not clear and is probably lost in folklore. Cases such as George Kurien, and they are legion, surely show that, just as a persons birth has no necessary connection with his native speakership in the linguists sense, so his mother tongue has little to do with it. MR. GURALNIK: I was born into a household of nonnative speakers of English, and it was not until I was five that I came into prolonged contact with native speakers (i.e. my teachers).... I would like to know whether I am a native speaker of English. INQUIRER: Native speakership seems to be a privilege rather than a T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 50
right, but I think you should be a native speaker of English according to my second definition, especially since you have successfully used your intuitions for a whole lifetime in a highly specialized area of applied linguistics. You are, of course, also a native speaker of your mother tongue or first language in the first sense of the term. I only hope you are not claiming any of the more dubious prerogatives associated with native speakership in the second sense, such as infallibility. MR. GURALNIK: No. INQUIRER: Prof. Allen Walker Read once asserted in a paper presented to the Linguistic Circle of Columbia University that native speakers cannot make mistakes. DOCTOR C: I was at that talk and I happen to agree with Read. I quote: It is a fundamental assumption that is obligatory and inexorable.... If linguistics is to have rigor, the linguist must respect his raw material and not interfere with it. The popular view that mistakes are found everywhere cannot be supported. A close parallel is that of the Young Turks of the 1870s, who held that sound laws admit of no exception. It seemed absurd, but was necessary for a sound scientific base. The doctrine that native speakers cannot make mistakes is a procedural necessity of the same kind. MR. GURALNIK: A dubious doctrine, unless one accepts all varieties and dialects of a language as separate entities, a notion that runs counter to current understanding of what a language is. INQUIRER: I find the doctrine too dogmatic for my Catholic beliefs. Here I am, inquiring into the scientific basis of the concept of native speaker, wondering if we are not dealing with just an Abominable Snowman, but Doctor C would like to think that my Abominable Snowman not only exists but is also infallible as a matter of procedural necessity. I suppose the dogma of papal infallibility is also at least partially a procedural necessity, so that the Pope can go ahead and define more dogmas. But then, His Holiness is supposed to be infallible only when speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals. The claim that the native speakers intuitive judgments are infallible whenever he opens his mouth is more than I can take. PROF. MCDAVID: Being a native speaker doesnt confer papal infallibility on ones intuitive judgments. In fact, one can frequently be wrong about the status or ethnicity of familiar forms, for all the cussed reasons human beings can go wrong. I frequently find myself at odds with the brethren who rely on intuitive judgments of a native speaker - for it all depends on how much opportunity one has to observe, calibrate, and modify the judgments of an earlier period. Its just like politics; or like the T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 51
little girl in Wordsworths We Are Seven. I trust positive native-speaker reactions fairly well: for instance, I know that my ethnic and cultural peers will say might could, used to could, used to didnt, for I have heard them enough and have no taboos about their status; but if someone from my home town says such forms are counter-intuitive, or whatever the fashionable term of derogation happens to be, then I try to make sure that my purse is secure. Conversely, when Guy Lowman or I record from York State Yankees such putatively black forms as liked to fell, I take the evidence of usage as far superior to any intuitions anyone may come up with.... As you know, I suspect that the intuition of the native speaker is often a lazy mans way out - a means of avoiding the responsibility of looking at evidence. When The SECOL Review publishes my Failure of Intuition I might be able to say somewhat more about one part of your problem. INQUIRER: Raven McDavid passed away a year after saying that. It was always a pleasure for a nonacademic like me to listen to him at learned societies meetings. There was so little that was purely academic about what he said or wrote. Prof. McDavids SECOL Review article appeared in the Summer 1984 number and contains a small revelation. The article examines in detail the intuitive judgments of a single cultivated South Carolina informant, reviewed by Bernard Bloch in 1937. From an analysis of the informants background, the writer infers that his judgments should have a fair chance of being accurate and reliable. McDavid goes on: This inference, however, is not supported by the facts. Of seventy judgments involving the vocabulary, seventeen are false and fifteen are doubtful. Of thirteen judgments on pronunciation, ten are wrong and another is dubious. Of three grammatical judgments, two are wrong. The last paragraph of the 12-page article brings the moment of truth. As Swift concluded his A Modest Proposal, I make these evaluations of the informants judgments in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (record SC 42d) without expectation of personal or professional profit, except as they enable me to be more objective. For I happened to be the informant whom Bloch interviewed in 1937; and it was my own intuition that was so often out of phase with the facts. INQUIRER: So much for native speaker intuitions and the case for infallibility. The problem of native-speaker errors cannot be easily dismissed.
Explain away native-speaker errors

Linguists of the Chomskyan school seem to explain away a native T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 52
speakers mistakes as lapses, slips of the tongue, syntactic blends, and errors of judgment, since by definition they know the formation rules of their mother tongue (Corder, 1973). This is like saying (as Prof. Chambers above) that all Indians are from India, otherwise they wouldnt be called Indians. According to the linguist, the mistakes made by nonnative speakers are supposed to be of a different kind from mistakes made by native speakers. They are not physical failures but the sign of an imperfect knowledge of the code. The learners have not yet internalized the formation rules of the second language. What is more, Native speakers are able to correct their own errors, but learners cannot...: The learners situation is similar to that of an infant acquiring his mother tongue (ibid.). But whereas the infant acquiring its mother tongue proceeds to adulthood and graduates as a native speaker, the foreign learner seems condemned to remain till kingdom come in the limbo of his infantile condition. I find this also somewhat revolting to my beliefs. I think the nonnative speaker deserves a place in the same purgatory of language acquisition as the native speaker. PROF. DORIAN: Nowadays even the more enlightened transformationalists concede that judgments of correctness are not remotely uniform. (See John Ross on Wheres English in Fillmore, 1979). On the other hand, I would say that mother-tongue speakers are not the same as native speakers - the former can be defined by language loyalty, emotional preference, order of learning, and the like, but it does seem that the term native speaker implies a degree of competence that is, the ability to speak like a native. Fluency is not enough in itself though: the foreign learner can become fluent and yet make so many communicative and social errors in the use of language as to mark himself / herself out as anything but a native speaker. That is, the term seems to me to imply both certain linguistic skills and certain sociolinguistic skills. INQUIRER: If by degree of competence you mean in the acquired variety, then I think you have just endorsed the two definitions I formulated at the beginning of this discussion, i.e., native speaker 1: mother-tongue or firstlanguage speaker; 2: competent user of a specific language. But what bothers me is that, if this linguistic competence which is claimed as the characteristic quality of the native speaker admits of degree, why cant the foreign learner partake of it as his learning gradually improves? Let us ask Prof. Pit Corder who seems rather noncommittal about this in his Introducing Applied Linguistics. Prof. Corder, if, as you say, the competence which the linguist describes is an idealization or an abstraction (p. 91), could we take the next logical step and say that native speaker itself is a kind of ideal to T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 53
which speakers of a language (natives and nonnatives) may be said to conform in varying degrees? PROF. CORDER: [No comment]. INQUIRER: It seems hardly fair that the foreign learner should be considered a horse of a different colour from the native speaker, with no rational evidence whatsoever to back up the distinction. To me, the foreign learner is in the same boat as the child acquiring its first language, as Pit Corder concedes in his book, and the ill-educated native-speaking freshman who writes about everyone being middle-aged during the Middle Ages, salesmen roaming the countryside exposing themselves, and the anal parliament. (See SPECIMEN A above) However, linguists are not to be laughed at. We dont laugh at the Bible for saying the world was created in six days. By definition or as an article of the linguists faith, as it were, our native speaker is born with grammatical competence. By another fiat, or as a matter of course, he or she also acquires communicative competence: The communicative competence of native speakers includes the ability to vary their usage according to the situation in which they find themselves as well as the ability to recognise such variation. (Hartmann, 1983) The foreign learner is assumed to be a case of being handicapped, often referred to in such affectionate terms as exceptional and special: Such dictionaries reflect an awareness of the special needs of such users, and particularly of the fact that while mature native English speakers have acquired much of the grammatical system of the language, no such assumption can be made in the case of even advanced foreign learners. (Cowie, 1983b) DOCTOR A: Its possible, I suppose, though I should think unusual, for a child to learn two languages in infancy, so that either or both could be called native; and I suppose its also possible, though again unusual, to acquire such proficiency in a second or later language that ones performance would be undistinguishable from that of genuine native speakers. PROF. CASSIDY: During the learning stage, such children may confuse the two native languages merely because neither can be distinguished by nonlinguistic attachments. INQUIRER: Anyone who has looked into a 1982 publication on the subject, Francois Grosjeans Life With Two Languages, will be convinced that bilingualism that equals native speakership in two languages is not only possible but quite common. Grosjean says: Using two or more languages in ones daily life is as natural to the bilingual as using only one language is to the monolingual (p. viii). To the average person in the United States or Europe bilingualism ... is restricted to a few countries such as Canada, Belgium, or Switzerland.... But if we question a citizen of an African or Asian T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 54
nation ... bilingualism is the norm; most people speak two or more languages, and a large proportion of the worlds population is bilingual. (p. 1) Life With Two Languages also discusses myths such as that the earlier a language is acquired, the more fluent a person will be in it and questionable assumptions such as that before the onset of puberty the brain is more malleable or plastic and hence more receptive to language learning. Particularly interesting in the context of native speakership is the position taken by recent researchers of the developmental school that acquisition of a second language parallels that of the first language, and that transfer (or interference) is of minor importance.... The child learning a second language recapitulates the learning process of a native speaker of that language. (pp. 192-193) A remarkable thing about Grosjeans book is that he seems to eschew the term native speaker in the theoretical linguists sense of arbiter of grammaticality. Of course, one could argue that Grosjean is not ex professo dealing with native speakership and grammaticality. Grosjean does use native speaker (as above) in more than a dozen places in his 341-page book, but it is clearly in the factual sense of mother-tongue speaker. In my opinion, this down-to-earth and truly enlightening work, whose main strength is in its case histories of language acquisition and language use from all over the world, effectively seems to prove that there is no such animal as the linguists native speaker. PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: I am constantly amazed at how blind - or ignorant - some linguists are. On both sides of the GermanDutch border the local speech is practically identical, but on the German side the children go to school and learn to become native speakers of German, and on the other side the school education turns the children into native speakers of Dutch. I am told the situation is very similar on the French-Italian border. DOCTOR A: But one can quickly spot the speaker who doesnt qualify as native: you remember the old joke that Roman Jakobson spoke Russian in six or seven languages. PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: That reminds me of the traditional flat earth argument: any damn fool can see the earth is flat and, in any case, if it was really round, the people underneath would fall off. Doctor A can quickly spot those who have a foreign accent, and so he knows they all have a foreign accent. INQUIRER: It may be easy to identify individual nonnative speakers. Pronunciation usually gives them away (e.g. Joseph Conrad) in spite of proficiency in grammar, vocabulary, etc. And I suppose it is a common fallacy to make generalizations based on individual instances; Ab uno disce omnes, i.e. if you have seen one, youve seen em all! DOCTOR A: As for native-speaker intuition, I think its indispensable for linguists. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 55
INQUIRER: I think intuition is indispensable for everyone, whether one is a linguist, an auto mechanic, or a physician. The best diagnostic equipment without human intuition in the use of it may be worthless. But I think such intuition comes with training and experience, not from circumstances of birth or infancy, although these doubtless could help in a subsidiary role. It is like your having a better chance of becoming an engineer if your mother was an engineer. But as an engineer, what your intuitions are really worth would depend on your personal attainments, not on your mothers credentials. There are no native speakers any more than there are born engineers. Even if native speakers do exist, they and the linguists who are their handlers dont have any monopoly on intuitive knowledge. Oftentimes they dont even seem to be studying the common, natural language of speech communities. This was amply demonstrated by a study carried out at Pennsylvania State University and reported in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. (Spencer, 1973) In this study, one hundred and fifty exemplar sentences from six linguists articles were presented to 43 linguistically naive and 22 linguistically non-naive native speakers. Native speakers agreed among themselves as to the acceptability or unacceptability of 80% of the sentences. Subjects shared intuitions with linguists in only half of the exemplars. It was suggested that linguists should consult nonlinguists as to the acceptability of exemplars which illustrate the rules proposed as a check that those rules reflect the formal structure of the common language being described. As Prof. David Crystal of the University of Reading (one of our participants) says, We have to distinguish clearly between the intuition of the native speaker (the man who is linguistically naive, as it is often put) and the intuition of the linguist, i.e. the analyst. The two intuitions work in different ways. The native speakers can only be safely used to provide information about what he feels is in the language - about what is a normal usage or meaning, or what is deviant; it cannot be safely asked to provide opinions as to how this data should be analysed.... Reliable intuitions on the latter point are the product of training and professional experience - and in this respect, of course, the linguist is no different from, say, a physicist. The difference between the linguist and physicist, though, is that the linguist may be a native speaker as well: the two kinds of intuition can reside in the one man ... and it is here that the dangers associated with subjectivity lie. (Crystal, 1971) I think the very idea of the native speaker as the fountainhead of all linguistic inspiration is a deeper source of subjectivity than linguists mixing up their intuitions as linguists with those as native speakers. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 56
Labov, Labov, Dorian & semi-speakers

