From native speakers to "new speakers"- Problematizing nativeness in language revitalization contexts

Abstract

Within the field of applied linguistics the concept of nativeness has over the recent decades come to be recognised as problematic. The problematization of the native speaker concept has, however, been more recent in other areas of language analysis including the field of minority language research and language revitalization, the sub-field on which we will focus here. Researchers interested in minority language communities such as Irish, Basque, Welsh, Corsican etc., and associated processes of language shift and revitalization, have by and large tended to focus much of their attention on native and/or heritage communities. Significantly less attention has been given to non-native or what we are referring to here as "new speaker" varieties and categories. In this paper we are interested in examining why this has been the case and how the treatment of nativeness in this subfield fits with the broader epistemological debates around the native speaker concept in the field of applied linguistics and linguistics more generally.

Full text

FROM NATIVE SPEAKERS TO “NEW SPEAKERS” –
PROBLEMATIZING NATIVENESS IN LANGUAGE
REVITALIZATION CONTEXTS
Bernadette O’Rourke
Heriot-Watt University
AND
Joan Pujolar
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Abstract
Within the field of applied linguistics
the concept of nativeness has over the
recent decades come to be recognised as
problematic. The problematization of the
native speaker concept has, however, been
more recent in other areas of language
analysis including the field of minority
language research and language revitaliza-
tion, the sub-field on which we will focus
here. Researchers interested in minority
language communities such as Irish,
Basque, Welsh, Corsican etc., and associated
processes of language shift and revitalization,
have by and large tended to focus much of
their attention on native and/or heritage
communities. Significantly less attention has
been given to non-native or what we are
referring to here as “new speaker” varieties
and categories. In this paper we are interested
in examining why this has been the case and
howthe treatment of nativeness in this sub-
field fits with the broader epistemological
debates around the native speaker concept in
the field of applied linguistics and linguistics
more generally.
Keywords
Minority language, language revitalization,
language shift, new speaker
Résumé
Dans le champ de la linguistique appliquée,
le concept de locuteur natif est reconnu
comme problématique depuis plusieurs
décennies. Sa problématisation est néanmoins
plus récente dans d’autres sous-champs des
sciences du langage – comme celui des
langues minoritaires et de la revitalisation
des langues, auquel nous nous intéressons
plus particulièrement dans cet article. Les
chercheurs qui travaillent sur les langues de
communautés minoritaires, comme l’irlandais,
le basque, le gallois, le corse, etc., et les
processus de changement linguistique et de
revitalisation qui leur sont associés, ont dans
l’ensemble eu tendance à privilégier l’étude
des communautés « natives ». Une attention
bien moindre a été portée au locuteur « non
natif », ou à celui que nous appelons ici « néo-
locuteur ». Nous examinons les raisons de
cette situation, et en quoi le traitement du
« natif » dans ce sous-champ disciplinaire
correspond aux débats épistémologiques plus
larges autour du concept de « locuteur natif »
en linguistique appliquée et dans les sciences
du langage en général.
Mots-clés
Langues minoritaires, revitalisation
des langues, changement linguistique,
néo-locuteur
Histoire Épistémologie Langage 35/2 (2013) p. 47-67 ©SHESL
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INTRODUCTION
Within the field of applied linguistics the concept of nativeness has over
the recent decades come to be recognised as problematic (Davies 2003).
The debate around nativeness and problematization of the native speaker
concept has to a large extent been concerned with the implications of
the spread of English as a global language. This is a concern which emerged
in a context in which there were more non-native speakers than native
speakers of English world-wide (Crystal 2003; Graddol 1997, 2006), either
as second language learners or as a result of colonisation, thus bringing the
previously unquestioned legitimacy of the native speaker under scrutiny.
The emergence of new “Englishes” (Kachru 1990; Bolton and Kachru
2006; Jenkins 2006; Holborow 1999) brought the long-standing hegemonic
model of “proper English” into focus, a model which, it could be said, had
reproduced a race-based, colonially-informed conceptualization of linguis-
tic legitimacy. As such, the native speaker was seen to encapsulate political
and social injustice in post-colonial Asian and African contexts where
English had continued to be an official language (Davies 1991, 2003;
Joseph 2013). Discussions around the legitimacy of the new types of
“Englishes” which these contexts created were thus a reaction to the taken-
for-granted privileged position which had been given to the white Anglo-
American native speaker (Phillipson 1992).
