International Conference
The Native Speaker and the Mother Tongue
Go to: Call for Papers ∙ Programme
Abstracts
Nigel Love (
Mr
N. Speaker inculcates the father tongue
The
native speaker in linguistic theory
Integrational
linguists would endorse many of the views expressed in Thomas Paikeday’s well
known book The Native Speaker is Dead! (Paikeday
Publishing, Toronto, 1985), at least in so far as native speakers of languages
are supposed to be objectively and determinately identifiable denizens of the
real world. However, integrationists are
interested in where the idea of the native speaker comes from and what role it
plays in, among other things, (i) the construction of social and linguistic
identity and (ii) linguistic theory. It
is the latter question that will be addressed here.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Sean Bowerman (
What
use to linguists is the native speaker?
Descriptive
linguistics has attempted, via various routes, to address the question, ‘what
is a possible human language?’. An
important informant in many, if not most, of these attempts is the native
speaker. Who is this native speaker, and
what is his / her mother (parent?) tongue?
The
attempt to diagnose whether language exists by itself has always been a
frustrating one, because language only appears in ‘measurable’ form surrounded
by a number of attendant performance factors, which arguably have nothing to do
with language per se, but which influence at least its production and
reception. Hence the Chomskyan ideal
speaker / hearer, a native speaker unaffected by performance factors, so that
his or her performance exactly mirrors his or her competence. Clearly, such a creature does not, and
cannot, exist.
Another
stumbling block in the path of the descriptive linguist is the ubiquitous
phenomenon of language planning. Myriad
reasons—some more factual than others—are given for this enterprise: to
resurrect a dying variety, to (re)valorise a marginalised variety,
globalisation, mobility, socioeconomic realities, political ideology, and so
forth. Like Chomsky’s ideal speaker /
hearer, the concept of native speaker in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics
becomes all but meaningless when faced with the linguistic (and interface)
realities of this and every age.
Thus,
in two quite divergent fields within linguistics, the principal subject is a
mythological native speaker. This paper deals with the concept of the
native speaker in linguistics, with a focus on two particularly sanitised
versions: the native speaker as an informant in generative syntax, and the
native speaker as beneficiary or victim of language planning. Starting with the proposal that Universal
Grammar—by which I mean the young human’s potential to acquire any language—is
the only native language, I will explore the notion of the native speaker in
linguistics. What do linguists really
mean when they use this term in their various fields, and is it a legitimate
object of linguistic inquiry?
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Chris Hutton (
Who
owns language? Mother tongues as intellectual property
An
important aspect of mother tongue ideology is that native speakers are held in
some sense to own their own language. This relates to Romantic theories of
ownership which imply privileged access to, and authority over, personal and
group identity and its components, including language. Ownership of language in
this sense is an aspect of self-ownership. Issues concerning ownership have
arisen in relation to English and English standards. The argument is often
made that, with linguistic globalization, native speakers no longer 'own'
the English language and have forfeited this Romantic form of ownership
and its attendant rights. By contrast, indigenous knowledge and culture is
often seen as best defended by the assertion of exclusive or monopoly
proprietorship over cultural knowledge and practices, and this can involve
hostility to the documenting of indigenous languages by anthropologists
and linguists. This paper explores different understandings of language
ownership and language rights, using debates in the law of intellectual property
(which does not in general recognize languages as objects capable of being
owned) to frame its discussion.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Edda Weigand (
Linguists
and their speakers
Language, the object
of study of linguistics, does not exist on its own, like rocks. As an ability
of human beings it depends on human beings, on speakers. So we would expect
that speakers play a role in any
linguistic theory. This is not the case. Nor are the speakers, if they play a
role, the same figures, the same speakers. Linguists feel free to choose or
create a concept of language which is, from the very outset, damaged by
methodological exigencies.
Methodological exigencies derive from
theory construction. Competence theories are based on rule-governedness and
compositionality. Compositional concepts of language and their concept of the
speaker as the ideal speaker/hearer have been radically demolished by
Baker/Hacker and criticized as ‘language myth’ by Harris. Performance theories
focus on ever-changing individual speech events. The concept of the ideal
speaker changed to the native speaker and to the individual speaker. The
concept of the standard language contrasts with existing varieties of language.
What counts as convention is no longer decided by the native speaker but by
frequency in a corpus.
Even
if performance models stress the point that they aim to describe ‘reality’, what
they describe is the ‘reality’ of speech. Speech, reduced to the empirical
level, does not do justice to what people do with speech. Human beings use
their ability to speak in integration with other abilities, mainly of cognition
and perception. Language represents an integrated part of human beings’ ability
to interact. To describe it, we need an integrational
theory which starts from the object and derives its methodology from it.
