Definition:
A speaker who uses a first language or mother tongue.
Examples and Observations:
- "The concept of a native speaker seems clear enough, doesn't it? It is surely a common sense idea, referring to people who have a special control over a language, insider knowledge about 'their' language. . . . But just how special is the native speaker?
"This common-sense view is important and has practical implications, . . . but the common-sense view alone is inadequate and needs the support and explanation given by a thorough theoretical discussion is lacking."
(Alan Davies, The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality. Multilingual Matters, 2003) - "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 . . . 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 couldn’t make love in English,' said one man to me. . . .
"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. (I’m a case of the latter, in fact, having been brought up in a Welsh-English environment until nine, 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.)"
(David Crystal, quoted by T. M. Paikeday in The Native Speaker Is Dead: An Informal Discussion of a Linguistic Myth. Paikeday, 1985)