PROF. LABOV: You might want to look at the discussion of several marginal cases [of native speaker] in my 1966 book on New York City. I found that people who came to New York City between 5 and 9 years old behaved like the others, but those who came after that showed marked peculiarities.... Finally, I suggest that you might want to write to Prof. Nancy Dorian of Bryn Mawr College who has written a paper on semi-speakers, which raises serious challenges to the limits on native speakership and the definition of the speech community. INQUIRER: Dr. Dorian has kindly sent me a couple of her papers. In one of them she refers to her field work in the coastal East Sutherland area of mainland Scotland: In a total pool of Gaelic speakers which numbered 140 in 1972, there were at the upper end of the spectrum a few individuals who were more comfortable and proficient in Gaelic than in English, in the middle range many who were skilled bilinguals, fluent in both languages, and at the lower end some who could make themselves understood in imperfect Gaelic but were very much at home in English. These I have called semi-speakers. (Dorian, 1977) I dont think this phenomenon is peculiar to a dying language. You can find cases similar to what Dr. Dorian describes in any bilingual or diglossic community. They seem to me the combined result of individual differences in language acquisition and social conditions inhibiting language use. We find the same kind of variation in the language competence of so-called native speakers. Some of our native speakers seem to me of an even lesser breed than semi-speaker, what I may call demisemispeaker. What I would really like to find more of in our own society is a kind of speaker who used to be more common a quarter of a century ago, before the TV era. There were highly educated people - professors, lawyers, journalists, usually people from the learned professions - who could come alive on a platform, whether with a prepared speech or speaking impromptu, but without the aid of notes or Teleprompter. It is something they acquired by virtue of education - a sort of highly refined and cultured gift of the gab. They held you captive by their fluent command of the English language, never stumbling or backtracking in search of the right expression, by their eloquence, wit, humour, literary allusions, bon mots, and other ornaments of speech. It used to be a treat to listen to such speakers. They left you with the kind of satisfaction you get from listening to a concert or watching a dance recital. Edward Kennedy spoke somewhat in that style after his campaign T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 57
for the Democratic nomination in 1979 but, of course, he had help from a speechwriter. Such performers seem rare nowadays. You hear of them sometimes in the British parliament. I would like to call such speakers superspeakers. Prof. Ron Butters has recently been discussing the question of the existence of a black English vernacular (BEV). But since the definition of speech community on which BEV hinges seems to be based on the definition of native speaker in its dubious sense, I think the more important question is, Is there a native speaker? A satisfactory settlement of this basic issue could probably do away with many unnecessary discussions and dissertations. PROF. BUTTERS: I have given some thought to your question and I find that I am having trouble seeing that there is much of a problem here. Some things in nature are discrete and easily isolated: humans from nonhumans, for example. Others are continuums: mammals vs. nonmammals are mediated by the duckbilled platypus; metaphors vs. literal statements are mediated by dead metaphors and ambiguous utterances like silent paint. INQUIRER: Whatever happened to our missing link Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis)? As I see it, everything that exists seems discrete and easily isolated when you consider it in the concrete, but continually changing when you look at it in the abstract or in a larger perspective. Under this aspect, as the philosopher said, we dont step twice in the same stream (if that is a good enough translation of Non bis in eodem flumine immergimur, itself a rendering of the original Greek of Heracleitus of Ephesus, not that it matters who said it first; Heracleitus probably got it from one of his slaves). Continuity and change, even in fleeting things like the snows of yesteryear, can be observed only over a relatively long period and after much scrutiny. Thus, when you take a better look at the evidence (I totally agree with McDavid on evidence versus intuition), even nonhumans are seen to have changed to humans just as nonmammals have changed to mammals, carbon to diamond, and metaphors to literal statements. It could also happen vice versa because of factors affecting the direction of change. Much seems to depend on length of time and point of view. Since most of us live in the here and now and not in eternity, the judgments we make are everyday judgments that may be good and true chiefly for immediate application in the world around us. Our judgments are made according to criteria we lay down ourselves, like a recent ruling of a Louisiana court (TIME, 18 July 1983) which made one Susie Phipps, 49, who had always considered herself white, an instant nonwhite because her great-great-great-great-grand-mother was found to have been an 18th T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 58
century black slave. Everyone will laugh at this, but you cant fault the logic of the decision which was based on a statute (recently repealed) that stipulated a person is nonwhite if his racial makeup includes more than one thirty-second Negro blood. Like the Louisiana statute, there are also crucial manmade tests to distinguish humans from nonhumans, males from females, mammals from nonmammals, gold from nongold, and metaphors from literal statements at any given point in time. But when we depart from such distinction between opposites and venture into the realm of the more or less, as when we say so-and-so is a better specimen of a human being than another, we are making a somewhat questionable value judgment, unless we can first agree on strict criteria for a good human being and determine how we are going to apply them. I think the same is true of native and nonnative speakers of a language. So far no scientific or linguistic tests seem to have been brought forward which could be used to determine who is a native and who is a nonnative speaker of a given language at a given point in time. Such a distinction probably does not exist except on the basis of a value judgment. There seems nothing in the speech of two speakers that can be attributed exclusively to nativity or birth but much that can be shown to be due to learning. MR. GURALNIK: I agree. Therefore, I think Raven McDavids definition of native speaker given earlier has objective validity. For example, a Vietnamese child adopted in infancy and raised in a home by native English speakers (in that sense) is a native speaker. INQUIRER: I agree about objective validity. But I think a dictionary definition of the term, like the definition of dishwasher I discussed earlier, should define the essential nature of the concept embodied in native speaker, distinguishing native speakers specifically from other speakers, regardless of the circumstances in which languages are acquired, because the question of how native speakers come to be seems to have no direct bearing on the validity of the concept itself and therefore doesnt belong in a definition of the meaning of the term. Perhaps it is more like native son which has been variously defined as a man native to a particular place (Websters New World Dictionary, 1970) and a native of a particular state (Supplement to OED, 1976). Belongingness in regard to a particular place seems the essential meaning of native son in current English, sex and stateside origin being accidental differences which the phrase has been gradually shedding as its meaning undergoes change. Even six years after the 1970 edition of Websters New World was out, the Oxford lexicographers apparently couldnt find any evidence of native sons produced outside the U.S. In any case, their definition seems T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 59
to have been the result of prophetic insight rather than judgment based on historical evidence because, although the Oxford hasnt given any quotations illustrating the desexing or neutering of the meaning of native son, more recent evidence seems to point that way, as shown by this figurative usage: Like humans, words go in for reverse migrations, returning to the mother country often so transformed that they are not even recognized as native sons. Such a word is pedigree. (Leggatt, 1984) I would like to observe in this connection that the Oxford Supplement does sometimes betray a weakness for lexicography based on insight, probably native-speaker intuition, as in the above case, departing from the usual norm of lexicography based on historical evidence. (More about this in Paikeday, 1985a). A question such as whether a native son should have been a continuous resident of a place for so many years, like the understanding in linguistic circles, as Dean Fromkin pointed out earlier in the discussion, that a native speaker should have used his language continuously since acquiring it, may be valid for other purposes than for a dictionary definition, as when a legal definition of native son is discussed for determining a native sons rights and obligations. A native son neednt even have been born in a specified place, like Canadas erstwhile prime minister John Turner who was actually born in London. No one has yet claimed him as a native son of Britain. During the 1984 election campaign he was frequently referred to and since then has established himself as a native son of British Columbia. Thus, circumstances of birth and upbringing seem to have as little to do with native son as with native speaker, dishwasher, etc. in their essential meanings. Another reason why McDavids explanation of the genesis of native speakers will not do for a dictionary definition is that it cannot stand the test of substitutability commonly used by lexicographers. Try substituting one who has learned English from early and continuing exposure rather than from conscious study in this sentence: Many pages have their share of printing errors; and most of the text seems not to have been checked by a native speaker of English. (Verschueren, 1984) This idea of native speakers alone being able to write and edit acceptable language seems to run rampant in the academic world. Here is another quotation: The book is therefore a great disappointment .... After all [the publisher] entrusted the publication to two editors, neither of whom is a native speaker of English: the result is a volume replete with spelling errors.... (Knowles, 1984) The definition of native speaker that I have suggested earlier (briefly, a competent user) should satisfy all contexts including the two above without affecting the meaning sought to be conveyed and without T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 60
our having to go into the origins of a native speaker. MR. GURALNIK: In the usages you have cited above, the meaning is clearly proficient user. INQUIRER: Thats why I would think in an utterance embodying the linguistic concept, a more meaningful modifier of speaker or one of its synonyms should be competent or proficient rather than native. PROF. GATES: Depends on what you want to say. In transformational grammar, probably competent is what is meant. INQUIRER: I fail to see what transformational grammar has to do in the two quotations I cited above, except that the topic of the discussion happens to be the transformation of writing into print. Returning to the question of criteria, the so-called native speaker cannot be shown to have a monopoly on linguistic intuitions. As Raven McDavid also pointed out, native speakers err in their intuitions, and that is surely why linguists seem to be always looking for educated native speakers. PROF. CASSIDY: Id prefer experienced or language-aware [to educated] - one who observes without prejudice - observes himself among others. INQUIRER: There is no doubt that the criteria that linguists implicitly apply to speakers before certifying them native are criteria of performance or proficiency, not nativity. The question seems to be really one of speakers with various degrees of competence in a language. What we should be talking about perhaps is good, competent, or proficient users of languages, not native speakers. PROF. BUTTERS: It seems to me that the polar ideal native speaker is a monolingual who has been exposed to one and only one language during his entire life. MR. GURALNIK: I do not think monolingualism is a criterion. If one has been raised in a home where two - or three or even more - languages have been regularly employed by native speakers, one can be a native speaker of each of them. There may be degrees of proficiency, but as suggested by several, that is not a valid criterion and can equally characterize monolinguals. INQUIRER: I think that merits further consideration - the influence of a multilingual joint family as distinguished from the monolingual nuclear family on language learning - if I understand the question right. PROF. BUTTERS: The [native speaker] continuum contains folks who have been exposed to other languages in various ways - true bilinguals, speakers exposed to one language early in life and one late, people who speak creolized languages, etc. There is no test that will mediate in many marginal cases, any more than there is a test that will clearly T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 61
mediate borderline cases of French and Italian, or German and Dutch. INQUIRER: I would agree. When we consider that we are all learners of everything that we acquire, languages included, and continue to be learners all life long, we are all, so to speak, marginal cases of native speakership or, if you like, semi-speakers, to borrow a term from Prof. Nancy Dorian. An ideal should not be indiscriminately imposed on reallife beings. It should be considered as something to aspire to. PROF. CASSIDY: Descriptively it may refer to a reality: the monolingual. INQUIRER: But anything that exists in reality or any of its attributes or states should be distinguishable from its opposite by testing, as males or diamonds or pregnancy or sobriety may be distinguished from nonmales, nondiamonds, nonpregnancy, or nonsobriety. A borderline case of German and Dutch may be neither the one nor the other. Or you may consider it as either German or Dutch or more of the one than of the other; it depends on the criteria you apply. Similar criteria should be applicable to speakers of languages. But nativity is not a logically applicable criterion in regard to speakership. It is a misnomer for competence or proficiency. The linguists native speaker seems to me as dead as a dead metaphor. I think it is time we listened to Prof. Chomsky who approaches this question from a metaphysical point of view.
Enter Chomsky
PROF. CHOMSKY: I read your comments on the concept native speaker with interest. In my view, questions of this sort arise because they presuppose a somewhat misleading conception of the nature of language and of knowledge of language. Essentially, they begin with what seem to me incorrect metaphysical assumptions: in particular, the assumption that among the things in the world there are languages or dialects, and that individuals come to acquire them.... INQUIRER: Please, Sir, if I may interrupt you for a moment: the existence of languages and the question of individuals coming to acquire them seem demonstrable facts of everyday life to me; I dont see how you can call them metaphysical assumptions. A language like Latin or English, for example, can be accurately described in its spoken and written forms as having distinctive sounds, vocabulary, and syntax, and adequately distinguished from other languages. Each seems to be a distinctive system with existence in its own right and capable of undergoing processes of growth and decay like anything else that lives and goes out of existence. And individuals (children if you will) are seen to acquire languages from a state of total ignorance to varying degrees of proficiency. Why then is it T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 62
an incorrect metaphysical assumption? PROF. BENSON: It seems to me more of an empirical fact than an assumption. DOCTOR D: I think what Prof. Chomsky means is that questions of this sort seem to involve us in incorrect metaphysical assumptions. DOCTOR E: Doesnt Prof. Chomskys position involve us in a different set of metaphysical assumptions, which are perhaps neither more nor less correct than Inquirers, but simply different? It is logically possible to speak of correctness in a correct way without buying in a whole set of criteria concerning what correctness is. Prof. Chomskys view - as I understand it - is that humans are born with innate knowledge of quasiuniversal formal principles which, ultimately, determine a particular languages grammatical structure. His is a rationalist hypothesis or an innate ideas theory, as distinct from and opposed to the empiricist hypothesis (Lockes view) which claims that knowledge arises from sense experience. Who is correct? What is correctness? Where is the real world? DOCTOR F: By referring to things in the world I think Prof. Chomsky is charging us with the crime of reification. He seems to be saying, in effect, that we are considering languages like, say, automobiles and that languages are acquired very much like a first car, second car, etc. DOCTOR G: Prof. Chomsky probably means that language does not exist independently of the behaviour of speakers. He seems to be taking an implicit position against normativism, the thesis that there are objective standards of correct usage independent of the behaviour of speakers. INQUIRER: Gentlemen, let us not bother about textual interpretation as long as Prof. Chomsky is still with us. Sorry I interrupted; you were saying? PROF. CHOMSKY: And then we ask, is an individual who has acquired the dialect D a native speaker of it or not, the question for which you request an acid test at the end of your letter [Appendix 2]. INQUIRER: The native-speaker question is posed by the linguist on whom the burden of proving the validity of the concept seems to fall. To my thinking, if we look at it logically, there are speakers and nonspeakers of each language, the speakers enjoying varying degrees of competence. But I havent met any native speakers. I would therefore ask the professional linguist, if there is a so-called native speaker of any language, can you distinguish him adequately from a nonnative speaker of the same language, just as gold may be distinguished from nongold using the acid test. I dont see what is wrong with my question. PROF. CHOMSKY: In the real world, however, what we find is something rather different, though for the usual purposes of ordinary T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 63
communication it is sufficient to work with a rather gross approximation to the facts, just as we refer freely to water, knowing, however, that the various things we call water have a wide range of variation including pollutants, etc. INQUIRER: I quite appreciate that ideal water doesnt exist. But I dont see how variations in the way water exists would invalidate the concept water or negate the actual existence of water, at least polluted water. We could also validly talk about water at the earthly level, as when we say Water drawn from this well will have to be potable by livestock. The assertion would be operative if you could define potability (allow a small percentage of pollutants) and livestock (farm animals such as cattle, pigs, sheep, poultry, geese, rabbits - you name it). I dont think anyone would bother about the metaphysical implications of drinking water from a well. It should be the same with assertions like The sentences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker because both sentences and speakers belong to the physical world. MR. GURALNIK: I think this dialogue is beginning to get away from your initial and basic question: Is there such a person as a native speaker and, if so, how do we identify him or her?
Chomskys Following Chomskys red herring without losing the scent