Such a theory has to cope with individuality because the speaker is in any case
an individual speaker. Nonetheless, language use cannot mean use of private
languages. Can the concepts of a standard language and of a lingua franca in a multilingual world be
completely abandoned? The concept of the individual’s identity changes in a
changing world. These are issues linguists have to address if they want to
develop a language theory which is of social, political and practical
relevance.
The
lecture introduces the ‘Mixed Game Model’ (e.g., Weigand 2007) as a holistic
theory which starts from human beings and their abilities and describes how
they try to resolve their social needs and purposes in dialogic action games on
the basis of principles of probability.
References
Baker, G.P./Hacker,
P.M.S. (1984): Language, Sense and Nonsense.
Harris,
Weigand, Edda (2007): The
Sociobiology of Language. In: Dialogue and Culture ed. by Marion Grein &
Edda Weigand, 27-49.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jan Wawrzyniak (University
of Warsaw)
Native
speaker, mother tongue and natural semantic metalanguage
Anna
Wierzbicka’s semantics of primes and universals, unequivocally grounded in the
two theses of the language myth, is hereby presented as a failed attempt ‘to
develop an understanding of, and a theoretical apparatus capable of dealing
with, language in heteroglossia as a normal, rather than an extraordinary,
phenomenon’. But it is an instructive failure: through dis/analogies between
the native speaker and the specialist, it not only stresses the need to come to
grips with one’s own metalanguage as part of any linguistic undertaking, but
also shows, indirectly, how useful integrationism is in this respect.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Noël Christe, Adrian Pablé, Marc Haas (University of
Lausanne, Switzerland)
Language and identity in
Swiss bilingual communities
The
Swiss Confederation is composed of 26 political entities called “cantons”. The
territory is also divided into linguistic areas, whose borders often differ from
those of the “cantons”; they are not fixed. They have evolved through time and
there is no political aim to achieve stability. The population is generating
those mutations. When more than half of the citizens of a town or a village
speak a different national language than the administrative one, the village
and its territory switches and officially adopts the language of its majority.
According to the National Office of
Statistics, twelve communities have changed their linguistic belonging
between 1980 and
The
two villages are communities in which two national languages are being spoken,
but within which only one is officially recognised. Is there a clear
geographical cut between the two languages, or are there informants in a mixed
zone who are using both languages? As Love (1998) argues, languages are
artificial – or ‘second-order’ – constructs (there is not a single ‘French’ or
‘German’). Nonetheless, the myth of the ‘fixed code’ could be regarded as
necessary for the speakers in their communicative experience. They can refer to
a label which they can recognise. An artificial frame is therefore a basis to
become creative with individuals never met before. How do people in
multilingual communities make sense of this issue? Do they use “codes” and do
they switch them? Is there a ‘mixed code’? If yes, this would prove the
irrelevancy of a ‘fixed code’ theory. Despite the strong idea of correctness of
languages, do informants use creative forms to communicate in multilingual
areas?
What
does it mean for the population to switch official language? The ‘language community’ myths are strong
ideas among the informants: therefore, how do they consider the official switch
from one code to another for the respective users of both? Will German speakers
feel a loss if their village becomes officially French, and will the French
feel more bound to their place if it adopts their language, or is that an
irrelevant question for the speakers themselves, as they generally communicate
both ways? The core question at issue is: how do the inhabitants of a place
identify with their area and to what extent is this identification linked with
what they think is their mother tongue?
The
question “What difference is there between French and Swiss German?” might
generate answers which show the ongoing interpretative activity of the
informants according to the situation. Some will think that the differences are
on the level of the language, others on the level of the population. The latter
interpretation shows how language is closely associated with identity in
general representations. Those stereotypes are abstract conveyers of
ideological assumptions, often fertile grounds for social and ethnic
discriminations. Will a multilingual community make people more aware of this
fact and therefore more open-minded regarding users of other languages, or
rather value only two (or more) “groups of speakers” and thus maintain
linguistic hierarchies?
The
purpose of the present study is also to show how informants differ in their
answers according to the context of communication. The same question might
generate answers which (i) illustrate how the informants make sense of the
inhabitants’ self-representations (foreigners and immigrants will also be
questioned, to see how they consider their own linguistic knowledge), (ii)
reveal something about the supposed identity of the interviewer (French and
German, but also English, will be used for the investigation). If the
interviewer is showing linguistic skills in the two different “codes”, will the
informants use both to communicate? Another focus of this study is to ask
informants whether a certain language has a better position (in the hierarchy
of informants) according to the administrative, professional and social
position.