The problematization of the native speaker concept and nativeness has,
however, been more recent in other areas of language analysis including
the field of minority language research and language revitalization, the
sub-field on which we will focus here. Researchers interested in minority
language communities such as Irish, Basque, Welsh, Corsican etc., and
associated processes of language shift and revitalization, have by and large
tended to focus much of their attention on native and/or heritage commu-
nities. Significantly less attention has been given to non-native or what
we are referring to here as “new speaker” varieties and categories. In this
paper we are interested in examining why this has been the case and
how the treatment of nativeness in this sub-field fits with the broader
epistemological debates around the native speaker concept in the field
of applied linguistics and linguistics more generally.
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HISTORICIZING NATIVENESS IN MINORITY LANGUAGE CONTEXTS
While the current sociolinguistic contexts and status of Europe’s minority
languages differ in many ways, their historical trajectories tend to follow
a largely similar pattern involving the marginalization and subsequent
“minorization” of their speakers within linguistically homogenous nation-
states. This was the case of Catalan, Basque and Galician following the
linguistic unification of Spain as a Spanish-speaking state. The plight of
Irish, Gaelic, Welsh, Cornish and Manx followed a similar pattern in the
context of an English-speaking Britain, in the same way that Breton,
Occitan, Picard etc. were rendered invisible in a linguistically united
French-speaking France. As such many of the “other” languages of Europe
were pushed to the socioeconomic and socio-political margins, often as
peripheral sub-standard dialects of a national language. Removed from
modernization projects and the echelons of political and economic power,
speakers of these “minoritized” languages were presented with few if any
economic incentives to use these languages or to pass them on to their
children. Therefore, in most of these contexts, social mobility and language
shift went hand in hand, often accompanied by out-migration to the
cities or through emigration to other countries. The exception is Catalan,
which despite its minoritized status has traditionally enjoyed high social
prestige because of its continued use amongst the Catalan prosperous
middle-classes (see for example Woolard 1989; Strubell and Boix-Fuster
2011).
The emergence of language revitalization movements over the course
of the nineteenth century was thus a reaction to these nation-state
nationalisms and to the processes of language shift which they had initiated.
However, such movements unwittingly reproduced many of the ideals
which had led to their minoritization and demise in the first place, drawing
on the same ideals of 19th century linguistic ethnonationalism linked
to Herder and later Humboldt’s ideas about the origin of language. Similar
to nation-state nationalisms, minority language revival movements
drew on dominant European ideologies about language and identity, based
on the premise that communities of speakers were conventionally
constructed around distinct nationalities. Language thus came to define
national collectivities and provided the means for their cultural reproduction.
Such cultural reproduction was seen to be through the intergenerational
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transmission of the language through an unbroken biological lineage from
parents to children. In the same way that nation-state nationalisms were
epitomized through their “native” speakers (Bonfiglio 2010), revitalization
movements defined their right to nationhood through the construction
or re-construction of a native speaker population.
However, in difference to nation-state nationalisms where the models
of legitimacy tended to be that of the dominant political and economic elite,
in the case of many revitalization movements, the sources of legitimacy
were more diverse. Even in cases where these languages had written
traditions, folklorists and dialectologists gave particular weight to the oral
variety of language spoken by what had often become the most economi-
cally, politically and geographically isolated sectors of the population.
It was to this group that revitalization movements tended to look in search
of the most authentic and “purest” representations of the culture they sought
to reproduce. As Fishman (1972, p. 69) has noted, the trend amongst
ethnocultural movements in Europe at the time was to draw on “the
language variety of the noble and uncontaminated peasant”, who was seen
to have kept the language pure and intact. In essence, the native speaker
was made into the fountainhead of a new national consciousness.
Revitalization movements thus drew on the same ideological principles
and dominant language ideologies which had shaped European thought
more generally. In line with these principles, languages were conceptualized
as bounded entities and homogenous representations of national
collectivities. In language revitalization contexts, speech communities were
thus re-imagined through authentication and as part of this process native
speakers were reified and idealized as speakers of the most “authentic” form
of language. This is not to say that all minority nationalists or champions
for the language were necessarily native speakers themselves. In fact
many of them were not. Indeed, there is an unwritten history of the role of
“learners” or “new speakers” in such processes including historical figures
such as Sabino Arana in the Basque Country, Douglas Hyde in Ireland
as one of the founding members of the Irish Gaelic League, Rosalía de
Castro and other members of Galicia’s language revival movement, Robert
Lafont in the revival of Occitan, amongst many others. While attempts
were made to re-teach these languages to those who no longer spoke them,
maintaining a traditional native-speaking community nevertheless tended
to be at the core of the language planning process.