INQUIRER: There is no doubt we are going off the track. If you consider the three-cornered relationship of a symbol or term, the concept or meaning behind it (reference), and the thing it refers to (referent), what I am asking is, Is the referent of the term native speaker as conceived by the linguist (i.e. arbiter of grammaticality and acceptability) something real or purely imaginary like, say, the unicorn or a heavenly being like an angel? But Prof. Chomsky would like us to forget about the thing or referent and concentrate on the concept. He would then like to show us that the question whether Tom, Dick, or Harry may be said to be a native speaker of a language doesnt make sense because the concept native speaker is based on the concept of particular languages which is somewhat abstract, which in turn is based on the concept of language in a more abstract sense and which cannot really exist except by a process of illegitimate reification! When Prof. Noam Chomsky throws us a red herring and involves us in a discussion that is twice removed from reality, I think the world is interested in seeing how we pick up the red herring and analyze it. I am personally interested in it for the opportunity it gives us to discuss some of the basic tenets of Chomskyan linguistics. Let me put the question another way. Prof. Chomsky says in his T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 64
Syntactic Structures that the native speaker is the arbiter of acceptability of sentences and in his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax that operational tests may be devised for acceptability. I would like to ask if we may have some tests for identifying native speaker. PROF. CHOMSKY: To see whats wrong with the question, lets consider a similar one (which no one asks). Each human being has developed a visual system, and in fact visual systems differ from individual to individual depending on accidents of personal history and maybe even genetic differences. Suppose we go on (absurdly) to assume that among the things in the world, independently of people, there are visual systems, and particular individuals acquire one or the other of them (in analogy to the way we think of languages). INQUIRER: That may be a better analogy than the previous one about water; but it seems no less fallacious to me. Languages and visual systems dont seem comparable for our purpose and they dont have a similar relationship to people. Languages, as distinguished from idiolects, exist independently of the people acquiring them, or to put it another way, their existence is not dependent on any particular speaker. As everyone knows, languages exist in society - no society, no language. The human visual system may indeed be thought of like language, but at a higher level of abstraction than individual languages. As for an individuals visual system, one doesnt develop or acquire it starting with total blindness, as one acquires a language starting from total ignorance. As for the differences between individual visual systems, these, as you say, are accidental differences. I wonder if that is why corneas are transplantable like hearts, lungs, and kidneys, whereas languages arent. Language ability seems more like ones ability to walk, run, or swim which is developed in a similar way to language and is similarly also very personal and nontransferable. The visual system, therefore, seems native to each individual who is blessed with it, whereas language or speech is something acquired and nonnative of its very essence. PROF. FORGUSON: So language ability, like the ability to swim or run or ride a bike, is acquired. I agree. But why does one then have to go on to say that the language has an independent reality? Swimming doesnt, nor even a particular style of swimming. A language, if it is the description of a skill common to a population (or characteristic of it) need not be reified. INQUIRER: No one is reifying anything. I think reification is a bad word with negative connotations. The res, thing, or animal called native speaker already exists as solidly as anything else in existence, like a tire which you can kick. Otherwise we wouldnt refer to individuals as native speakers. What I am saying is, the people we refer to as arbiters of
grammaticality are not really so because true arbiters of grammaticality are proficient users of languages, not just native speakers. But, instead of talking about whether the arbiter sense fits the person usually referred to as a native speaker, if Prof. Chomsky wants to shift the ground and talk about the concept native speaker, all right, let us do so. But then you cant deny that language exists. Language does exist and in the same way as swimming, running, and the butterfly stroke exist. Only their mode of existence is different from that of bicycles, runners, swimmers, or what have you. Let us now hear out Prof. Chomsky on what follows from what you call reification. PROF. CHOMSKY: Then we could ask, who has a native visual system V, and what is the acid test for distinguishing such a person from someone who has in some more complex or roundabout way come to be highly proficient in the use of V (say, by surgery, or by training after having natively acquired a different visual system, etc.). Of course, all of this is nonsense. INQUIRER: I doubt it. Rather, it is a logical corollary of the linguists claim that only some speakers are native speakers of a particular language, all others being nonnative speakers. When we say some persons are male and all others are nonmale (logically speaking), we can substantiate the proposition and its corollary by crucial tests based on chromosome patterns. The linguist has a similar obligation when he posits the existence of native and nonnative speakers of a language. PROF. CHOMSKY: But I think uncritical acceptance of the apparent ontological implications of ordinary talk about language leads to similar nonsense. What we would say in the case of the visual system is this. There is a genetically determined human faculty V, with its specific properties, which we can refer to as the organ of vision. There may be differences among individuals in their genetic endowment, but for the sake of discussion, lets put these aside and assume identity across the species, so we can now speak of the visual organ V with its fixed initial state V-0 common to humans, but different from monkeys, cats, insects, etc. In the course of early experience, V-0 undergoes changes and soon reaches a fairly steady state V-s which then remains essentially unchanged apart from minor modifications (putting aside pathology, injury, etc.). Thats the way biological systems behave, and to a very good first approximation, this description is adequate. The things in the real world are V-0 and the various states V-s attained by various individuals, or more broadly, the class of potential states V-s that could be attained in principle as experience varies. DOCTOR E: But what of the critical acceptance of the apparent T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 66
ontological implications of ordinary talk about language? Doesnt this lead to difficulties of a more sophisticated sort? In what sense does Prof. Chomsky use the term ontological? Is this a metaphysical or a phenomenological ontology of being? Wittgenstein states that What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. If this is so, are such terms as ontology or even philosophy cognitive? INQUIRER: I think what Prof. Chomsky talks about as the way biological systems behave is true only for biological systems. An important question is, Is language or speech a mere biological system or is it a biologically based intellectual system? I favour the latter because intelligence is essential for use of language but not for use of the eyes. Even a brainless person could see biologically like cats and dogs though not intellectually as when we see beauty or goodness. DOCTOR E: I like your distinction. Prof. Chomskys view presupposes a biological / physical paradigm. PROF. CHOMSKY: We then see that the question about native acquisition is silly, as is the assumption that visual systems exist in some Platonic heaven and are acquired by humans. INQUIRER: Platonism is just another label with unfavourable connotations. I dont understand why languages and visual systems have to exist in some Platonic heaven in order that they may be acquired by humans. DOCTOR F: I think Prof. Chomsky is referring to Platonic heaven in a very loose sense. Not all reification fallacies are Platonic in the proper sense - certainly not this one. INQUIRER: Then the charge of reification is just a red herring. Platos philosophy hardly seems relevant to our discussion. We are talking about perceptible and verifiable earthly existences, not universals of some superordinate category, and I dont see any analogy between language and our visual system or the way in which they are acquired and used by humans. A visual system normally comes with its body, as standard equipment, whereas language seems more of an optional item, though one that is very necessary for a social being; let us say, like turn signals for an automobile. We are normally born with actual visual systems, albeit in an incipient or undeveloped stage, just as we are born with speech organs. But a language system is something that is acquired from outside of us. We need help from neither Plato nor metaphysics to appreciate the existence or acquisition of language, unless you want to look at it as Prof. Chomsky does. PROF. CHOMSKY: Suppose now that we look at language in essentially the same way - as, I think, we should - extricating ourselves from much misleading historical and philosophical baggage. Each human T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 67
has a faculty L, call it the language faculty or, if you like, the language organ, which is genetically-determined. DOCTOR G: The easy slide from language faculty to the language organ involves what I would call reductionism. INQUIRER: I think it is an illegal cross-over from the faculty of psychology to the faculty of biology. In my view, what is comparable to the organ of sight is the organ of speech (comprising the tongue, mouth, throat, etc.) and this, being a biological system, may be said to be genetically determined in the same way the organ of sight is. Each human has this language organ endowed by nature and is thus born with a general disposition to talk, but I dont see any evidence of anyone being endowed with a knowledge of universal grammar or of a predisposition to start talking a particular language. If this were so, everyone could be said to be a native speaker of such a language, which I suppose would be his mother tongue, not just any first language, and a nonnative speaker of other languages he acquires. DOCTOR G: All one needs to see is that we are born with a disposition to talk which needs society to activate it. But even vision needs light to activate it! The parallel between vision and language may be closer than you allow. PROF. CHOMSKY: Again, we may assume to a very good first approximation that [the language faculty or language organ] is identical across the species (gross pathology aside), so that we can speak of the initial state L-0 of this organ, common to humans, and as far as is known, unique in the universe to the human species (in fact, with no known homologous systems in closely related or other species, in contrast now to V). In early childhood, the organ undergoes changes through experience and reaches a relatively stable steady state L-s, probably before puberty; afterwards, it normally undergoes only marginal changes, like adding vocabulary. There could be more radical modifications of a complex sort, as in late second language learning, but in fact the same is very likely true of the visual system and others. PROF. FORGUSON: The usefulness of the analogy depends on the comparability of V-0 to L-0. V is not plastic in its ability to adapt to experience (or it is relatively non-plastic). L seems to be highly plastic. One does learn to see - i.e. learn how to use V effectively. But it is much less adaptive and modifiable than the way experience shapes language acquisition. INQUIRER: I think we know more about the development of biological systems such as the eyes and speech organs than we know about the process of acquisition of language. Recent research seems to show that infants have only a 20/200 vision shortly after birth, but by three months T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 68
of age it has improved to 20/80. Infants go on seeing better and better without the benefit of society as a teacher or undergoing a process of learning. And an infants vision is not restricted to what its eyes are trained on in its native land. An American child can see equally well in Tokyo and in New York. But language is acquired by a process of active learning (which is restricted to the particular language one is exposed to) rather than by passive experience of something abstract called language. L-0 and L-s are always tied to particular languages x, y, z, etc. so that the learning faculty should be more correctly represented as L-0(x), L-0(y), etc. at the beginning stages or L-s(x), L-s(y), etc. in the steady states attained, granting for the sake of argument that a steady state is attained and language acquisition levels off afterwards. L-0 and L-s have no essential connection with x, y, and other languages. If they did, a child would have acquired speech automatically by virtue of the growth of his body and the development of his speech organ. As everyone knows, the organ is indifferent to acquiring a particular language, including the childs mother tongue. It could be the organ of a test-tube baby. I think we should therefore distinguish the organ from what it acquires. PROF. FORGUSON: But see the experiments on deprivation of visual stimuli of certain kinds in early infancy of cats, chicks, etc. which crippled subsequent visual ability. Specific sorts of stimuli are important, but not probably the variety of stimuli as in language learning. PROF. CHOMSKY: Putting these complications aside, what is a language or dialect? Keeping to the real world, what we have is the various states L-s attained by various individuals, or more generally, the set of potential states L-s attained that could in principle be attained by various individuals as experience varies. DOCTOR E: Now L-0 and Platos language idea or archetype look to be very similar. If there are only L-ss in the real world, then why speak of L-0? PROF. CHOMSKY: Again, we see that the question of what are the languages or dialects attained, and what is the difference between native or non-native acquisition, is just pointless. DOCTOR G: Prof. Chomsky seems to agree with you that native speaker is a myth. Only your philosophy differs. INQUIRER: Then I think he should come out and say so instead of seeming to dodge the issue by invoking metaphysics, which is a misuse of philosophy. If language is only a state of acquisition of something and not the thing itself that is acquired, and if that something is abstract and universal instead of being real and distinctive as particular languages are, then the child who starts talking English would have been intelligible to T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 69
the child who starts talking Japanese and vice versa. Or are we still in in Platos heaven? PROF. CHOMSKY: Languages and dialects dont exist in a Platonic heaven any more than visual systems do. In both cases, there is a fixed genetic endowment that determines the initial state of some faculty or organ (putting aside possible genetic variation), and there are the various states attained by these systems in the course of maturation, triggered by external stimuli and to some rather limited extent shaped by them. In both cases, there is overwhelming reason to believe that the character of the steady state attained is largely determined by the genetic endowment, which provides a highly structured and organized system which does, however, have certain options that can be fixed by experience. PROF. FORGUSON: Now how does [that] affect the question as to whether the English language has independent reality (vis-a-vis the speech behaviour of speakers) or whether there are or are not native speakers (in some useful sense of this word). DOCTOR E: Is language itself a way of thinking - one which perhaps has led to such fictions as language, square circle, and the real world? Would such notions - fictional or real - have arisen had the Phoenicians not invented the alphabet, abstracting sounds and groups of sounds from Egyptian hieroglyphs, i.e. a set of self-interpreting symbols? One cannot draw a square circle. PROF. CHOMSKY: We could think of the initial state of the language faculty, for example, as being something like an intricately wired system with fixed and complex properties, but with some connections left open, to be fixed in one or another way on the basis of experience (e.g., do the heads of constructions precede their complements as in English, or follow them as in Japanese?). Experience completes the connections, yielding the steady state, though as in the case of vision, or the heart, or the liver, etc., various other complications can take place. PROF. CASSIDY: Is that a valid concept or analogy? I dont think it can be accepted as any more than fiction. INQUIRER: I can appreciate the wired system as a childs intellectual faculty for language acquisition in a potential state, waiting to be actuated. PROF. CASSIDY: Even that is perhaps to stretch the reality. INQUIRER: Let me explain. Since the faculty of speech, as we all know, is dependent on a particular area of the brain, it could be thought of as genetically determined to a degree, but I dont see any overwhelming reason to believe that the grammatical competence attained by a language learner is genetically determined or to identify the faculty for language acquisition with what it acquires. This faculty seems to develop like all other faculties of body and T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 70
mind, but it lies dormant as long as the child is not exposed to people speaking a particular language. It atrophies in the case of the wolf child. In a suitable environment, it develops and attains the steady state in regard to L-1, the first language it is exposed to. Owing to changing circumstances, as in the case of a child orphaned and displaced from its native land while still a child, it may lose the steady state attained in L-1 and attain a steady state in another language L-2, or it may attain an equally steady state in more than one language, with some academic differences in the degrees of competence attained, as in a perfectly bilingual person or one who grows up in a home environment where the immigrant parents speak one language and the childs peers speak another. But I think we have to come to grips with particular languages rather than assume something built in. PROF. CASSIDY: Unless one accepts the concept of universals.
The native speaker as a terminal case

