Inventing the Native Speaker

This paper argues that employing the designations “native speaker ” and “native language” unreflectively is to engage in a gesture of othering that operates on an axis of empowerment and disempowerment. Bonfiglio examines the ideological legacy of the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of “mother tongue ” and “native speaker ” by historicizing their linguistic development. He traces the construction of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race, which informed the philology of the early modern era and culminated most divisively in the race-conscious discourses of the 19th century. Bonfiglio makes the case that scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to over-extend biological metaphors in the study of language, as even today these encourage, however surreptitiously, genetic and racial impressions of language. Keywords: native speaker w mother tongue w vernacular w Middle Ages w religion w nationalism ne of the most divisive issues in the discourse of operational multilingualism concerns the ideology of native speaker authority. To employ the designations “native speaker, ” “native language, ” and “mother tongue ” unreflectively is to engage, from the instant of first perception, in a gesture of othering that operates on an axis of empowerment and disempowerment. Those born into the matrix of nation and language can often invoke, in conversations with someone foreign to that matrix, the notion of a birthright of linguistic authority, an authority that is configured as an infallible innate sense of the acceptable utterance. As Bourdieu has pointed out, such invocations may involve a certain inevitable intimidation; they include “a symbolic violence which is not aware of what it is (to the extent that it implies n