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Linguistics as a discipline and its related sub-strands, including
sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and the sociology of language
in turn, were to draw on these same basic principles and socio-historical
assumptions of European thought. The very notion of “speech community”
in sociolinguistics for example, can be seen as an attempt to conceptualize
bounded collective entities through linguistic criteria. Again, this idea
of speech community can be traced to nineteenth century nationalism and
to communities which were imagined and constructed in a historical
and often geographical context. Whether explicitly stated or not, this in turn
had a bearing on which speakers could then participate in and/or belong
to a given speech community, that is, who became part of the “in-group”
and who was considered the “out-group”. In the same way that the native
speaker concept has been problematized in applied linguistics, in the field
of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, the notion of “speech
community” also came under scrutiny (Gumperz 1971; Hymes 1974). This
was to the point that it was as we know largely abandoned in the 1990s
and replaced by the more empirically-grounded notion of “community of
practice” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992; but see also Blommaert and
Rampton 2011; Duranti 1997; McElhinny 2011).
“SALVAGE” LINGUISTICS AND “SAVING” THE NATIVE SPEAKER
While discussions around nativeness in the context of English as a majority
language have been concerned with the linguistic, social and political
implications of its spread as a global language, for researchers concerned
with minority languages, the focus has been on language loss (see for
example Grenoble and Whaley 2006), “language death” (see for example
Dorian 1981, 1998) and “vanishing” languages (Nettle & Romaine 2000).
This focus is often tied up with discourses of endangerment (see Duchêne
and Heller 2007 for a critique) and an underlying concern with “saving”
potentially threatened languages from extinction. In the minority language
literature, indexes of endangerment are frequently identifed by a break in
the process of intergenerational transmission of a language in the home and
the subsequent decline of a native speaker population. Joshua Fishman’s
(1991) widely cited model for reversing language shift, has been most
concerned with restoring intergenerational transmission of the minority
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language as a mother tongue. In difference to the contested privileges
associated with being a native speaker of a global language such as English,
in the case of regional minorities the socially, economically and politically
marginalized status of the native speaker community made it the focus of
social and political injustice. In order to address this injustice, language
planners, revitalization movements and researchers in the field have thus
sought to reverse the processes of language shift through a reification of
the native speaker community.
The priority given to the native speaker tended to be built around
a preservationist rhetoric which exoticized and romanticized local people,
locking them in time and space (Cameron 2007; Pennycook 2010).
The “salvaging” leanings in certain strands of linguistics and in particular
linguistic anthropology sought to preserve indigenous languages in the
same way that salvage anthropologists had done with indigenous cultures
(Bucholz 2003, p. 400). Interest in linguistic minorities by salvation
linguistics has been driven by a commitment in certain strands of socio-
linguistics to study those groups which were seen to be pushed to the
margins, whose future existence was threatened and who were thus seen in
most need of protection. Sociolinguists for language revival have thus been
involved in assessing and promoting language planning efforts devoted
to the protection and expansion of communities of minority language
speakers, generally operating within the Fishmanian language revitalization
paradigm. However, in making traditional native speakers the central focus
of scholarly attention, such scholars may, unwittingly perhaps, have ignored
the very ethical principles of inclusion that they set out to uphold in the
first place, that is, by assigning legitimacy to only some language users and
not others. In an attempt to “save” the native speaker population, who was
seen as a representation of the most authentic speakers in the community,
revival sociolinguistics may also have created a very specific view of
who fits into the category of native speaker in the first place. Traditional
dialectology of minority language communities has tended to be based on
a documentation of a narrow selection of speech samples, drawing on those
speakers perceived to be the most authentic, traditional and untainted by
interference from the contact language. For this, they frequently drew on
a small pool of rural, elderly, male individuals. The documentation of
endangered languages more broadly has been concerned with collecting
“authentic” speech from the last surviving native speakers of a language
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(see for example, Hale 1992; Harrison 2010). As Bucholtz (2003) high-
lights, this re-assembling of the past is yet again a residue of Romanticism
where rural peasant populations, supposedly untouched by urbanity,
often came to be valorised as authentic sources of cultural and linguistic
knowledge.