PROF. CHOMSKY: So then what is a language and who is a native speaker? Answer, a language is a system L-s, it is the steady state attained by the language organ. And everyone is a native speaker of the particular L-s that that person has grown in his / her mind / brain. In the real world, that is all there is to say. PROF. CASSIDY: Sounds terminal. This is total idiosyncrasy. INQUIRER: I am not sure that language acquisition is a terminal case myself. But the native speaker surely is! PROF. FORGUSON: [Prof. Chomskys] position is compatible with the view that there are as many L-ss as there are people who speak: every idiolect is a language with one native speaker. And if a person acquires two skills L-sl and L-s2, then he or she is a native speaker of both. INQUIRER: But that is a purely theoretical view resulting from looking at reality indirectly, as if through a mirror, from word to concept to reality instead of directly at the referent of the term native speaker. It could lead to other unreal positions such as Allen Walker Reads that native speakers cannot make mistakes. As David Guralnik has responded, no linguist accepts the position that all varieties and dialects of a language are separate entities. I think such a view would only make life impossible for practical linguists such as dialectologists and lexicographers. Moreover, Prof. Chomskys idea of native speaker seems a bit too far-fetched to be of any use except as pure theory. If you dont mind a small diversion here, as Lofti Zadeh, the pioneer in fuzzy logic, says, fuzziness may be an essential part of human thinking. But we cant operate under fuzzy conditions all the time. And linguists seem to operate under rather exacting conditions, as in the following T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 71
example: Prof. Peter A. Reich claims embedding of clauses has to stop at a sentence like: The rat that the cat killed ate the malt. But Prof. Chomsky would claim grammaticality (on the basis of acceptability to the native speaker) even for this sentence: The rat that the cat that the dog that the cow tossed worried killed ate the malt. (Reich, 1969) If everyone is a native speaker of the particular L-s that that person has grown in the mind, I would like to ask you, Sir, if it is such a native speaker you mean when you say in Syntactic Structures, The sentences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker. PROF. CHOMSKY: [No comment]. DOCTOR G: Good. I think you have hit the nail on the head. PROF. NEY: I do not believe in Chomskyan nativism at all.... Language as objective social reality (as against Prof. Chomskys belief that language is only in the neurological structures of the brain) has been adequately explained in Laszlo Antals Psychologism, Platonism, and Realism in Linguistics (Antal, 1984). INQUIRER: As I see it, language is a system L-s all right, but it is a system of sounds and symbols built up by social agreement and acquired by each new member of the society that speaks the language. I dont see how L-s is a state attained by the language organ, as Prof. Chomsky calls it, or the faculty of speech, as I prefer to call it. I dont see how you can consider language as if it were a natural outgrowth or attribute of a bodily organ. As for the speaker of a language, I appreciate that one has to grow it in his or her mind (by it I mean the wired system itself, not just some connections that are left open) in order to be a competent speaker of it, just as a walker has to learn to walk and a driver has to learn to drive. It is the nativity that I cant accept. There are no native walkers or drivers. Similarly, how can we posit a native speaker? PROF. CHOMSKY: Now as in the case of water, etc., the scientific description is too precise to be useful for ordinary purposes, so we abstract from it and speak of languages, dialects, etc., when people are close enough in the steady states attained to be regarded as identical for practical purposes (in fact, our ordinary usage of the term language is much more abstract and complex, in fact hardly coherent, since it involves colors on maps, political systems, etc.). All of that is fine for ordinary usage. Troubles arise, however, when ordinary usage is uncritically understood as having ontological implications; the same problems would arise if we were to make the same moves in the case of visual systems, hearts, water, etc. INQUIRER: Ordinary usage should not have ontological implications. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 72
In the present discussion, language, like visual systems, hearts, water, etc., should stay at what Hayakawa (Language in Thought and Action) calls the extensional level of the physical world, not deal with intensional meanings. When you say that Sentences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker you are dealing with the physical world and the statement should be operative in the physical world which it doesnt seem to because you cant supply an operational definition or test of the term native speaker. You give the term an intensional meaning or connotation, namely, the arbiter of grammaticality and acceptability, but it has no extensional meaning or denotation. It seems like mermaid, angel, or Abominable Snowman which exist by definition only. DOCTOR G: I think you have a strong point there. INQUIRER: As everyone knows, not everything that can be defined and entered in a dictionary enjoys reality, because dictionaries deal primarily with what the semanticist calls intensional meanings. In my view, on the basis of usage, the only meaning of native speaker that can apply to the physical world (besides the popular sense of mother-tongue or first-language speaker) is competent user of a language. What you are really saying in regard to sentences generated seems to be that they will have to be acceptable to competent users of the language in question, not to anyone who has it as his mother tongue or first language. PROF. CHOMSKY: Such questions as how many languages are there have no clear meaning; we could say that there is only one language, namely, L-0 with its various modifications, or that there are as many languages as there are states of mind/brain L-s, or potential states L-s. Or anything in between. These are questions of convenience for certain purposes, not factual questions, like the question of how many (kinds of) human visual system are there? INQUIRER: We seem to be back at square one. The human visual system is one, but languages, as I see it, are distinct from each other and from the biological system or organ used in speaking languages, and I dont see how you can say language or speech proceeds from the organ of speech, as sight from the organ of sight, and call it the language faculty or language organ. I would like some evidence that speech develops as an organic offshoot of ones speech organs, like a tree putting forth flowers or a budding driver who may be imagined to come as standard equipment with each automobile shipped from Detroit. PROF. CHOMSKY: Apparent problems about the number of languages, native speakers, etc. arise when we make the kind of philosophical error that Wittgenstein and others warned against. INQUIRER: When I have no problem understanding other T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 73
compounds of native such as native American, native land, native silver, native state, native talent, and even native language, I feel that I would be less than honest with myself if I were to use philosophical help from Wittgenstein to understand native speaker when it is not even his brainchild. I may only get academic in the process without ever getting at the truth. Wittgenstein himself seems to have warned against this in his later years. (Philosophical Investigations) PROF. FORGUSON: On the basis of Philosophical Investigations, I think Wittgenstein too would reject native speaker as a useful guide to what a proficient speaker is. PROF. CHOMSKY: I think that looked at [my] way, the questions you raise no longer seem puzzling, and in fact dissolve. INQUIRER: It was very kind of Prof. Chomsky to join our discussion. And I wish I could appreciate his reasoning better. But I dont even see the need for a metaphysical explanation of native speaker, which is an earthly concept referring to earthly beings, quite unlike the concept of the Trinity or the Virgin birth. These could use some help from metaphysics. Native speaker seems more of an epistemological problem. What do you think? PROF. CHAMBERS: I agree with most of [what Chomsky said]. The telling point in coming to the distinction between native speakers and the reductio of native seers is the culture-specific input to language, for which there is no equivalent in vision. Thus, the native speaker of a language has certain capabilities that can never be acquired by an older adult learning a second language. PROF. CASSIDY: Im not so sure [that there is no equivalent in vision to the culture-specific input to language]. PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: The logic of Prof. Chambers remark is faulty. Language differs from vision, he says, because the language input is culture-specific. The next sentence is a non sequitur. INQUIRER: I think there is also a bit of ignoratio elenchi in Prof. Chambers comment because I doubt if the culture-specific input to language affects Chomskys line of argument. I agree that an older adult learning a second language is somewhat handicapped compared with one learning his first language in childhood or even, as Chomsky mentioned earlier, some time before puberty. But the crucial question is, does your native speaker have any capabilities that a nonnative speaker couldnt acquire in his youth, perhaps even later in life? PROF. CHAMBERS: Of course there are grades of native speaker capability among nonnative speakers, and some - a colleague of mine among them probably have native speaker capabilities as far as they could be measured. INQUIRER: That sounds like the theory of the noble savage, if I may T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 74
be allowed a hyperbole. There seem to be grades of native speaker capability not only among nonnative speakers but even among native speakers. But I would indeed be interested in any kind of measuring device or method, even if you cant come up with an acid test, provided you can show by such measurement that your native speaker is endowed with some capability that your nonnative colleague doesnt have and could never have acquired. I really think that native speaker (with all the linguistic prerogatives claimed for this entity) calls for justification or proof of an objective nature, an operational definition or test, failing which it should be considered a figment of the linguists imagination and a mere adjunct to his theorizing. DOCTOR G: I think Chomsky is forced into the following position: The native speaker is the criterion of grammaticality. However, we cannot identify a native speaker. Therefore we cannot ever be sure of the grammaticality of a sentence in a living language. INQUIRER: Splendid! Your syllogism looks near perfect. My own line of argument is this: There is no real arbiter of grammaticality. Therefore the concept of native speaker as reflected in usages of the term is false. Now, as linguists and lexicographers, we cannot attempt to change usage; it must take its natural course. Therefore we should change, clarify, or redefine the concept embodied in the term to read proficient user of a language. The definition of a term should be compatible with the concept behind it. DOCTOR G: Perhaps a safer conclusion is that we cannot be sure of the ungrammaticality of a sentence - hence, nonnativism is gone. You claim that the linguist cannot demonstrate the distinction between native and nonnative speakers. Chomsky would seem to agree, but prefers to stress how foolish it is to expect him to. INQUIRER: I think it is incumbent on all professors of linguistics who swear by the native speaker to show us a native speaker. It is not like swearing by the Almighty. DOCTOR G: I guess so. Since Chomsky has used the native speaker concept, he should either point to a native speaker or recant his use of native speaker or explain how he can avoid this dilemma. I suspect he really would like to recant. INQUIRER: The holy angels help us! PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: Chomsky now lives in a philosophical world of his own and is concerned with the speech of angels rather than of men. By dismissing various matters as questions of convenience for certain purposes, not factual questions, he appears to dodge the issue. Presumably, the judgment as to whether a particular sentence is grammatical or not could also be dismissed as a question of convenience. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 75
PROF. BENSON: I think you have uncovered a Chomskyan bias in the use of the term native speaker, which shows a desire to elevate some peoples intuitions about language (the educated native speaker) over other peoples intuitions. This is a kind of armchair theorizing about language that leads to complete lack of interest in performance questions. The kind of linguistics I am interested in, coming from Michael Halliday, doesnt recognize the competence / performance dichotomy. And in fact, Halliday seems to use mother tongue more frequently than native speaker. The question of the acid test for a native speaker may not be answerable, but if it is, the answer would be more likely to come from those linguists interested in English as a world language.
Hallidays Hallidays comment

INQUIRER: It would be interesting to ask Michael Halliday. I realize, of course, that linguists could be much more busy down under in Sydney than in the hub of the universe in Massachusetts. I thought Chomsky was quite obliging, considering that he is next only to Charles Sanders Peirce (according to the MLA bibliographers) among scholars whose theories were most frequently discussed during 1982 (MLA Newsletter, Summer 1984). And Peirce doesnt have to answer inquirers any more. Prof. Halliday, would you mind telling us why you prefer mother tongue to native speaker? PROF. HALLIDAY: I appreciate your interest in my reactions ... and do not mind at all being bothered! But my problem is that I havent really got any views on the questions at issue. Native speaker seems to me to be one of a large number of useful terms for talking about language as an institution; it is useful precisely because it isnt too closely defined. I dont think I use it very much in my own writing. As Prof. Benson says, I have referred at times to the mother tongue - a term which also seems to me healthily vague. INQUIRER: I think clarity is more healthy than vagueness. And to me mother tongue is as clear as mother, although mother tongue has two meanings; but then mother has half a dozen. In context, neither mother nor mother tongue poses any problem for me. But I agree with you that vagueness helps to carry on a discussion. It seems endemic to the more speculative branches of knowledge. I guess it could even become systemic, if you will forgive the pun! I am reminded of the epidemic of learned literature a couple of decades ago dealing with the vague outlines of unidentified flying objects. But a harmless drudge like me is supposed to earn his living by producing something wellT. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 76
defined from time to time, even if it is only a single word. I do think native speaker can be defined closely like any other group of words in the language. PROF. CASSIDY: The term is established, but it is variously understood - which is the whole point of the discussion. It should be definable, as any term is. PROF. HALLIDAY: I could comment at length on some of the points raised by [the] discussants; but this would be quite marginal to the question of native speaker. Some of what I would have to say would concern the nature of definition itself.... A lot of what I have written about categories of language as system would also apply to categories of language as institution. So it would turn into a general discussion of lexicography, which will have to wait for a different occasion! INQUIRER: Thank you very much, Prof. Halliday. The trail of my inquiry has grown a little cold. It seems to me, the more speculative and theoretical a particular school of linguistics is, the less likely it is to be of help in tracking down something so down-to-earth as the native speaker. And since there are limits to any human inquiry, perhaps I had better stick with the one system of language analysis that has found wide acceptance, if not revolutionized linguistics. Let us listen to another British scholar who has written widely on linguistics and doesnt mind commenting on Chomskys theories. PROF. CRYSTAL: Your memo about native speakers arrived in the year when I change from one steady state into another.... Chomskys explanatory interpretation of the concept is absolutely consistent with his general views and cannot really be argued against without calling into question various tenets of those views. INQUIRER: That sounds really good. But does Chomskys interpretation of the concept native speaker hold water in practical terms? PROF. CRYSTAL: Certainly, no one can defend the concept as an explanation of anything. The trouble with your memo is that you ask too many questions of it, some of which are explanatory, some of which are not. INQUIRER: I think any valid concept should be able to explain and answer all legitimate questions related to it. PROF. CRYSTAL: Chomsky has taken the explanatory aspect of the problem, and dealt with it very well, in his terms. Hes quite right to say that its like language, dialect, etc. But its plain from his analogy that he is thinking at a higher-order level than the level at which I suspect your own primary interest lies. INQUIRER: Yes, indeed, as a working lexicographer and no theoretical linguist, Im interested primarily in the animal referred to as native speaker T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 77
and then in clarifying the concept behind the term. In other words, on what basis can anyone say Jack is a native speaker of such and such a language but Jane is not? On the theoretical linguists own ground, what does it mean to say that The sentences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker? Who on earth is a native speaker? PROF. CRYSTAL: To say that all people are native speakers of whatever it is that they have learnt doesnt dissolve the question: it just turns it into a different question, which it suits Chomsky to answer. PROF. CASSIDY: Good. INQUIRER: Nothing like the realms of metaphysics, I suppose, for shifting ones ground! PROF. CRYSTAL: Chomsky doesnt address the primary descriptive validity of the term, which I think shouldnt be dismissed so lightly. These questions may be questions of convenience, but they are serious questions nonetheless. One reason for taking the native speaker question seriously is that it does have some explanatory force. There are differences between people who claim to have a native-speaker awareness of a language and those who do not. INQUIRER: I wonder if they are objectively verifiable differences. PROF. CRYSTAL: Chief amongst these differences, it seems to me, is the private store of early sense associations, family slang, dated slang, etc. which identifies a person as belonging, not all of which can be put into words (but cf. when I was a boy ..., and the like). PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: Since that kind of experience differs qualitatively from family to family, it is really only its existence or nonexistence that can be considered important in the present context. And an L2 learner who has become part of the continuum [as a user of L2] will fill in a lot of lacunae from contact with friends and from the reading of books and newspapers and from watching films and TV programmes. In any case, all so-called native speakers have lacunae of one kind or another in their experience of the national life: not everybody has been to a boarding school or to a university, or in the army, or been an MP or a JP, etc., etc. When consulted by a foreign learner, a native speaker may well have to confess, Im afraid I know nothing about army slang / public school slang, never having been in the army / to a public school, etc. INQUIRER: That reminds me of an argument that one of my American friends, Jonathan, had with George Kurien from India the other day about a bit of locker-room slang. Jonathan claimed that Georges reference to the currency of that piece of slang (in a paper he was preparing for a learned society) was incorrect and only native speakers like himself could be good T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 78
judges of slang. George then disclosed that he had his paper checked by no less an authority on American slang than Stuart Berg Flexner. Nothing daunted, Jonathan argued that Stuart didnt know either because he couldnt have been frequenting locker rooms very much since becoming a vice president of Random House. It is this private and exclusive quality of native speakership that I find most difficult to accept. Sometimes it seems like the children of Fatima claiming they see an apparition of the Blessed Virgin which others are supposed to take on trust. But let us hear out Prof. Crystal on the differences between people who have this native-speaker awareness of a language and those who do not. PROF. CRYSTAL: This [difference] is obviously present when a person has been exposed to one language alone - our ideal nativespeaker/ hearer - and it is evidently present in the kind of bilingualism which the language-acquisition people study, as is illustrated by the very early stage at which these kids start playing one parent off against another (e.g. deliberately talking to the German mother in French). It is less clearly present in the cases of kids who learn their second language naturally when they are older, and it is quite unclear what to make of cases like Nabokov and the others George Steiner (Extraterritorial Papers) talks about as having no native language. But these are marginal cases. INQUIRER: Im a bit leery of writing off cases as marginal or exceptional. If linguistics is a science and based on the intuitional evidence of so-called native speakers, we should be able to define clearly who is and who is not a native speaker and be able to make assertions like The sentences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker truly valid and operative - just like assertions made in the other sciences; e.g. light travels in straight lines. Apparent exceptions like light rays seeming to bend round corners should be explainable by other scientific laws. We seem to enjoy this kind of scientific accountability in the more established branches of linguistic science such as historical linguistics: like Verners Law providing a fuller explanation of Grimms Law. As I said earlier, exceptions should prove (i.e. test) the rule instead of being used as excuses. So my question is, do we have any objectively verifiable criteria for native speakership? PROF. CRYSTAL: For the most part, it should be possible to draw up a set of empirical criteria as to what counts as a native speaker. In a grammar of native-speakerese, the above [difference] would be an important consideration. Another would be the range of language varieties which the person had an intuitive awareness of. Another would be the fact that the person has passed through a series of child language acquisition stages (a point which is of some relevance for Chomsky, as this process has T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 79
presumably some kind of neurological representation, which it might be possible one day to confirm - either directly or indirectly, e.g. via language pathology studies). Another would be the extent to which the spontaneous learning of a second language by a given stage of development (e.g. puberty) is qualitatively different from that which has taken place with the first. INQUIRER: Most of the differences you have mentioned strike me as somewhat subjective criteria. Furthermore, they relate to the process of language acquisition rather than to language competence as attained. Linguists seem to have no use for the intuitions of the language learner (whether native or foreign) at the learning stage. It is when the so-called steady state has been reached, especially at the mature educated stage (as Quirk insists) that the testimony of the socalled native speaker begins to have weight. For evidentiary purposes, therefore, it seems immaterial how the individual user of a language attained his linguistic competence. What seems to matter is that he or she be competent. So I think the criteria we lay down should be criteria for being competent, not criteria for becoming competent. MR. COWIE: Perhaps the following passage succeeds in capturing the nature of mature educated command which is the ideal goal of the advanced learner, but which few native speakers actually attain: The achievement of humorous effects by the manipulation of idioms normally regarded as fixed, calls for a degree of cultural or literary awareness possessed only by mature native speakers of English. (Cowie, 1983a) INQUIRER: I think the mature educated nonnative speaker will find it hard to agree with the last part of the passage. PROF. CRYSTAL: It is important, I think, not to be confused by fluency, or native-like ability, in all this. INQUIRER: That implies a major premise which seems questionable to me. PROF. CHISHOLM: There are two terms to be defined. One is native speaker. The other is native speaker fluency. The native speaker by perfect circular definition has native speaker fluency. INQUIRER: Uh? PROF. CHISHOLM: That is, his mind possesses the grammar of the language to the extent that no speaker of his native language would think his performance foreign to the slightest degree. But originally, he may have been a native speaker of some other language. Since, by dint of circumstances, he has acquired a native speaker fluency. Any person born to the English speaking nation becomes a native speaker if he lives long enough, 8-10 years, his residency in the nation being uninterrupted, his input to his language decoding device (his brain) being customary, and his brain being undamaged by defect or accident. Any (?) person not born to the English speaking nation may acquire native speaker fluency, the T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 80
more likely, of course, being the individual who joins the English speaking nation before lateralization has been completed.
I couldnt make love in English.