One
of the conclusions we might get is the following. In Wallenried, there is a
German and a French high school, but education is offered in a single language
per school. Macro-social distinctions seem here at stake to prevent people from
learning hybrid codes. This fact enlightens the existence of an ideological
conception of language in state politics,
despite the multilingual status of the country. The differences that exist
between two languages could therefore be regarded as learnt, while the folk
(including linguists) usually attribute the differences to the essence of the languages themselves.
References:
Love,
Nigel. 1998. “Integrating Languages”. In Harris, Roy and George Wolf (eds.). Integrational Linguistics. A First Reader.
Pergamon Press, 96-110.
Harris,
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Alex
V. Kravchenko (
Native speakers, mother tongues, and other objects of wonder
It is routine practice
in orthodox linguistics to appeal to native speakers as ‘informants’ in
defining ‘facts’ about a particular language spoken by a particular community.
These facts serve the goal of identifying individual languages as separate
semiotic systems governed by specific sets of rules. The latter may differ
considerably from language to language while having the same function of
‘organizing’ verbally expressed thoughts which humans ‘exchange’ in
communication. Since symbols (words) and rules are ‘in the head’ in the special
‘language organ’, they are responsible for linguistic ‘competence’ which
underlies actual ‘performance’. A native speaker's competence is genetically
pre-wired, which invokes the concept of ‘mother tongue’ as something ‘pure’,
passed on from mother to child. Not surprisingly, linguistic performance of
‘native speakers’ is believed to be exemplar for communication in a given
tongue, a kind of standard to be achieved by those whose ‘mother tongue’ is
different and whose cultural identity, for that reason, is also different. This
is what orthodox linguistics wants us to think, and this is where it errs.
As culturally
constrained behaviour, languaging is grounded in the complex cognitive dynamics
in real space-time. Verbal patterns are virtual; as such they depend on
socio-cultural contingencies in the developmental history of an individual. As
a result, individuals speaking allegedly the same ‘mother tongue’ may differ in
their command of language (both at the ‘competence’ and ‘performance’ levels)
to a degree when successful communication may become problematic. When chosen
as ‘informants’, they will often differ in their judgments on ‘grammaticality’
of particular verbal patterns. Thus, the empirical value of ‘linguistic
competence’ allegedly characteristic of native speakers, appears to be
questionable. This brings up the question of whether a community of native
speakers sharing the same ‘mother tongue’ is, in fact ‘monoglot’, thus
differing in some essential aspects from communities in which two or more
languages are spoken, and whether the way native speakers construct their
identities differs from how it is done by non-native speakers.
Moreover, the notion of
‘mother tongue’ itself is controversial; for example, due to different
socio-cultural contingencies on the developmental time-scale, the language my
mother spoke was not exactly the same kind of language that my best friend's
mother spoke, although they both were ‘native speakers’ of Russian on the
historical time-scale. Importantly, over our developmental history my friend
and I, although speaking the same ‘mother tongue’, constructed different
linguistic/cultural identities, one of us appearing to be much more ‘Russian’
than the other. As a father, I have spoken English (which is not my ‘mother
tongue’) to my children from the day they were born, never once addressing them
in my ‘mother tongue’. Psychologically, they have neither perceived English as
a foreign language, nor their father as a non-native speaker. To them, English
is a ‘father tongue’ which, along with their mother tongue, has impacted on their identity. Although fluent in
English, are they native speakers of
English? I don't know. Do they suffer from split identities? Certainly not. Are
they Russian? I don't have an answer to this question.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jesper
Hermann (
The notion of ’personal identity’ as a joker
in a multilingual language community
Our commonsense notions of identity and language turns out
to be of no avail when they have to be used in a society recently turned
multilingual, as the case of Denmark shows. For more than a hundred years, an
abnormally monoglot prevailing culture was the norm. However, recent migrations
have during the past thirty years or so forced us to wake up to a new reality.
The paper addresses this situation as a question of developing some more
realistic and scientific notions to deal with the impossible clashes between
outdated, un-scientific ideas both of language and of identity and of their
possible marriage-nexus.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
George Braine (Chinese University Hong
Kong )
The nonnative speaker movement: achievements and
challenges
The nonnative speaker (NNS) movement has shown remarkable progress since
its beginning in 1999. In areas such as employment, research, publications, and
leadership in professional organizations, the achievements of NNS teachers and
scholars have been unprecedented in
In this presentation, I will first summarize the growth of the NNS
movement in
________________________________________________________________________________________
Maria Recuenco Pen)alver (
Vassilis
Alexakis’s mother tongue: what is the identity of a Greek-French/French-Greek
Writer?