At the same time, however, capturing the authentic speech of these
surviving native speakers is made difficult by the fact that their speech
is seen to become “contaminated” by the long term effects of language
contact. In the search for the “true” speaker of the language, there is often
a perceived need to go further back in historical time to find the authentic
speaker. However, this logic in fact again runs counter to the ethical
principles of inclusion which prompted salvage linguists to take interest
in such groups in the first place. The language and not the speakers thus
become the focus and to preserve the language, its speakers are often
expected (albeit implicitly) to remain static. Similar to other forms of
heritage, the native speaker community undergoes a process of what Choay
(2011) refers to as museification, where the speakers become museum
pieces rather than lived experiences. In some contexts, in an effort to “save”
these languages, revitalization agendas have sought to “protect” them from
modernization and economic development. In doing so however they often
ignored the political and economic needs of the speakers themselves
(Muehlmann 2007; Duchêne and Heller 2007).
While such an approach can be criticized for its somewhat essentialist
leanings, it needs to be understood within the historical context within
which such revitalization emerged. The concern often voiced in salvage
linguistics about linguistic interference and the blurring of language
boundaries between the minority and dominant contact language needs to
be set against a background in which such blurring has in the past justified
the socio-politically motivated process of “dialectalization” (Kloss 1967).
At various moments in the sociopolitical history of many minority
languages this was a process which relegated these languages to the
status of a sub-standard dialect of the dominant contact language.
Jaffe (1993, p. 111) recognizes this tension describing it as one of the
fundamental epistemological quandaries faced by those involved in
revitalization programmes, that is, “how to assert the value of mixed or
plural identities in “minority” societies in which the attempt to escape
relations of dominance places a high premium on declarations of absolute
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difference and clear-cut boundaries”. Therefore, demands for linguistic
purity and keeping the language intact can be seen as a defense mechanism
adopted by salvage linguists and minority language activists against the
possible absorption and disappearance of the language altogether. However,
in adopting this position, salvage linguists are subject to the much larger
epistemological quandary about the ways in languages have been
constructed in the first place, that is, as autonomous wholes which can be
counted and separated into discrete entities (Duchêne and Heller 2007;
Makoni and Pennycook 2007). The “counting” of languages through census
questions and sociolinguistic surveys became an important endeavour at
regional, national and international level in an attempt to monitor the rate
of language decline and/or linguistic revitalization in contexts of perceived
language endangerment (Urla 1993, 2012). This approach has in turn
meant that the in-between linguistic spaces (Martin-Jones, Blackledge
& Creese 2012) and sometimes more hybridized forms of language inherent
in language contact situations were often ignored in sociolinguistic
discussion.
FROM NATIVE SPEAKERS TO “NEW SPEAKERS”
Despite the strong focus on maintaining or reviving its native speakers,
in many minority language contexts, traditional communities of speakers
continue to shrink as a consequence of urbanization and economic
modernization. At the same time, however, (and not unsimilar to a global
language such as English), new profiles of speakers are also emerging.
In many contexts, there are now as many if not more non-native speakers.
This general trend across European minority languages is to a considerable
extent the result of more supportive language policies at both regional and
national levels. Such policies are in many cases leading to increased provi-
sion for these languages through their inclusion in school curricula,
the media and other public domains. This is leading to a deterritorialization
of these languages away from their so-called “heartland” areas and into
new urban spaces. So similar to English where new ways of speaking and
new profiles of speakers have emerged in the context of globalization
and the new social order that such processes are creating, “new speakers”
of minority languages are also appearing in this new context. These “new”
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speakers tend to be characterized by a middle-class, urban profile, clearly
distinguishable from rural-based, traditional native speakers (O’Rourke and
Ramallo 2011).
Irish, for example, is a case in point where the number of second
language speakers of the language significantly exceeds a native speaker
population (McCloskey 2001), which continues to undergo an unrelenting
pattern of decline (see Ó Giollagáin, Mac Donnacha et al. 2007). Manx, on
the other hand, points to a case where there are in fact no native speakers
left. This has led many observers to declare the Manx language dead,
equating the loss of the last reputed native speaker of Manx in 1974 with
the loss of the variety itself. Nevertheless, in more recent history the
language has in a sense been “brought back to life” through a growing “new
speaker” population of language enthusiasts and activists (Ó hIfearnáin in
press). We find broadly similar trends emerging in some of Spain’s minority
language contexts including Basque and Galician. While in the early
nineties, native speakers of Basque still accounted for the majority of
Basque speakers, amongst a younger generation more than fifty per cent
are “new speakers” (Ortega et al., in press). A similar pattern can be found
amongst a younger generation of Galicians where the majority now acquire
the language outside of the home (O’Rourke and Ramallo, in press).