PROF. CRYSTAL: I know several foreigners whose command of English I could not fault, but they themselves deny they are native speakers. When pressed on this point, they draw attention to such matters as the above - their lack of awareness of childhood associations, their limited passive knowledge of varieties, the fact that there are some topics which they are more comfortable discussing in their first language. I couldnt make love in English, said one man to me. INQUIRER: They could be confusing the fact of mother-tongue speakership with the question of native speakership. Or being unnecessarily apologetic. In any case, I think that, native speakers being in the position of jurors in regard to giving evidence, claims to knowledgeability and lack of it that are of a subjective nature should not be entertained. Mother-tongue speakership, on the other hand, is an objective fact on which there can be no two opinions regarding the same individual. But native speakership in the linguists sense represents a quantum leap from fact to fiction. As for the more intimate uses of language, we all know of socalled native speakers of English who couldnt begin to make love in English. At the same time, so many others who are not to the manner born probably do a better job. Remember the first time we went at it, even if it was in our mother tongues, we didnt know exactly where to start. I think it is all a question of learning. Any learning, of course, has its limits. One never attains the ideal that one has in mind. PROF. HALLIDAY: I dont know what it would mean to talk about an ideal native speaker of a language. PROF. CRYSTAL: In an ideal native speaker, there is a chronologically based awareness, a continuum from birth to death where there are no gaps. In an ideal non-native speaker, this continuum either does not start with birth, or if it does, the continuum has been significantly broken at some point. (Im a case of the latter, in fact, having been brought up in a Welsh-English environment until 9, then moving to England, where I promptly forgot most of my Welsh, and would no longer now claim to be a native speaker, even though I have many childhood associations and instinctive forms.) INQUIRER: [David Crystal is currently away from Reading spending a sabbatical in Wales. That was the change in steady state he referred to in his opening remarks]. Prof. Crystal, I hope you are not saying that you are a native speaker T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 81
of neither Welsh nor English. That would be stretching native speakership a bit too far or, looked at another way, unduly restricting its application. Which probably knocks the bottom out of the concept. Like my friends David Guralnik, George Kurien, and so many others, I think you would be a native speaker of English in the linguistic sense, as in my second definition of the term, and a native speaker of Welsh in the primary or popular sense. There are no ideal native speakers, any more than there are ideal Welshmen or Englishmen. As for the continuum, I think it could stretch from anywhere to anywhere, not necessarily from birth as the starting point and death as the end point. One would be a native speaker as soon as he or she got on the continuum (i.e. after acquiring competence in the language for which, of course, the pre-puberty stage is the best period of life, if only because language is a biologically-based skill) and would cease to be a native speaker as soon as the person got off it. But any competent speaker of a language should be a native speaker while he or she remained in the continuum. Prof. Christophersen has a very fascinating account of how he got on the continuum. PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: The language of my childhood home, and the medium of instruction in the schools I attended, was Danish. But I grew up in a very anglophile atmosphere, and in any case there was, and is, great emphasis on language teaching in Danish education. The first time I set foot on English soil, in my middle twenties, after taking a degree in English at Copenhagen, I was most often taken for English, and if it was sometimes realized that I was not English, it seemed to be less because of my speech than because of what my conversation had revealed, directly or indirectly, about my background. But I was less confident, then, in my use of English than my accent might suggest; Danish was still my primary medium. The balance shifted during a period of seven years, when I was stranded in England because of the Second World War and was cut off from contact with Denmark. For three years I was a research student at Cambridge, and later I was engaged in various forms of war work in London. During that period I got on the continuum (to use your useful phrase) in my use of English and ceased to belong to the Danish continuum, simply because I moved almost entirely in English surroundings and was happy in those surroundings. That state of affairs has continued and consolidated itself ever since. INQUIRER: World War II reminds me of what I read the other day about Victor Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter. He gained the start of his fluency in England during the Second World War. His mother worked in T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 82
the Soviet mission in London, and his friends were all British. After six years in the U.K., he spoke better English than Russian! Sukhodrev said in a recent interview with William Johnson, the Moscow correspondent of the Toronto Globe & Mail: Ive interpreted for the seven U.S. presidents starting with Dwight Eisenhower. Johnson reports that Sukhodrev speaks flawless English, with either a British or a U.S. accent.... He was 24 when he became his countrys foremost interpreter. He accompanied Nikita Khrushchev during his shoe-banging visit to the United Nations in 1958. Then he became Mr. Brezhnevs interpreter, and he has interpreted for the three Soviet leaders since then.... His command of English is impressive. (Johnson, 1985) As Victor Sukhodrevs and Prof. Christophersens cases show, I think the continuum should not be thought of as something external and impersonal like space or time which each one enters willy-nilly at birth (maybe even conception) and exits at death (for all we know about otherworldly matters). It should be like any of those continuums we get into by a process of acquisition, like walking, swimming, or bicycling. I used to be a pretty good bicyclist till about 25 years ago when I landed on this continent. I have had no use for a bike all this time. But when I got on my sons ten-speed the other day I had no problem keeping my balance. There had been a break in the continuum, a loss of bicycling ability, but I have been able to pick it up again. With some more practice I am sure I could attain a degree of skill or competence that could be compared to anyones linguistic competence as a native speaker. But in speaking, as in any other acquired skill, the present continuum (i.e. being a native speaker) is more crucial than past or future links with the continuum, like being able to swim or pedal now is crucial for qualifying as a swimmer or bicyclist. Francois Grosjean cites numerous instances of the environmental and acquisitional factors, as opposed to the native factor, in language learning, language loss, recovery, etc., albeit in the context of bilingualism. PROF. CRYSTAL: The continuum is crucial. Chomskys account doesnt explain the notion of language loss very well, it seems to me. But then, the whole notion of steady-state which he raises is a dubious one. Its possible in his terms only because of his focus on syntax and phonology. He ignores vocabulary, considering it a marginal feature. But I see vocabulary development (which never stops) to be just as important a feature as other aspects of development. Language is never in a steady state, in that sense. And this point is made stronger if one brings in the acquisition of new varieties of language (as is discussed in the polylectal debate). INQUIRER: I feel that a simple and factual explanation of native speaker based on linguistic usage (i.e. a competent user of a specific T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 83
language) should adequately answer all our questions. PROF. CRYSTAL: Chomskys answer, like his general approach, goes some way towards explaining the similarities between languages, but it does not help us explain why there are differences. INQUIRER: I dont think some way is good enough. PROF. CRYSTAL: The whole point of the native-speaker concept, though, is that it is oriented as much towards difference as similarity - why we find linguistic data unintelligible or only partially intelligible. That is why it is so useful in the language-teaching context, when language organs which have developed differently come into contact with each other. INQUIRER: Chomsky seems not only rather sceptical about the significance, for the teaching of languages, of such insights and understanding as have been attained in linguistics and psychology but gracious enough to admit that teachers, in particular, have a responsibility to make sure [the linguists] ideas and proposals are evaluated on their merits and not passively accepted on grounds of authority, real or presumed. (Chomsky, 1966). Just what I have been trying to do, I guess, in asking for an operational test of native speaker. PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: As some of the others have pointed out, the prevailing attitude to the native / non-native distinction is allied to the us/them distinction and is sometimes directly linked with nationality in the legal sense. A Welshman from Welsh-speaking Wales can safely model himself on an RP-speaking Englishman; many English people will refuse to believe him when he tells them that his language is really Welsh: What nonsense! You can hear he speaks perfectly normal English. But a foreigner in the same situation may cause irritation or ridicule: Hes masquerading as something hes not. INQUIRER: I think that is especially true of speakers of English like Ajit Singh and George Kurien. As members of visible minorities, they are not supposed to sound any different from the stereotype of speakers of so-called Indian English. They would be accused of conspicuous consumption or something similarly bad. For the same reason, when they are among people of their own nationality, they would rather affect features of Indian English than be looked down upon as foreigners. In the movie Gandhi, did you notice the marked change in Ben Kingsleys accent between South Africa and India? I thought that was quite true to life. MR. GURALNIK: I wouldnt want metaphysical views on what I now see as a question that has even more political and sociological overtones than linguistic ones. I am inclined to [think] that many, if not most, of the adherents of native intuition are motivated by unconscious - or even conscious - notions that are elitist, perhaps racist. Have you raised the question of whether American blacks, who for T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 84
perhaps fifteen to twenty consecutive generations have had no language but English, may not therefore have a native intuition, at least for certain varieties of the language, that may be more deeply engrained than that of speakers whose involvement with the language may go back only four or five generations? INQUIRER: A thought-provoking question. I would like to hear from someone better informed than I am on this. MR. GURALNIK: I agree with you that if insights and intuitions are, in fact, a sine qua non of the native speaker, there must be some way to identify, and perhaps even measure, them. PROF. GIMSON: You wrestle valiantly with a problem of definition which is clearly more complex than I had thought. The simple definition must be that a native speaker is one who has used from infancy one (or more) languages. It will usually be the case that he inhabits a country where this language is a major tongue, but this restriction is not invariable. From a linguistic point of view, the more interesting and crucial question concerns the ability of a speaker to make judgments (intuitively) on grammar and acceptability which conform to those of the generality of the (English) community. A native speaker must be expected to have this ability unless his acquisition of the language has been in some way deprived or unless his language ability is centrally disordered. Nevertheless this type of competence may well be achieved by someone who has not spoken the language from infancy, but for whom English, for instance, has become the first language or for whom English has parity with his mother tongue.... There are, therefore, natural native speakers and others who must qualify as honorary native speakers. A decision on whether someone falls into this latter category must rely on exhaustive tests of his ability to make immediate intuitive judgments of a linguistic (and related cultural) kind. The question as to whether he is judged by natural native speakers to be a natural native speaker of, say, British or American English (in any of their forms) provides a separate, though related, problem. It has sometimes happened in my experience that recordings of native Britons (from the remoter regions) have been judged by Londoners not to be native speakers! PROF. CHISHOLM: Now, taking an example, [Cleveland radio announcer] Karl Haas has near native-speaker fluency, near because, for instance, his post-vocalic [1] is German, not English. There is, in other words, a residue of his native-speaker fluency in German, whether induced by psycholinguistic reasons or something else. A residue of the problem of definition presents itself when one notes that not all native speakers of English whom I have asked can identify Karl Haas as a nonnative speaker! T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 85
INQUIRER: In the light of Prof. Chisholms observation, I think it would only be fair linguistically if Britons from the remoter regions had as much right as Londoners to confer honorary native speakership. Perhaps this is an honour that anyone could confer on anyone else, based on the subjects perceived proficiency in the language the subject is supposed to be speaking. Because this question is so full of variables, I would insist that all putative speakers of a language be subjected to the same tests, with no questions asked about the speakers mother tongue, language of infancy, country of origin or domicile, etc. I think we have sufficient evidence of the fact that natural native speakers are not ipso facto endowed with an intuitive ability to make judgments about grammar and acceptability. They have to be educated native speakers and the more educated the better.
An excursion with Eleanor Rosch