Vassilis
Alexakis is an artist (novelist, filmmaker, cartoonist, journalist...) born in
Due
to his languages, the reception of his books in his homeland and his adoption
country is quite curious: Alexakis is considered as a foreigner writer (French
author) in
Two
of the most famous and intereseting Alexakis’s works are dedicated to
languages: La langue maternelle
(1995) [The mother tongue] and Les mots
étrangers (2002) [Foreign words] (translated into English in 2006 by Alyson
Waters).
In
The mother tongue, Nikolaïdès, the
protagonist, (Alexakis’s alter ego, as in many of his works) pays homage to his
death mother. Living between two languages, French and Greek, Nikolaïdès’
return to
Foreign words is a
meditation on language and loss, and also on the power of words to change the
way we see ourselves, and we see the world. The protagonist of the novel, that
has been wandering for almost 30 years from one country and one language to the
other, feel at the age of 52 years old, the need to learn and write yet another
language, Sango, an idiom spoken only in the
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Nora Norahim (
Language
choice in the Bidayuh community in
The
paper discusses the results of a study which examines the language choice
patterns of a sub-group of a “major minority” in
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Creole versus French in Reunion:
diglossia, identity and sociolinguistic representations
The language of slave ancestors, the French-based créole réunionnais arose in a complex
socio-historic and socio-linguistic context during which the slaves were unable
to speak their own native language on
account of the particular organization
of the colony. Since then, some Reunion Creole native speakers have had a dual
relationship with their mother tongue: pride and uneasiness are clearly
mingled. This ambivalence towards their native language results from several
elements which all go back to the colonization period. Colonization is
fundamentally the cornerstone of the linguistic insecurity of Reunion Creole
native speakers. Indeed, the social, economic and linguistic organization of
the island set up by French colonists from the 17th century, i.e.
slavery, was the socio-economic background to the genesis of Reunion Creole,
which means that it was initially the means of communication of the colony’s
most inferior and destitute group.
Besides, the linguistic monopoly of the French
language in its local variety is another reason for the stigmatization of
Reunion Creole. In the French/Creole diglossia in
This linguistic hierarchy is a situation with which
Creole speakers live more or less easily. For some, the bilingualism is
“additive”, but “subtractive” for others. Nevertheless, the speakers have all
come to understand that mastering what is traditionally called “standard” French
is a key to socio-economic integration, which does not mean surrendering their
native linguistic heritage and practices. Besides, since the 1970s, the
Reunionese Creole identity has been expressing itself through various sources
such as literature, music, theatre, radio or screen productions. Creole
speakers are finding different ways of reinstating their particular voice and
linguistic identity.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Amos Chauma (University of Malawi
Language Maintenance and Endangerment :
The Case of Chilomwe in Malawi
During
the past decade, arguments on endangered languages have constituted one of the
major issues in language education. They have mostly been concerned with how to
save or revitalize languages in danger of extinction. Available evidence in the
literature on endangered languages suggests that a large proportion of the
world's languages are in imminent danger of coming to have no native speakers
in the next few generations.
The
current state of
The
Lomwe are one of the four largest ethnic groups living in
The
Lomwes do not speak Chilomwe. They prefer to be associated with their ethnic
groups but not the language perhaps because they accept the fact that their
languages are no longer viable now as was the case before. While a handful
Lomwes are trying hard to revive the languages,
the majority are disinterestedly going about using Chichewa and Chitumbuka languages respectively.
Since
the Chilomwe language is not being passed on from the older to younger
generations, the result is constant disuse of
the native language and their ultimate disappearance as they are no more
taught to children who are often embarrassed to speak them even if they have
some knowledge.
Consequently
Chilomwe is dying out, with only the oldest still speaking it but cannot
communicate with the younger generations. Many of the younger Lomwes now speak
in Chichewa language which is other peoples’ language. This undoubtedly is a
problem since language is a social phenomenon by
means of which individuals and groups construct personal identities.
Since
languages are perpetuated by children who learn from their parents, the case of
Chilomwe language which is no longer
learned as a mother tongue is therefore beyond mere endangerment but doomed to
extinction like species lacking reproductive capacity.
