Free Is That a Fish in Your Ear? by David Bellos Page A

insidious: it acts as a suggestion that our preferred language is not just the language spoken to us by a mother but is, in some almost mystical sense, the mother of our selfhood—the tongue that made us what we are. It is not a neutral term: it is burdened with a complex set of ideas about the relationship between language and selfhood, and it unloads that burden on us as long as we take the term to be a natural, unproblematic way of naming our linguistic home.
    We may all be born with the potential to acquire a language and a need to do so—with what some linguists have called a “language-acquisition device”—hardwired in our brains. But in practice, we are not born into any particular language at all: all babies are languageless at the start of life. Yet we use the term native speaker as if the contrary were true—as if the form of language acquired by natural but fairly strenuous effort from our infant environment were a birthright, an inheritance, and the definitive, unalterable location of our linguistic identity. But knowing French or English or Tagalog is not a right of birth, even less an inheritance: it is a personal acquisition. To speak of “native” command of a language is to be just as approximate, and, to a degree, just as misleading as to speak of having a “mother tongue.”
    The curious ideology of these language terms is brought into clearer focus by British and American universities, which, when seeking to appoint someone as a professor of languages, conventionally state that “native or quasi-native competence” is required in the language to be taught. What can “quasi-native” possibly mean? In practical terms it means “very, very good.” Implicitly, it means that you can be very good at French or Russian or Arabic even if it is not your birthright. But the most obvious implications of the formula are, first, that a distinction can be made between those who were “born into” the given language and those who were not; and, second, that for the purposes of high-level instruction in the language this distinction is of no consequence. But that creates a curious problem. If the latter holds, how can the former be true?
    Language scholars distinguish between sentences that are grammatically and lexically “acceptable” and “unacceptable” by appealing to the intuitive judgments of “native speakers.” “Native-speaker competence” is the criterion most commonly invoked for determining what it is that the grammar of a language has to explain. Now it may seem obvious that “Jill loves Jack” is a sentence of English and that “Jill Jack loves” is not, and that a grammar of English should explain why the first is acceptable and the second is not. But to ground the boundaries of what is and is not English on the judgments of native speakers alone creates a somewhat mind-bending circularity to the whole project of writing a grammar. How do we judge in the first place whether the English spoken by some individual is “native” or not? Only by appealing to the grammar, itself established by reference to the judgments of “native speakers” themselves. Yet there is no regular way for distinguishing unambiguously between native and nonnative speakers of any tongue. Most often we don’t even use any formal tests, we just take people’s word for it. And, as a result, we often make mistakes.
    That is to say, speakers of English cannot reliably ascertain whether another person speaking the language acquired it in the cradle, or at school, or by some other means. And we are even less able to separate the “natives” from the “others” when it comes to written expression. I am sometimes mistaken for French when speaking the language. But I am not a “native speaker” in the commonly accepted meaning of the word: I learned French at school, from a mild-mannered teacher called Mr. Smith. When French people exclaim with surprise, “But I thought you were French,” I still blush