INQUIRER: We are privileged to hear from a couple of scholars who shed light from cognitive psychology on this vexed question. PROF. CARROLL: My general comment is that the term native speaker is a convenient reference to a kind of prototype (cf. work of Eleanor Rosch on this concept), the prototype being the usual person who learns some particular language as the mother tongue and keeps using that language all his or her life. I would judge that at least 90% of the worlds population consists of native speakers in this sense. But theres a small percentage of exceptions - of several types: (1) the person who learns one language in early childhood, but for some reason changes to another language for daily use - even to the point of exhibiting performance equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of the prototypical native speaker, and often practically forgetting the original native language. For example, just yesterday I met a man who said his first language was German (an American whose father and mother were spending some time in Switzerland on an academic sabbatical when he was born and raised for a few years); hed completely forgotten his German, and his later education being in the U.S. he certainly appeared like a native speaker of English, even an educated native speaker. (2) the child who is reared in an environment where no one language is dominant - thus having to learn two or more languages as a native speaker. Such cases may be relatively rare, but they certainly occur. Some of them turn out to be true bilinguals as competent as native speakers of two or more languages - and in some cases as competent as educated native speakers of two or more languages. Thus Id say the concept native speaker is a prototype term, but T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 86
beyond that its a matter of degree. INQUIRER: It seems to me a prototype is something so abstract and universal that a real individual may be said to belong to that category only in a very fuzzy way, as when one says Joan is an angel or A beanbag is a chair. Angels and devils could be considered as human prototypes, I suppose, just as chair is a prototype term for kitchen chairs, arm-chairs, deck-chairs, easy chairs, electric chairs, etc. We might say in a fuzzy way that Joan is an angel and this beanbag is a chair, but we cannot say categorically that Jo Anne is not an angel or that an ottoman is not a chair. As George Lakoff says: In a fuzzy set, an individual is not simply a member or a non-member, but may be a member to some degree, for example, any real number between 0 and 1. Take the fuzzy concept of tallness. Someone who is 65" is clearly tall, and someone who is 50" is clearly not tall. But what about someone who is 57", 59", 511"? (Lakoff, 1973) Like the tall person, the native speaker also seems to belong to a very fuzzy set. When Chomsky says, The sentences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker, it is as fuzzy as saying, The ceilings of a house should be acceptable to the tall person. The statement is inoperative as long as both acceptability and tallness remain undefined. Chomsky has said that one might propose various operational tests for acceptability (Aspects), which may be like saying a tall person should be able to sit, stand, and walk about in his house and also occasionally to leap a little, but he disallows the question of testing native speakership on metaphysical grounds. In effect, he leaves the native speaker as ill-defined as the tall person. According to Chomsky, everyone is a native speaker of the steady state he or she has reached in acquiring a language, which is like saying that everyone is as tall as he or she happens to be at a given moment or perhaps when they think they have reached a steady state. Now, is that a useful specification for a builder trying to fix the height of the ceilings of a house and doesnt know which exotic tribe of people - Pygmies, Masais, Finns - is going to live in it? Since there is some semantics involved in this question, let us see if we can get a second opinion from Prof. Geoffrey N. Leech of the University of Lancaster who has written a very sophisticated book on the subject (Leech, 1974) in which he breaks down meaning into seven different ingredients: logical or conceptual meaning, connotative meaning, stylistic meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocative meaning, and thematic meaning. Prof. Leech, since you use the term native speaker in the linguistic sense in over a dozen places in your fascinating book, would you mind telling us how to make out the meaning of the statement The sentences T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 87
generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker? PROF. LEECH: Thank you for your letter and enclosures. Prof. Quirk sent me a copy of his remarks on the notion of native speaker. I must say I associate myself with his views. INQUIRER: But Prof. Quirk hasnt discussed the semantics of the sentence I have quoted. I suspect there could be an eighth meaning in human communication which may be termed fictive meaning. I am beginning to see the wisdom of Paul Christophersen who reports that there is evidence to suggest that some exotic communities do not ... distinguish between native and nonnative speakers. Perhaps the exotic communities concerned have quicker ways of settling semantic disputes than by indulging in theoretical linguistics.
A linguistic apartheid
Come to think of it, most communities dont practise apartheid either. As I wrote in TESOL Quarterly recently, When theoretical linguists claim an innate facility for grammatical competence in a language on behalf of the native speaker,... it seems like a white South Africans claim that he can walk into a railway station in Pretoria any day, purchase a first-class ticket, get into any first-class coach, occupy a window seat, and travel all the way to Cape Town without getting thrown out at the first stop, as though a black or coloured could not do it. Some competence. As everyone knows, apart from manmade restrictions, there just isnt any rational evidence to back up such claims to exclusivity or the need for separateness of consideration. (Paikeday, 1985b) I agree with Prof. Carroll that 90% of the worlds population consists of native speakers, but that is in the popular sense of one who has a specified language as the mother tongue or first language, which is a clearly defined term with a clear concept behind it. Prototypes seem to be all-embracing terms which, of their very nature, should admit of no exceptions. In the present case, the real prototype seems to be the linguists native speaker, belonging to some superordinate category like angel or chair which, as Prof. Carroll says, is merely used as a convenient reference. I would prefer to say native speaker is just a linguistic ideal in relation to which other speakers are judged, usually in a value judgment involving birth, parentage, infancy, country of origin, cultural mannerisms, etc. that have nothing to do with the operative or essential characteristic of a native speaker as distinguished from other speakers, which seems to be proficiency in the language. I wonder if the idea of prototypes is anything more than the ancients T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 88
in a new package. However, since Eleanor Rosch seems to be an oftquoted authority in psychological circles, and cognitive psychology has a direct bearing on the subject of our discussion, let us get a second psychologists opinion on whether Rosch can shed any fresh light on our question. PROF. CASE: The point of Roschs work is that, just as chairs exist in the world, prototypic or ideal chairs also exist, in the minds of both children and adults. When one learns a word, what one is in effect doing is tagging a concept in ones mind, albeit a concept that has a real-world reference. INQUIRER: Im glad that Prof. Case thinks ideal chairs also exist. Prof. Chomskys main thrust has been that languages dont exist in any sense of the term. PROF. CASE: One can then rank specific chairs (or nonchairs) in terms of how close to (or far from) this concept they are. Presumably this is why the law allows for definition by example as well as by genus and differentiae. INQUIRER: I suppose also Indians could be ranked that way instead of being separated into tribes and nations. In the case of native speaker, I think such a ranking would apply only to the linguistic meaning of native speaker because proficiency admits of degree whereas parentage and other accidents of birth and upbringing (which are the essential elements of the first meaning of native speaker) dont admit of degree. The linguists native speaker (like Columbuss Indian) seems to be quite a different concept from the popular notion of one whose mother tongue or first language is the language in question. PROF. CASE: You could never get a perfect definition of a chair, i.e., one which neither excluded a real example nor included a nonexample. But you could rank other chairs in terms of how close they were to a prototypic chair. INQUIRER: I would consider a definition such as the following a practical definition though not a perfect one: a piece of furniture with four legs, a back, and a seat for one person. All pieces of furniture that fitted this definition would be chairs and all others that didnt would be nonchairs. PROF. CASE: Psychologically speaking that is fine because one understands what you mean. But logically speaking, there are thousands of chairs that dont have legs, that dont have backs, etc. I think it is the same problem with native speaker. The exceptions may in fact be exceptions, but that is true for any definition of something which is a natural category. INQUIRER: I didnt know chair and native speaker could be T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 89
categorized as natural categories. Personally, I think all categories are artificial. But defective chairs may still be considered as chairs, I suppose, although, as the differences from the standard chair increase in number and quality, we seem to resort to terms like broken chair, stool, and seat and give them separate definitions. It seems anomalous to speak of a tripod as a chair or a North American native as an Indian. Dictionaries like to keep meanings separate, making finer and finer distinctions as thought and language develop. But I dont go for the kind of lexicography la Merriam-Webster which atomizes the meanings of words into such fine sprays of abstractions they tend to cloud the essential meanings instead of clarifying them. PROF. CASE: Instead of thinking in terms of a class which does fit your definition and a class that doesnt fit it, why not use a different definition for the class of chairs that allows some, for example, to have the back and seat in one curved piece? One doesnt need a different definition for these. Nor does one need a different definition for chairs with a solid base with no legs or with three legs. All these are perfectly good chairs, which show a reasonable fit to the prototypic chair, but which are exceptions to your definition since you assume a conjunctive logic rather than a disjunctive, probabilistic, or fuzzy logic. INQUIRER: I think fuzzy logic would get a lexicographer nowhere. Fuzziness helps to accommodate thoughts, especially in situations in which it is impossible to be precise or draw a boundary. As lexicographers, primarily, we take account of words and when words extend their applications, as when new models of chairs appear on the market, we revise our definitions. But if a new model of chair comes with a new name and the new name gains currency, as when a trademark passes into the public domain, we define it as a new dictionary entry. Customers who want recliners, sofas, beanbags, ottomans, etc. would be ill served by just the prototypic chair, I suppose. In the case of native speaker, I think linguists have a certain ideal in mind but their real-world referents have no necessary connection with that ideal. At best the connection is fuzzy. The linguistic concept native speaker is that of someone who is a proficient user of a specific language, not of someone who has the language as mother tongue or first language. Different tags seem called for when we have different concepts. If the same tag or term is used, a distinction of meaning should be made, as when we say Indian, 1. a native or inhabitant of India; 2. a North American native. PROF. CASE: You still seem to want to have a nice crisp boundary. Why not allow exemplars to vary along a continuum? INQUIRER: Continuums being universals, I suppose they exist T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 90
chiefly in our minds. In the final analysis, everything that exists may be considered as exemplars of one idea, the idea of being, or as having evolved gradually and continuously from something primordial. The question of who is a native speaker is a practical one with very practical implications. Does the linguists native speaker have any greater reality than angel or chair in the abstract does? Whether you are recruiting native speakers as editors for a dictionary, teachers of a language, or as informants in a linguistic study, what criteria do you apply for discriminating between native and nonnative speakers? PROF. CARROLL: The excess baggage placed in the term by some linguists has to do with the native speakers presumed competence to evaluate the grammaticality of utterances. Surely this competence must be a matter of degree: on the assumption that a language is a property of a particular speech community, the various speakers of that language must vary in their conformity to the norm, if only because they acquire the language at different rates and to different degrees. I dont think wed want to trust all native speakers as competent judges of grammaticality or other aspects of the linguistic norm. Thus, when linguists refer to native speakers competence in judging grammaticality, etc., they fail to mention their assumption that they are talking about native speakers who have progressed far enough in acquiring the language to be regarded as competent judges. And they [native speakers] might be competent judges of simple things (like rejecting a sentence like I went yesterday to town) but not competent judges of advanced matters like meanings of words that lexicographers argue over. INQUIRER: One native speaker (i.e. the educated type) may be said to be a better native speaker than another in the same sense that Joan may be said to be a better angel than Jo Anne or a recliner may be a better chair than a beanbag. But these seem to be questions of competence. As for the competence of native speakers in judging simple things, I went yesterday to town or Yesterday I went to town.... would strike me as a less usual order of words than I went to town yesterday, not as particularly ungrammatical. Utterances generated mechanically, as by a computer, have to follow set patterns, but isnt it natural to expect that human speakers, nonnatives and natives, would occasionally depart from the usual in regard to word order as in all other linguistic particulars, not necessarily because of linguistic factors such as interference from another language, but fatigue, stress, and such things that affect natives and nonnatives alike? PROF. CASSIDY: [Human speakers] are more complexly programmed than a computer and produce subtler results because more elements of linguistic context are put in when they produce a statement, whereas the computer is limited. INQUIRER: In the above instance, it seems equally probable that I T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 91
went yesterday had some prior order of significance in the mind of the speaker than I went to town and he didnt bother (because of extralinguistic factors) to rearrange his thoughts in the right syntactical order before expressing himself. A more proper test of native speakership (or of grammatical competence which I dont consider the monopoly of the native speaker) would be the rejection of sentences like the following cited by Grosjean as examples of syntactical interference, although it is not impossible to justify them by clever interpretation: But he knew well French. On the page five. Were going at Montreal. PROF. WINER: One thing you might consider is soft or squishy areas in the language. There are definitely areas like this in English in, say, tense sequencing with when and if and creeping biconditionalism: e.g., Ill tell him when Ill see him, If Ill see him, Ill tell him, and If I would have known I would have told him, respectively. Use of some such nonEnglish forms might be ascribed to French interference or influence in Quebec, but surely not in Southern Illinois. The whole question of variation has to be dealt with, so that what English or French is at any one synchronic point is variable, as are the intuitions of native speakers. Without change, variation and fluidity, not to say disagreement, the language would become petrified. INQUIRER: While we are on this subject, here are a couple of sentences that landed on my desk today. These are examples of edited English (not spontaneous utterances like the two specimens of freshman English I quoted at the beginning of this discussion) put out by two native English-speaking institutions which, however, may be more interested in our pocketbooks than in teaching grammar and spelling. One is from Revenue Canadas 1983 Income Tax Return. Its first line reads: If the number shown at left is not your Social Insurance Number, please enter it below. That surely is language that defeats its purpose. Revenue Canada may collect taxes but it is going to be left with more wrong numbers than it started with. Context, of course, is a great help in the disambiguation of meanings and tax collection. The other is from McDonalds Restaurant. A certificate issued to a little girl after a birthday party states: Ronald McDonald Hereby Proclaims Annie An Honourary [sic] Citizen of McDonaldland and is [sic] Entitled to Fun and Happiness Forever. I am sure the second part of the proclamation, which reads like a claim on behalf of Ronald, was really supposed to be about Annie. And Ronald could also have spelled honorary in the only style endorsed by Canadian, British, and American dictionaries. I suspect T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 92
McDonalds sometimes bends over backwards to shed its American image when operating outside the U.S. The linguist may object that the above two are merely examples of poor communicative competence, but I think there is grammar involved that is relevant to any judgment about native speakership. The linguists native speaker, whether speaking on his own or with editorial assistance, doesnt seem to be endowed with any unique or distinctive qualities (strengths and weaknesses) that are not shared by his nonnative speaker. We are fortunate to have Prof. Chomsky back with us to reply to the debate.
Chomskys Chomskys reply

PROF. CHOMSKY: I wish I had the time to comment fully. There are, in my opinion, a great many serious errors and misunderstandings, but I simply do not have the time to run through the [comments] point-bypoint. The worst problems begin on p.65, where Inquirer states that languages exist independently of the people acquiring them and that As everyone knows, they exist in society. As for the latter statement, one can understand the thought that Inquirer is trying to convey, but this way of expressing it reveals great confusion, and is almost meaningless if interpreted literally. The first statement is intelligible: it expresses Inquirers belief that languages exist as Platonic objects... INQUIRER: Not again! PROF. CHOMSKY: ... a position that Inquirer later denies, revealing that there is some deep-seated confusion here as well. INQUIRER: As you say, the confusion is chiefly in the expression rather than in the thought intended to be expressed. Perhaps I should have avoided Plato altogether as the red herring that it seems to be. Languages exist independently of the people acquiring them is simply like saying Circles exist independently of the people going in circles which doesnt mean the circle exists either as a Platonic object or as something concrete by itself. It exists in geometry, exists on paper, and exists in the mind: these are modes of existence that are not mutually exclusive. PROF. FORGUSON: The walk exists independently of the walkers walking? The race exists independently of the runners r u n n i n g ? S e e t h e l a s t s t a n z a o f W. B . Ye a t s A m o n g Schoolchildren. W. B. YEATS: O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 93
INQUIRER: No problem. I accept Yeatss poetry, but the philosophy you read into it is another matter. With all respect to a professional philosopher, I happen to prefer my philosophy straight, although I think a dash of philosophy improves the taste of poetry, like Scotch added to water. As for knowing the dancer from the dance (the same applies to knowing the Scotch from the water) when my little girl who takes ballet lessons is not swaying her body exactly as she should, that is one occasion when it is easy for me to tell the dancer from the dance. Her instructor is much better at this, I am sure. When there is perfect blending of dancer and dance, then we tend to get lyrical, even to the point of losing our philosophical sobriety, and it seems as though we cant tell the dancer from the dance. In my philosophy, the dance exists as does the dancer and the Scotch exists even after it has gone down the hatch though, again, not in the same way. When I say languages exist in society, I simply mean it normally takes more than one person to use a language; one doesnt need a grammar, vocabulary, and speech sounds to talk to oneself. We have to recognize an existence that is neither Platonic nor perceptible by the senses. As Prof. Case said earlier, not only do chairs exist, but even the ideal chair exists, i. e. as a mental concept, which is not something recently invented in California by Eleanor Rosch but something as old as philosophy itself. Rosch merely repackaged and trademarked it prototype. As Aristotle said, concepts exist fundamentally in things and formally in the mind (fundamentaliter in re, formaliter in mente, as in a Latin translation). I will go back over the script later and try to clear the confusion. Right now let us listen to Prof. Chomsky. PROF. CHOMSKY: I do not see any reason to suppose that languages exist in any sense supposed by Inquirer. That is the source of many confusions that follow. The analogy I drew to visual systems is quite accurate. Inquirer is making a familiar error of assuming that if we use a term (in this case, language) in intelligible discourse, then there is a thing, existing in the world, to which the term refers. INQUIRER: You denied earlier in the discussion that even water exists because it is sometimes found polluted. But you cant deny that at least polluted water exists, that water exists also as ice and vapour, at various temperatures, etc. I think the same applies to language: there is polluted language, language at various levels of usage, and there are languages belonging to different linguistic families. It is all a question of what mode or manner of existence we are talking about. Water exists as a thing in one way and language exists as something in a different way. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 94
Water exists for human beings and lower forms of life; language exists for us. But existence itself, whether of things that are perceived by the senses or of things that are intellectually perceived, is something undeniable. If languages are figments of the mind with no existence in any sense whatsoever, then so is the native speaker. DOCTOR G: Hear, Hear! PROF. CHOMSKY: This [reification of referents] is a serious error, constantly discussed in the philosophical literature, and responsible for all sorts of imagined and pointless difficulties. In the present case, suppose we make the assumption (absurd in my view) that languages exist independently of the people who speak them, i.e., as objects in a Platonic heaven ... INQUIRER: I object. PROF. CHOMSKY: ... like numbers for a Platonist (note that this is precisely what the statement means). If an object exists, it has definite properties; it cannot, for example, have the property P and also the property not-P, and it cannot have the property P fuzzily (to think otherwise would be to misunderstand seriously the technical notion of fuzziness to which you refer). For example, if English exists, then it either has the property that the past tense of bring is brang or that it is brought or that it is both or that it is neither; and it has the property that I went to symphony or I went to the symphony is grammatical, or both, or neither; etc. INQUIRER: But English has definite properties. I hope you are not saying that brang and brought are in the contradictory relationship of P and not-P. Brang and brought seem to me more like P-1 and P-2 and could coexist as alternative forms like sneaked and snuck. Something contradictory would be if one were to say brang exists and does not exist in the same breath or that the past tense exists and does not exist in English. Even if someone said that, it would not reflect so much on the existence of English as on the existence of sanity in the speaker; or we might question the existence of brang; we know, of course, it exists in the real world in child language. And fuzziness, in my own sometimes fuzzy view, is in the mode of predication of a property, not in the existence of the property itself. Also, I think that I went to symphony and I went to the symphony are not contradictory. They could both be grammatical. The trouble with the first sentence is only as it is written. If you write symphony with a capital S (referring to something unique and grammatically proper like Symphony Shoppe Inc.), I dont think anyone would call it ungrammatical. You were saying? PROF. CHOMSKY: If German, Dutch, Chinese, Italian, etc., exist as individual entities, then each has its definite properties; e.g., mutually intelligible dialects of German have the identical properties throughout T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 95
(which is nonsensical) and a dialect of Dutch that is mutually intelligible with a dialect of German has different properties. If we were to assume that languages in the common sense of the term dont exist (contrary to Inquirer), but only dialects, the same problems arise, and if only idiolects exist in the Platonistic sense of Inquirers odd beliefs, then there are far more of these than there are people (since each person has many, and there are many that for one or another reason arent spoken). All of this leads to problems, such as those to which this inquiry is directed, which seem difficult, real and apparently insoluble, but are really not problems at all, just errors based on misunderstanding of the use of language, on illegitimate reification. The right approach to these questions, avoiding all of these pseudo-problems, is the one I sketched in my letter, as far as I can see. INQUIRER: I think when we speak of mutually intelligible dialects of German, it should not mean that they have the identical properties throughout, as you put it, but merely that they share certain properties (say, properties C, D, and F out of a total inventory of A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H) which make them mutually intelligible and maybe even partially confusable, which is not nonsensical. It is like two sisters who, even if they happen to be identical twins, neednt have the identical properties throughout (their measurements, for example) but who nevertheless exist in reality, share common characteristics, and make a lot of sense.
As Pilate said, What is truth?