The
purpose of the paper therefore is to critically explore the endangerment and
maintenance levels of the Chilomwe
language in
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
John McKeown (
“One
hasn’t got time for the waiting game”: promoting bilingual and bicultural
community through the development of shared practice
Creating
a community of shared practices is an approach to working together that
profoundly affects schooling by positively, and efficiently, moving reform
forward. Initiating and sustaining the concept is challenging: it requires
staff to focus on learning rather than teaching, to work collaboratively on
matters related to learning, and to be accountable for results that fuel
continued improvement. Under these
circumstances, creating shared common goals amongst diverse faculty requires a
multi-faceted approach. Working together to construct shared practice produces
a repertoire of experience and expertise that develop mutually beneficial aims
and creates rapport between teachers and trainers from different backgrounds or
countries. Specific practical curriculum
and administrative examples can be put to immediate use to develop trust
between participants from different cultures. Implementing these strategies
builds bridges with teachers previously grounded in a teacher-centered
pedagogical style and offers opportunities to develop a student-centered
methodology. _________________________________________________________________________________________
Umberto Ansaldo (
Identity
alignment in multilingual communities: The Malays of
This paper introduces the
notion of identity alignment as an
alternative to the notion of shift in multilingual communities where language contact
leads to the evolution of new varieties. The notion of identity alignment in
multilingual ecologies (Lim and Ansaldo 2006, 2007) implies two significant
things. First, that identity can be defined by being multilingual. This
requires a loose view of ‘community’, shifting and constantly adapting and
renegotiating identities in an ever-changing ecology (Djité 2006: 12). The
notion of “simultaneous identities” (Woolard 1999: 20-21) in this context is
not new. It suggests that, instead of assigning one language a preferential
status in a multilingual community, one’s linguistic identity is shaped by the
plurality of linguistic codes itself, regardless of the order in which they
were acquired. Secondly, as observed by Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), concepts
such as ‘native language’ and ‘mother tongue’ come to mean little in
multilingual settings, where more than one language is spoken from birth (1985:
189). Ferguson (1982: vii) suggests that we “quietly drop” the notion of mother
tongue from professional linguistics, a call heeded by Rampton (1990: 107), who
argues that the related notions of expertise, inheritance and affiliation do
not adequately identify sociolinguistic situations and that it is inaccurate to
view people as belonging to only one social group. We discuss these issues in
the light of the Malay vernacular of
The evolution
of Sri Lanka Malay (SLM) can be seen as a process of interacting and
negotiating linguistic identities in a new environment. In the Malay community
of
References
Djité, Paulin
G. 2006. Shifts in linguistic identities in a global world. Language Problems and Language Planning 30.1: 1-20.
Le Page,
Robert and Andrée Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts
of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity.
Lim,
Lisa and Umberto Ansaldo. 2006. Keeping Kirinda vital: The
endangerment-empowerment dilemma in the documentation of Sri Lanka Malay.
Lim,
Lisa and Umberto Ansaldo. 2007. Identity alignment in the multilingual space:
The Malays of Sri Lanka. In Eric A. Anchimbe (ed.), Linguistic Identity in Multilingual
Postcolonial Spaces.
Rampton,
Ben. 1990. Displacing the native speaker: Expertise, affiliation and
inheritance. In Roxy Harrison and Ben Rampton (eds.), The Language and Ethnicity Reader.
Woolard,
Kathryn A. 1999. Simultaneity and bivalency as strategies in bilingualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8.1:
3-29.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Rajend Mesthrie (
Native speaker, vernacular universals and New
Englishisms: towards an empirical investigation.
Jack Chambers
(2003) has raised the question why it is that certain features recur in the
sociolinguistic variationist literature on L1 English. He terms these ‘vernacular universals’ since
they tend to be weeded out or decrease in frequency in prestige and more formal
styles. Some candidates from Chambers (2003:
265-6) are:
(a) Use of alveolar for velar nasal in forms
like fishin’ and walkin’.
(b) word-final consonant cluster
simplification (e.g. fas’ for fast)
(c) default singulars like invariant was to the exclusion of were
(d) conjugation regularization (e.g. He walk)
(e) multiple negation (e.g. I ain’t giving nothing to nobody)
A parallel set of features has been
claimed to exist for non-vernaculars – i.e. L2 varieties of English that are
spoken fluently and habitually by people in the colonial and postcolonial world
(aka New Englishes). These similarities
across L2 varieties of English were termed Angloversals
by Christian Mair (2003) and Universals
of New Englishes by Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi (2004). Perhaps a better term (with more restricted
connotation) is New Englishisms (Simo
Bobda 2000). Some syntactic New Englishisms include:
(i) The use of invariant question tags (e.g.
isn’t it?)
(ii) Use of be + -ing with stative
verbs
(iii) Use of resumptive pronouns in relative
clauses.
(iv) Use of inversion in indirect questions:
(Do you know what will she say?)
For phonology there are many similarities within New
Englishes like the use of a 5-vowel system (plus some diphthongs), the tendency
towards syllable timing, postponement of stress relative to current RP norms
(e.g. faciliıtate)
and the replacement of / θ / and / ð / by something other than a
fricative.
I propose that speakers undergoing language shift form
a crucial test case in resolving whether there are qualitative differences between
vernacular universals and New Englishisms, or whether these have the status of
dialect differences. I take a view of
language as an aggregate of acoustic speech signals, whose defining feature is
being continuous (or indiscrete).
Everyone, by virtue of being human and interacting in a human community,
has the ability to process at least one language holistically, i.e. without
segmenting the speech signal consciously.
With adequate interaction one is able to speak this language – i.e.
transmit its continuous signals without segmenting it consciously. Some people
in multilingual societies might acquire more than one language natively in this
way. In typical colonial bilingualism
English is transmitted largely by education – i.e. breaking up the speech
signals and teaching them in analytic units.
The two modes of transmission are different. For the vernacular the speech signal is
‘caught’ unsegmented by interaction and of course segmented unconsciously by
our mental faculty for language. For
colonial bilingualism the speech signal is ‘taught’ – i.e. segmentation
precedes interaction. It is possible
that the two modes result in different properties to the speech signal. In the
‘taught’ approach there would, ceteris
paribus, be less cluster simplification, less assimilation, less use of
vowel reduction, more explicit marking of clausal relations etc. In the ‘caught’ approach the child learner
enters into the historical evolution of the language, with the speech signal
being subject to the vagaries of variation and change. The child learns the semantic system of her
native language and the historical oddities of its speech signals in flux. If we accept this, and wish to test the
native speaker construct further, then we should observe what happens when an
L2 becomes L1. I propose to do this with
2 native speakers born in
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Timothy Reagan (University
of the
What
is my native language? The conceptual challenge of the prelingually deaf
The
concepts of ‘native language’ and ‘mother tongue’ are, under the best of
circumstances, somewhat problematic.
Like the concept of ‘language’ itself, these phrases, it can be argued,
do not refer to actual entities at all, but rather function as heuristic
devices that are used to facilitate discussion about what are in fact immensely
complex matters. Thus, some scholars have
argued, with respect to the term ‘language’ that “in its most commonplace and
everyday uses, the term ‘language’ is both ahistorical and atheoretical”
(Reagan, 2004, p. 43), and furthermore, that the writers who have suggested
that we need to speak to Englishes,
rather than of English, are correct as far as they go – but they do not go
quite far enough. Not only are there
multiple Englishes, but there are
quite literally millions of different Englishes. Nor does this
observation apply solely to English; it is true of each and every
language. There are Frenches, Russians, and Navajos, but no
English, French, Russian or Navajo. (Reagan, 2004, p. 46)
The
terms ‘mother tongue’ and ‘native speaker’ present similar conceptual
problems. Romaine, for instance, has
noted that “like ‘language’ and ‘dialect’, ‘mother tongue’ is not a technical
term and there are many problems with its use” (1994, p. 37). Apart from the obvious embedded assumption
that children acquire their L1 from their mother (when in fact in many
societies they acquire their father’s language as their L1), there are also
problems with presupposing that ‘native speakers’ are simply those who have
acquired a language “as children in a natural setting” (O’Grady &
Dobrovolsky, 1996, p. 1), as is commonly done in linguistics. What we are actually discussing here, of
course, is the fact that what constitutes an individual’s ‘native language’ or
‘mother tongue’ is in fact socially constructed and constituted. In short, the concepts of ‘native language’
and ‘mother tongue’, like that of ‘language’, are reflections of what is
basically a positivistic view of the world in general, and of language and
language behaviour in particular (see Reagan, 2005a).
The
case of the deaf presents an especially interesting example of the limitations
of traditional discourse about ‘mother tongue’ and ‘native language’. The vast majority of deaf individuals are
born to hearing, and non-signing, parents.
Once a child is identified as having significant hearing loss, under the
best of circumstances intervention begins – perhaps through the introduction of
a sign language, perhaps through intensive oral and aural rehabilitation, and
perhaps through surgical interventions such as those provided by cochlear
implants. In some instances, a
combination of these different approaches is used. What is important to note here is that in
most cases the deaf child’s exposure to language (whether spoken or signed) is
delayed.
Such
delays, in turn, have developmental consequences that are difficult to address
later on in the child’s education.