Your metaphysical position resembles that of Pontius Pilate who, when pressed on a point of truth and justice, washed his hands of the whole affair after posing the question What is truth? The question we are discussing is not What is existence? or whether languages exist, but on what grounds can the native speaker of a language in the popular sense of mother-tongue or first-language speaker (whose existence you cannot deny) may be said to be the arbiter of grammaticality. For this purpose it seems essential to have a proper definition of native speaker. You did give your own definition of native speaker earlier in the discussion, namely, everyone whose language organ has attained a particular steady state which that person has grown in his or her mind. But when I ask whether it is that kind of native speaker you mean when you say, Sentences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker, you dodge the issue (at least two of the other professors explicitly concur with me on this) and escape to the realms of metaphysics, merely suggesting that I try to see the question as you see it. PROF. CHOMSKY: Im sorry you dont see it. Not seeing it, you T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 96
really must face these hopeless and pointless problems, but you will surely never find any solution to them, as you will discover as you proceed, since the problems arise from serious misunderstanding in the first place and an illegitimate inference to the existence of an object, language, as a Platonic object. INQUIRER: Plato is an exaggerated realist, as shown by his allegory of the underground den in which human beings live enchained watching only their own shadows and those of the realities as they pass by, including, I suppose, language (Republic, Book VII, 514). I dont believe in any such idealized universal language with an otherworldly existence of its own. For me languages, and language in a more abstract way, are real and existent, they are the subject of linguistic science, and it is of them that you make statements such as, Sentences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker. Your invocation of Platonism may be just name-calling if not a red herring. You too have been accused of Platonism by your adversaries. PROF. NEY: The accusation that Prof. Chomsky is a Platonist has been made by James McCawley in his How far can you trust a linguist? INQUIRER: Isnt that interesting! PROF. NEY: McCawley says: Another noteworthy point in the paradigm of generative grammar is what I will refer to as Platonism, namely the idea that one level of linguistic structure (generally, deep structure) is real and that other levels are mere shadows or reflections of it. (McCawley, 1982). I personally like this use of the term Platonism because my feeling is that Descartes (and, subsequently, Prof. Chomsky) owes more to Plato (and Plotinus - neo-Platonism) than most care to admit. PROF. CHOMSKY: If you want to proliferate pointless problems in this way you might go on with society, or culture, asking similar questions. The basic error was pointed out (correctly, in my view) in the French Enlightenment and by British common sense philosophers such as Thomas Reid, who criticized the theory of ideas (in its rationalist and empiricist form), arguing that it was based on a mistaken interpretation of ordinary language; the assumption that I have an idea is parallel to I have a book, so that ideas exist, etc. Maybe one can save the theory of ideas or maybe not, but the fact that expressions can be systematically misleading in this sense is now a commonplace, and a good deal of modern analytic philosophy is devoted to discussing it, in various manifestations (Ryle, Wittgenstein, and numerous others). Inquirer has fallen into a variety of this error, and is thus attempting to answer questions that do not arise in the first place, when simple errors of reasoning and misunderstanding of ordinary language are eliminated. T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 97
INQUIRER: If I read Gilbert Ryle correctly, in his essay on Systematically Misleading Expressions (Ryle, 1932), the philosopher says, Paralogisms and antinomies are the evidence that an expression is systematically misleading. For Ryle, the statements Mr. Pickwick is a fictitious person and The Equator encircles the globe are misleading because they could lead to other propositions like Mr. Pickwick was born in such and such a year and The Equator is of such and such a thickness. Frankly, I dont see how the earlier statements can be said to be misleading if we are careful not to be misled, as between fact and fiction in the case of Mr. Pickwick and between imagination and reality in the case of the equator. But it is clear that you have been systematically misled in Ryles sense because your statement Sentences generated will have to be acceptable to the native speaker is a paralogism or proposition like The equator is of such and such a thickness. What we have in native speaker is a mere concept, an idea, so that, in your own words, when we say we have this idea, it is not like saying We have a book or anything similar in the physical world. I also have a nagging impression that your comments have been systematically misleading in a different sense from Ryles because you changed the subject of the discussion from whether native speakers exist to whether language exists. Gilbert Ryle seems to understand existence itself the way I understand it. In Dilemmas (Ryle, 1976), he says: Aesop told a story of a dog who dropped his bone in order to secure the tempting reflection of the bone. No child thinks that this was meant to be just an anecdote about a real dog. It was meant to convey a lesson about human beings. But which human beings? Hitler perhaps. Yet Aesop did not know that there was going to be a Hitler. Well, about Everyman. But there is no such person as Everyman. And later, There is no such animal as Science. There are scores of sciences. That is exactly the way I understand existence - existence at various levels of abstraction, not in watertight compartments of the reified and nonreified. There is no such person as your native speaker in the same sense as there is no such person as Everyman or any such animal as science or language. But there are any number of native speakers in the senses in which I have defined the term, just as, for Gilbert Ryle, there are scores of sciences. In other words, there are languages as well as sciences, which to me is the same as saying languages as well as sciences exist, as I said above, but not in the same way as language exists or native speaker in your sense exists. The latter exists only as an ideal or figment of the imagination. You have to redefine it to mean proficient user of a language since it is a real animal we are talking about. The same goes for the book as opposed to its mental concept or an T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 98
idea such as bookness or bookishness. I dont know what exactly you mean by parallel but, as I see it, the book (which we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell) has a different sort of existence from bookishness which is perceivable only by the mind but still exists, albeit not in the way a book exists. We can validly say, for example, that Bartholomew is bookish or that his scholarship is mere bookishness without giving bookishness a reality that is perceivable by the senses. Bookishness as an idea exists in our minds just as books and bookish people exist outside the mind. And I have no problem with terms like society and culture either. As for the problem of native speaker, I think I have studied it to death and it has ceased to be a problem for me. I am convinced that native speaker in the sense of sole arbiter of grammaticality or one who has intuitions of a proprietary nature about his or her mother tongue and which are shared only by others of his own tribe is a myth propagated by linguists, that the true meaning of the lexeme native speaker is proficient user of a specified language, and that this meaning satisfies all contexts in which linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, educators, and others use it, except when it directly refers to the speakers mother tongue or firstacquired language without any assumptions about the speakers linguistic competence. PROF. FORGUSON: I agree with you here. Thats why I think [this controversy] is off the track. INQUIRER: It was Prof. Chomsky who led us off the track, I think. PROF. CASSIDY: Proficient user [instead of native speaker] might help to clear the air. INQUIRER: Linguists and others who use the term as though linguistic insights and intuitions had a necessary connection with a subjects genetically related parent seem to belong to the same school as William Shockley of Stanford who claims that intellectual capacity is determined by genetic and racial factors. Prof. Chomsky has avoided that pitfall (after claiming earlier that there is overwhelming reason to believe that the character of the steady state attained is largely determined by the genetic endowment) by performing a coup and declaring all speakers native speakers. PROF. FORGUSON: All speakers are native speakers, but not all speakers of L-s1 are native speakers of it. I am a speaker of French, but not a native speaker, and this has nothing to do with its not being my first language. I agree with you that proficiency is the key. But how do we identify the proficient speakers for linguistic purposes? Which is the chicken, and which the egg - speakers or languages? INQUIRER: I doubt if logical, causal, or even purely temporal priority matters in this question of linguistics. Both chicken and eggs come first T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 99
because we are discussing a question of being, not becoming. Proficiency being variable, the proficiency of any speaker of a language at any given point in time could be tested objectively on the basis of criteria we could lay down for achieving the purpose for which the proficiency is required. It is like saying all graduate students shall maintain a B + grade, and this grade shall be awarded by agreement among the graduate faculty. I dont see any problem with proficiency testing. In sum, I believe that linguists of the genetic school may be producing their scholarly works cut on the bias and their conclusions, if they are based principally on the testimony of so-called native speakers, may be of questionable value. Others who use this biased notion of native speakership in hiring for jobs related to language proficiency are denying the members of disadvantaged groups equal opportunity with those for whom the language in question is their mother tongue or first language. PROF. FORGUSON: I agree. And this seems to be the sub-text of this whole debate. INQUIRER: If you mean subsidiary theme or topic, yes indeed! I wanted to show that native speaker in the linguists sense is a myth and because it is a myth, native speakership should not be used as a criterion for excluding certain categories of people from language-teaching, dictionary-editing, and similar functions. What use are purely theoretical deliberations that are divorced from reality (why I wouldnt pay another years dues to the Linguistic Society of America), but it has been a privilege and a pleasure discussing native speaker with all of you, especially Prof. Chomsky. PROF. CHOMSKY: Sorry that we couldnt reach mutual understanding on this issue, but the world will survive this failure. INQUIRER: Amen.
Noam Chomsky recant?

DOCTOR F: Dont you think your Amen would have been more appropriate if Chomsky had recited some formula of recantation? INQUIRER: Oh, no. I dont expect Chomsky to recant just yet. There is plenty of time left, you know. Moreover, a recantation is a purely personal decision. Some people recant on a daily basis when they say their evening prayers. Others wait till they really feel the moment of truth is near. Then they reach for the formula, as they used to do in the Middle Ages. Others never recant at all; they are not medieval. Any closing remarks from others? PROF. BASHAM: As a non-linguist, I find this discussion rather scholastic. Obviously, the meaning of native speaker is clear to the T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 100
ordinary man. It is equally obvious that native speakers are not always born into the language they speak, though this is, strictly speaking, a contradiction in terms and, on final analysis, the term is a misnomer. So what? INQUIRER: Prof. Basham, you are from the Centre for Religious Studies. I wonder whether those who believe in the Holy Spirit as the Inspirer would like to say, if the term is a misnomer, so what? PROF. NEY: I am in sympathy with your [Inquirers] position entirely.... The basis of Chomskys definition of a native speaker rests on his belief that it is possible to tap native speaker intuition through the ability of native speakers to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. James McCawley writes of this ability in How far can you trust a linguist? cited earlier: The alleged ability of speakers of a language to distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical strings of words is about as rare and as perverse as the ability to construct puns.... Anyone who has taught an introductory syntax course has had the experience of presenting an ungrammatical example only to be told by some smart-aleck about an unsuspected interpretation on which the sentence is quite normal ... the strings of words on which grammaticality judgements are allegedly made exist only as typographical or acoustic objects, not as perceptual or cognitive objects, just as the Necker cube exists only as a graphic object as contrasted with its two interpretations, which do exist as perceptual objects. (McCawley, 1982) If McCawley is right, and I believe that he is, Chomskys conception of native speakers is one more manifestation of his rationalism which has its roots in Platonic idealism. As long as a person can believe in Platos idea, then that person can believe in the Chomskyan concept of a native speaker. But if belief is to be supported by evidence, then there can be no belief in Chomskys concept of native speaker since 25 years of transformational linguistics has proved the veracity of McCawleys statement. PROF. GATES: Since I have almost no interest in transformational grammar, I find it hard to get exercised over the concept of native speaker. If one means competent speaker he should say that, not native speaker which ought to retain transparency in its etymological sense. I would not encourage any more anomalies like Indian. INQUIRER: I think it goes against the facts of life to expect words to retain their etymological senses. Native speaker as an anomaly seems an accomplished fact. We cant turn the clock back on semantic change. But the reality represented by the term should not delude us any longer. There is no such animal as the native speaker of a language. Even if there T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 101
was, rigor mortis seems to be setting in on it. The best we can do is to define and use words according to their common acceptations, but without losing sight of reality. It is just like using Indian to refer to Athabascans, Iroquois, Bengalis, Tamils, etc. but being able to distinguish between them as the need arises, as when you are recruiting informants for a study of a particular Indian language or analyzing the choreography of the Sun Dance.
Wanted: a Copernican revolution

DR. STINSON: This colloquy ... reminds me of the discussions among biologists 10 to 30 years ago over the meaning of type specimen relative to species. (My background is as a former assistant professor of comparative anatomy). In biology, the species concept had been developed long before the modern understanding of genetics had developed. Species were thought to be static entities, definable by a single type specimen. This concept changed with the realization that speciation was a dynamic, ongoing process. I suspect that native speaker will change for the linguist just as type specimen changed for the biologist. Type specimens are still valuable for reference, but they no longer provide the static definition of a species. The type specimen has changed from being the point in ndimensional character space that defines the species, to being one point in a (more or less tight) cluster of points that identifies the region identifying a particular species. As we learn more about how language is acquired, I suspect we will change the way we think of native speakers - not as the defining point in some n-dimensional linguistic space, but as any of many points in a cluster in the part of linguistic space that is correlated with a particular language. PPOF. FORGUSON: Wise words, I think. PROF. CASSIDY: In sum I might say that one cant question the existence of the phrase or compound noun native speaker as a term. People have used it, which means that they meant something by it. It must have had some common core of meaning to earn repetition without examination - its meaning was tacitly accepted, each user considering his own understanding of it to be the general one. But this is not good enough for those persnickety people who write dictionaries - they are always demanding definitions! As a lexicographer Im with you. You have done the trade a service by having your meeting and getting the problem out in the open. INQUIRER: You must mean those who trade in linguistic jargon. But I hope even nonlinguists will benefit by our discussion. And everyone T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 102
should now be able to enjoy the Song of the Native Speaker that has been languishing in your closet since 1962 (see Appendix 1), and more as a mock elegy than the triumphal ode whose form it has. PROF. CHRISTOPHERSEN: Something in the nature of a Copernican revolution is required in our linguistic outlook. Unlike the naive cosmology of the flat-earthers, the Ptolemaic world picture made sense and hung together; it was scientific in conception, but the theory was complicated to a degree and became increasingly so as more and more facts came to light and had to be fitted into the picture. Copernicus proposed a simpler way of explaining the same set of facts, yet it was centuries before his theory was commonly accepted - partly, I am sure, because Ptolemys explanation appealed to mans anthropocentric instinct. A similar feeling accounts for the popularity of the idea of a native language, ones own language which nobody else must presume to treat as if it belonged to him. This is a nice comforting way of looking at things, a safe shelter in which to hide from the increasing complexities of our modern world. Longcherished notions are often an unconscionable time a-dying.
APPENDIX 1
Song of the Native Speaker

by
Frederic G. Cassidy
(Presented to the Linguistic Circle of Madison, Wisc. February 1962)
Hail to the Native Speaker,

He never can go wrong! For by some process mystic, Subliminal, sublinguistic, And utterly spectacular, He knows his own vernacular To every last detail He simply cannot fail! Field-workers seeking to dissect The structure of his idiolect Occasionally may detect What seems at first an odd effect, Yet every item simply must belong: The Native Speaker never can go wrong! Our analytic bag of tricks, Each segment, sign, and superfix Unto the uttermost fud, He knew em by the age of six He has em in his blood. Yes, theyre there, lurking there In some infra-conscious layer Where there isnt room for any trace of doubt And all we have to do is draw them out! What if they prove erratic Or quite unsystematic? Could there have been a lapse? A slip of the tongue perhaps? No! No! No! It simply cant be so No Native Speakers syllable Is anything but unspillable; The fault is ours, and we must ask Are we equal to the task?
We speakers quite sophistic Of cultivated tongues, Our grammars pluralistic; Its diachronic features Like fossilized sea-creatures Have gills instead of lungs And structural variety Defying all propriety As primitive peoples speech would never do. And so wed better think twice And count the horrible price Before describing the speech of me or you! But it isnt the same at all With languages never writ So with the Native Speaker We neednt worry a bit. The Scientist is humble And Linguists never grumble; So when our first analyses Appear to swarm with fallacies, When by no form of gimmetry Can we discover symmetry, When even terminology Collapses in tautology, When -emes and -allos, nasty devils, Refuse to stay on their proper levels And when the room gets hotter, Our tongue feels like a blotter, Our brain begins to totter Like a titubating otter, And we see our Native Speaker With the eye of a garrotter, For our structure analytic Has proven quite rachitic, We must resist the urge to prune and patch (Natch! Just throw it away and start again at scratch!) Then fill a foaming beaker And hail the Native Speaker, The Hero and the Burden of our song For he never, no, never, can go wrong!
APPENDIX 2
Anyone Met a Native Speaker?

The following is the memo originally sent round to the contributors and some of the consultants for comments, as explained in the Preface. 1. The term native speaker has perplexed this dictionary editor for well nigh 25 years. It seems a household word among linguists and lexicographers and taken as self-evident by dictionaries of record such as OED and Websters Third which apparently have room for more obvious terms like mother tongue. 2. For an untutored lay person, native speaker may mean someone who speaks a native language, like an Iroquois or Athabaskan! A more widely read person would say it is a buzzword used by linguists, with the usual implication that it is devoid of much meaning. However, it is a matter of some consequence not only for linguists but for people in general. For instance, the first of many citations of the term available in a newspaper database has Claude Ryan, Quebecs former Liberal leader, saying in reference to Quebecs Charter of the French Language that all native speakers of English should be permitted to attend English schools. 3. The few dictionaries that enter native speaker dont do justice to the question: a person having a specified native language (Collins English Dictionary, 1979); native speakers of English = those who learn English as their first language, esp. in Britain, America, Australia, etc. (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 1978) 4. Citations of the linguistic use of the term are available by the hundreds in books and papers on linguistics. Thus, the Language and Language Behavior Abstracts database has 525 references, Educational Resources Information Center database has over 250, and so on. The common core of meaning contained in the literature on native speaker, as every linguist knows, is one who has an insight into a specified language or enjoys an intuitive sense of what is grammatical and ungrammatical in regard to its usage, someone whose native instincts qualify him as a touchstone or arbiter on linguistic matters relating to a language, especially if he is an educated native speaker. 5. But how do you determine who is a native speaker of a language? Ask your mother? Does everyone whose mother is identifiable and whose faculties have been unimpaired since birth and speech uninhibited, qualify as a native speaker of his or her mother tongue? 6. Is a native speaker made rather than born? If made, at what age should he have begun to speak the language? Can you switch from being T. M. Paikeday, The Native Speaker Is Dead!, Page 106
a native speaker of one language to that of another because of changing circumstances, especially domicile, and with the passage of time? Are there self-made native speakers or are they necessarily creatures of the environment, similar to natural organisms? Under what conditions are native speakers of English found in non-English-speaking countries? 7. Or is native speaker merely an ideal or a convenient linguistic fiction - myth, shibboleth, sacred cow - an etherlike concept with no objective reality to it, albeit embodied in a quasi-privileged class of speakers of each language? If so, how valid are linguistic studies based on the intuitions of native speakers? Is proficient user as good a term for purposes of such studies as native speaker? Would the studies have the same meaning or relevance if the former term were used instead of the latter? Does nativity have any more bearing on ones intuitions about a language than on ones ability to walk, run, or swim? 8. Can the distinction between native and nonnative speaker, especially since it happens to favour one group of speakers of each language, become discriminatory in some of its applications such as hiring for language-teaching positions - a question debated at a recent MLA Annual Meeting? If the difference is real or legitimate, is it necessarily one of kind or merely of degree as implied by the expression educated native speaker? 9. Can a native speaker be distinguished from a nonnative speaker as other contrary ideas and things may be distinguished, e.g. gold from something that is not gold (by the acid test) or a female of the species from a male (by chromosome patterns)? 10. If the foregoing are pertinent questions, it seems logical to ask what acid tests may be used to distinguish a highly proficient nonnative speaker of any dialect of English from a native, proficient or otherwise. Does anyone know of any such tests? This writer would appreciate help from readers for making a special study of the term native speaker.
REFERENCES
Laszlo Antal (1984), Psychologism, Platonism, and Realism in Linguistics, Word, 35, pp. 163-175. Dennis E. Baron (1982), Going Native: The Regeneration of Saxon English, Publication of the American Dialect Society, No. 69, University of Alabama Press, p.iii. Britannica Medical and Health Annual 1981, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., p. 250. Britannica Book of the Year 1984, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., p. 334. A. F. Brown (1963) (ed.), Normal and Reverse English Word List, University of Pennsylvania. Tom Burnham (1975), The Dictionary of Misinformation, Thomas Y. Crowell, p. 79. Ronald R. Butters (1984), When is English Black English Vernacular?, Journal of English Linguistics, vol. 17, pp. 29-37. J. C. Catford (1975), Some Aspects of Linguistics in Language Testing, English Teaching Forum, vol. xiii, p. 318. Noam Chomsky (1957), Syntactic Structures, Mouton, p. 48. (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, M.I.T., p. 11. --- (1966), Linguistic Theory, North East Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, p. 45. Paul Christophersen (1973), Second-Language Learning, Penguin, pp. 76-77. Collins Dictionary of the English Language, Patrick Hanks (ed.), Collins, 1979. Ray Conlogue, Info Globe [database of The Toronto Globe & Mail, daily newspaper), 5 Aug 1982. S. Pit Corder (1973), Introducing Applied Linguistics, Penguin, pp. 257-259. A. P. Cowie (1983a), R. Mackin & I. R. McCaig (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English, Oxford, vol. 2, p. xvi. (1983b), On Specifying Grammar, in R. R. K. Hartmann (ed.), Lexicography: Principles and Practice, Academic Press, p. 105. David Crystal (1971), Linguistics, Penguin, p. 110. Raimonde Dallaire, William W. Gage, Paul L. Garvin, Paul M. Postal, and Eric P. Hamp (1962), The Transformation Theory, Georgetown University Monograph Series on Languages and Linguistics, No. 5. DIALOG database, Palo Alto, CA. Nancy C. Dorian (1977), The Problem of the Semi-Speaker in Language Death, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, vol. 12, p. 24. ERIC database, DIALOG, Palo Alto, CA. Charles Fillmore, Daniel Kempler & Wm S.-Y. Wang (1979) (eds.), Individual Differences in Language Ability and Language Behavior, Academic Press. Francois Grosjean (1982), Life With Two Languages, Harvard. R. R. K. Hartmann (1983), On Specifying Context, in R. R. K. Hartmann (ed.), Lexicography: Principles and Practice, Academic Press, p. 109. S. I. Hayakawa (1972), Language in Thought and Action, Harcourt Brace. William Johnson, Info Globe [database of The Toronto Globe & Mail], 3 Apr 1985. Daniel Jones (1977), English Pronouncing Dictionary, J. M. Dent. Martin Joos (1961), The Five Clocks, Harcourt Brace.
F. E. Knowles (1984), review of Lexicography in the Electronic Age, J. Goetschalckx and L. Rolling (eds.), North-Holland, 1982, in ALLC Bulletin, vol. 12, p. 68. George Lakoff (1973), Hedges and Meaning Criteria, in R. I. McDavid and A. R. Duckert (eds.), Lexicography in English, New York Academy of Sciences, p. 144. Herbert Lederer (1980), The Native,Speaker Issue: Problem or Pretext? [MLA paper], ERIC database, no. ED203668. (1981), The Native Speaker Issue: Problem or Pretext? [ADFL Bulletin, vol. 12, no. 4], ERIC database, no. EJ253826. Geoffrey N. Leech (1974), Semantics, Penguin, p. 10. Jeremy Leggatt (1984), If Words Could Only Speak, Readers Digest (Canadian Edition), June, p. 108d. LLBA database, DIALOG, Palo Alto, CA. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Paul Procter (ed.), Longman, 1978. William F. Mackey (1984), Mother-Tongue Education: Problems and Prospects, Prospects, vol. xiv, p. 38. Albert H. Marckwardt (1974), in English Teaching Forum, April-June 1974, p. 12. Dell R. Marcoux (1973), Deviation in English Gender, American Speech, vol. 48, p. 98. James D. McCawley (1982), How far can you trust a linguist? in Thomas W. Simon and Robert J. Scholes (eds.), Language, Mind and Brain, Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 75-88. Raven I. McDavid, Jr. (1984), The Failure of Intuition, The SECOL Review, vol. viii, pp. 128-139. MLA Newsletter, Modern Language Association of America, vol. 16, no. 2 (Summer 1984), p. 10. The Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, Oxford, 1970. Oxford Supplement. See Supplement. Thomas M. Paikeday (1961), The Milk of Paradise, English Language Teaching, vol. xiv, pp. 55-60. (1981), Language Analysis and Lexicography by Microcomputer, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, New York, 30 Dec 1981. (1982) (Ed.), The New York Times Everyday Dictionary, Times Books. (1983a), In a Word, the Oxford is Lagging, The Toronto Globe & Mail, 5 Apr 1983. (1983b), Text Analysis by Microcomputer, paper presented at the tenth annual conference of the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing, San Francisco, 8 Apr 1983. (1983c), Technology Trounces Oxford, The San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle (This World section), 5 Jun 1983. (1983d), [Websters Ninth New Collegiate] Dictionary Lags Behind the Language, Computer Checks Show, The Toronto Globe & Mail, 17 Aug 1983. (1983e), The Meaning of the Computer for Dictionary Makers, The Wall Street Journal, 8 Nov 1983. (1985a), Computers, Lexicographers, and the
OED, American Speech, vol. 60, pp. 7479. (1985b), May I Kill the Native Speaker?, TESOL Quarterly, June 1985, pp. 390-395.
Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952, p. 388. Peter A. Reich (1969), The Finiteness of Natural Language, Language, vol. 45, pp. 831-43. Gilbert Ryle (1932), Systematically Misleading Expressions, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 32, Harrison & Sons, p. 168 (1976), Dilemmas, Cambridge, pp. 70-71. N. J. Spencer (1973), Differences Between Linguists and Nonlinguists in Intuitions of Grammaticality-Acceptability, LLBA database, no. 7303516. George Steiner (1971), Extraterritorial Papers, Athenaeum. (1975), After Babel, Oxford. A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, R. W. Burchfield (ed.), vol. II (H-N), Oxford, 1972. Jef Verschueren (1984), review of Studies in the Pragmatics of Discourse, Teun A. van Dijk, Mouton, 1981, in Language, vol. 60, no. 1, p. 175. Websters [Eighth] New Collegiate Dictionary, H. Bosley Woolf (ed.), G. & C. Merriam Co., 1973. Websters New International Dictionary, Second Edition, W. A. Neilson (ed.), G. & C. Merriam Co., 1934. Websters New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, David B. Guralnik (ed.), Simon & Schuster, 1980. Websters Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, Frederick C. Mish (ed.), Merriam-Webster Inc., 1983. Websters Third New International Dictionary, Philip B. Gove (ed.), G. & C. Merriam Co., 1961. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell. H. Bosley Woolf (1973), Definition: Practice and Illustration, in R. I. McDavid and A. R. Duckert (eds.), Lexicography in English, New York Academy of Sciences, p. 253.
ABOUT NOAM CHOMSKY

(From The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1977) Chomsky, (Avram) Noam (b. Dec. 7, 1928, Philadelphia), linguist, writer, and political activist, considered the founder of transformational or generative grammar, an innovative system of language analysis that revolutionized the study of linguistics.... In 1966 he was appointed Ferrari P. Ward professor of foreign languages and linguistics [at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge]. Chomsky views language as the result of a universal innate facility and considers his ideas concerning language to be related to those of the 17th-century rationalist philosophers.... Among Chomskys major publications in the field of grammatical theory are Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Cartesian Linguistics (1966), and, with Morris Halle, another U.S. linguist, The Sound Pattern of English (1968).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THOMAS M. PAIKEDAY has been a full-time lexicographer of American and Canadian English dictionaries since 1964. His important works include The New York Times Everyday Dictionary (1982), The Penguin Canadian Dictionary (1990), and The Users Webster Dictionary (2000). He also acts occasionally as an expert witness in trademark cases. He has written numerous articles on lexicography and has been a regular columnist on new words and meanings for the quarterly English Today, Cambridge, England. Paikeday pioneered the use of microcomputers for collecting and analyzing lexicographical data, as in The Joy of Lex, Creative Computing, Nov. 1983, pp. 240-245. For full biographical information, please see Directory of American Scholars, 2003; Marquis Whos Who in America, 2002; Canadian Whos Who, 1988; Contemporary Authors, vol. 65 (New Revised Series, 1998).

Native Speaker Dead

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THOMAS M.

THE NATIVE SPEAKER IS DEAD!

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INQUIRY THE SUBJECT OF THE INQUIRY

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NATIVE NATIVE SPEAKER, DEAD OR ALIVE?

Native speaker as a legal fiction

What Quirk & Quine think

The two senses of native speaker

Chomsky on grammaticalness & grammaticality

Is a native speaker born or made?

How a linguist diagnosed Indian English

Aristocracys Aristocracys squeezed and bleating sound

Anyone met a native dishwasher?

How George Kurien lost his mother tongue

Explain away native-speaker errors

Labov, Labov, Dorian & semi-speakers

Chomskys Following Chomskys red herring without losing the scent

The native speaker as a terminal case

Hallidays Hallidays comment

I couldnt make love in English.

An excursion with Eleanor Rosch

Chomskys Chomskys reply

As Pilate said, What is truth?

Noam Chomsky recant?

Wanted: a Copernican revolution

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Song of the Native Speaker

Hail to the Native Speaker,

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Anyone Met a Native Speaker?

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ABOUT NOAM CHOMSKY

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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