This
situation is intriguing in that most deaf children do not in fact actually have
a ‘mother tongue’ or ‘native language’ in a meaningful sense. The language of the parents (unless it is
already a signed language) is not the child’s L1; indeed, to learn this
language will require extensive educational efforts. Nor, initially, is the natural sign language
of the surrounding deaf community the child’s ‘native language’ since he or she
is most likely to learn that language only after being placed in an educational
setting. As Peter Matthews has noted,
echoing the view of mainstream linguists, a ‘native language’ is “a language
that people have acquired naturally as children, as opposed to one learned
later, e.g. through formal education” (1997, p. 238). Indeed, most deaf children actually learn to
sign from other deaf children in residential schools for the deaf. Thus, such individuals quite literally do not
have a ‘native language’ or ‘mother tongue’: prior to either the acquisition of
a natural sign language, such as American Sign Language or South African Sign
Language, or extensive intervention in terms of the deliberate teaching of
speaking and lip-reading skills in a spoken language, such persons are arguably
alingual.
In
this paper, I will explore the implications of the concepts of ‘mother tongue’
and ‘native language’ for the deaf, with particular emphasis on the situation
of the prelingually deaf individual being raised by hearing parents (see
Reagan, 2007a; Reagan, Penn & Ogilvy, 2006). Although my central concern will be with the
educational implications for such children, I will also discuss issues related
to the language rights of such individuals, and how the challenge of
conceptualising ‘mother tongue’ and ‘native language’ for such persons may
impact the discourse related to that dealing with language rights, linguicism,
and linguistic citizenship (see Jokinen, 2000; May, 2005; Muzsnai, 1999;
Reagan, 2005b, 2007b; Skutnabb-Kangas, 1994, 2000).
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ana Deumert, Yolandi
Klein, Oscar Sibabalwe Masinyana (
(1)
(2, 3)
“A
place where the world can be seen from a different set of eyes”: language
choice, use and multilingual identities in South African electronic media
The historical dominance of English on the WWW has
supported the popular belief that the language of electronic communication in
general is English; and in some cases English has been shown to replace a
user’s first language (cf. Leppänen 2007). However, languages
other-than-English occupy a small, but important (and growing) niche in the
various manifestations of electronic communication (including SMS), especially
in multilingual societies (Danet & Herring 2007). This can also be seen in
Following from previous work (Deumert 2006, Deumert
2008, Deumert & Masinyana 2008), this paper will discuss the
sociolinguistics of language choice and use in electronic communication in
Drawing on SMS, chat and blogging data by multilingual
users, our paper will focus on the negotiation of multilingual identities, as
well as the creative development of new types of multilingual literacies which
draw on a wide range of communicative resources, including mixed languages,
code-switching, puristic ‘standard’ norms, as well as the new conventions of
English (as used in these media across the world).
References
Banda, F.
2003. A Survey of Literacy Practices in Black and Coloured Communities in
Baron, N.S.
2000. Alphabet to Email: How Written
English Evolved and Where it is Heading.
Bucholtz, M.
2000. Language and Youth Culture. American
Speech 75, 280-283.
Crystal, D.
2006. Language and the Internet.
Second Edition.
Danet, B.
& Herring S. (eds.) 2007. The
Multilingual Internet.
Deumert, A.
2006. Semantic change, the internet,
and text messaging. In: The Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics,
vol. XI. Eds. K. Brown et al.
Deumert, A. 2008. Mobile Phone Behaviour and Community Service
Terminals – Focus Group Data Analysis. Report prepared for CitizenSurveys,
January 2008.
Deumert, A.
& Masinyana, S.O. 2008. Mobile Language Choices – The Use of English
and isiXhosa in Text Messages (SMS), Evidence from a Bilingual South African
Sample. English-World Wide 29,
117-147.
Herring, S.
(ed.) 1996. Computer-mediated Comunication: Linguistic, Social and
Cross-Cultural Perspectives.
Lafraniere, S.
2005. Cellphones Catapult Rural
Leppänen, S. 2007. Youth language in media contexts: Insights from the
functions of English in Finnland. World
Englishes 26: 149-169.
Sullivan, K.
2006. In War-torn
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Zeynep
F. Beykont (
Heritage language maintenance in an English-dominant
context: a study of Turkish youth in
The Turkish community in
In this seminar, I propose to discuss youth
perspectives on the importance and viability of sustained Turkish bilingualism
in
Analyses revealed that an overwhelming majority of
young informants strongly believe that Turkish maintenance is essential (a) for
developing a unique bilingual identity in the English-dominant context of
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Stephanie
Rudwick (
Zulu linguistic
varieties and their ethnic identities in post-apartheid
While
there are several comprehensive studies on ‘language and ethnic
identity/ethnicity’ (Gudykunst 1988, Dow 1991, Fishman 2001, Joseph 2004) there
is only one recent study (Fought 2006)
which addresses the questions how ethnic identity affects linguistic variation
and dialects within one language and how different varieties may index one and
the same ethnic identity. Similarly, the link between the Zulu language and
Zulu ethnicity and identity has been investigated too one-dimensional and
monolithic in past research (Rudwick 2004, 2008). This
study, in contrast, focuses on the before mentioned questions with reference to
Zulu ‘mother-tongue’ speakers in the province of KwaZulu-Natal by looking at
three Zulu based linguistic varieties spoken in the province (isiHlonipho, isiTsotsi and isiNgqumo). The three varieties are
examined with
reference to their inherent elements of ethnic identity, i.e. ‘Zuluness’. The
study explores with qualitative methodology whether, to what extent and how
isiZulu-speakers who make use of any one of these different Zulu varieties
ascribe significance to their ethnicity and what meaning these individuals
ascribe to other identities. Furthermore, it is investigated how the reference
points and cultural constituents of Zulu peoples’ ethnicities and their other
dominant identities may complement or stand in contrast to each other. On the
basis of qualitative interview data the study argues,
inter alia, that there are a number of linguistic resources available for Zulu
speakers in indexing an ethnic identity as a Zulu person. The research analysis
considers that the choice of any linguistic variety is context-dependent and
multifaceted, particularly in a multilingual and multicultural space like
References
Dow, J. R. (1991). Language
and Ethnicity.
Fishman, J. (2001). Handbook
of Language and Ethnic identity.
Fought, C. (2006). Language
and Ethnicity.
Gudykunst, W.B. (ed.)
(1988). Language and Ethnic Identity. Clevedon:
Multilingual Matters.
Joseph, J.E. (2004). Language and Identity. National, Ethnic,
Religious.
Rudwick, S. (2004). “‘Zulu - we
need it for our culture’: Umlazi adolescents in the post-apartheid state”. South African Linguistics and Applied
Language Studies 22 (3&4): 159-172.
Rudwick, S. (2008). “Coconuts and Oreos: English-speaking Zulu
people in a South African township? World
Englishes 27(1), 101-116.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Chaise LaDousa (
Constriction
of the “mother tongue”: school and language ideology in
In
keeping with the symposium’s themes of exploring and interrogating the notions
of “mother tongue” and “native speaker,” I consider constructions of languages
emergent from the school system in
______________________________________________________________________________________
María Carmen
Parafita-Couto (ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and
Practice,
On
the unity of language contact tapestries
The
present study will explore bilingual language interactions within the framework
of sociolinguistic and syntactic theories to question the existence of a native
language in multilingual societies. Languages coexist with societies as a wide
spread phenomenon where language contact situations are not an exception, but
rather a norm (Gafaranga, 2007). Indeed, it is hard nowadays to talk about
“mother tongue” languages from the purest and most traditional point of view.
Languages are not “contaminated” but influenced by others in such a way that
the dividing line between the so-called ¨mother language” and the
“target/acquired” languages is vanishing rapidly. Researchers agree that
bilingual language interaction generates a process where two languages and
societies collide in a specific geographic area and one of those languages will
sometimes need to reshape its status by assimilating, borrowing and adapting to
the other language (Winford, 2003).
Language contact situations constitute symbols of new identities where
the speaker and his/her language use are the ones that define a common
linguistic ground where two different languages may co-occur or influence each
other. Any attempt to study the linguistic skeleton of language contact
phenomena should convey an interdisciplinary approach where social and
linguistic hypotheses are interwoven to account for the same phenomenon:
linguistic identity of emerging/changing societies. The present study will
evaluate a linguistic theory which has been prominent in bilingualism research,
namely, the Matrix language Framework (Myers Scotton, 1993, 2002) and its
contributions to account for codeswitching/language alternation. Samples from
Spanish-English (USA) and Cindau-Portuguese (
References
Chan, B.
(2008). Code-switching between Typologically
Different Languages.Talk given at the ESRC Research Centre on
BilingualismSeminar Series.
Gafaranga, J. (2007). Talk
in two languages. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Myers-Scotton, C. (1993).
Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structure in Codeswitching.
Myers-Scotton, C. (2002).
Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters
and grammatical outcomes. 2002.
Winford,
D. (2003). An Introduction to Contact
Linguistics.