Similarly, in case of Catalan, nearly half of Catalan users are not native-
speakers of the language (Pujolar and Puigdevall, in press).
These and similar sociolinguistic realities in other minority language
contexts prompt us to re-think the Fishmanian-oriented model for reversing
language shift which has focused primarily on maintaining or reviving
the native speaker community. Romaine (2006), for example, encourages
scholars to consider what language survival might look like without the
intergenerational mother tongue transmission that has for so long been
the focus of models of language revitalization. Similarly, King (2001) and
Jaffe (2010) propose a conceptualization of language revitalization as
bringing the language to new speakers and new contexts of use instead of
a reversal of the process of language shift and a restoration of the language
to previous domains.
It is in this context that emerging research on minority language
communities has begun to turn more explicitly to discussions of nativeness
and the native speaker. Doerr’s (2009) recent collection of essays
explicitly problematized the “native speaker” with reference to “minority”
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communities such as Catalonia (Frekko 2009), Ikageng in South Africa
(Baker 2009), Yukatek Maya speakers (Whiteside 2009) and Easter Island
(Makihara 2009). In the Catalan context Woolard’s early ethnographic work
in the 1980s, examined the social and linguistic practices of “New
Catalans”, a term she uses to describe second-language speakers of the
language. This is a category which has also become the subject of focussed
study amongst others working in the field of Catalan sociolinguistics such
as Pujolar (2007), Pujolar et al. (2012, 2013) and Woolard and Frekko
(2013).
Notions such as “new speakerness” and “new speaker” have begun to
be used to describe the ways of speaking and the social and linguistic
practices of speakers which exist outside of the traditional native-speaker
communities (see for example, O’Rourke and Ramallo 2011, 2013;
O’Rourke, Pujolar and Ramallo, in press). In the field of linguistics and its
related strands, the “new speaker” concept is one which has been examined
under the perhaps more familiar, but increasingly contested labels such as
“non-native”, “second-language”, “L2” speaker or “learner”. As such there
is nothing intrinsically new about the concept, nor is it even a category of
speaker which is specific to minority language contexts per se. The coining
of the term, however, prompts a movement away from the deficiency model
sometimes implied in being a “non-” native, as opposed to a “native” or a
“second” as opposed to a “first” language speaker of a language. As such,
the concept complements some of the existing notions which have been
used to capture similar thinking including García and Kleifgen’s (2010)
idea of “emergent bilinguals” or Kramsch’s (2012) notion of “multilingual
subjects”. This deliberate shift in terminology therefore seeks to draw
attention to the ways in which minority language research, and indeed
linguistics in general, has participated in the reproduction of linguistic
ideologies, essentially through abstract notions of “nativeness”.
Although the explicit labelling of this phenomenon and the use of the
term “new speaker” only recently appeared in the English language literature,
the term has existed for some time as both a folk and academic concept
in certain minority language contexts. Euskaldunberri (literally “new
Basque speaker”) is used to refer to speakers who learn Basque through
formal instruction, either as adults or through immersion schooling in
Ikastolas. The fact that the word now exists in dictionaries confirms the
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extent to which the term has become naturalized into everyday language
(see Gatti 2007). The term neofalante (neo or new speaker) is widely used
in Galicia to describe a similar type of speaker, that is, someone who was
not brought up speaking the minority language but who adopted Galician
language practices as adolescents or as young adults. Similarly, the
neo-bretonnant label is used to describe Breton speakers who acquire
the language outside of the home and who have incorporated the language
as part of their linguistic repertoire. As well as an analytical category,
the notion is also sometimes adopted as a self-defining label by new
speakers themselves. At other times it can be used as a derogatory label
to contest the legitimacy of new speakers as “real” speakers.
Whether or not such labels are explicitly used, issues around legitimacy,
authority and authenticity have emerged as recurring themes to describe
issues around nativeness and new speakerness in minority language
contexts. Many minority language researchers have looked at the struggles
in which non-native speakers of minority languages often engage in pursuit
of recognition as “authentic” speakers (see for example Trossett 1986;
Woolard 1989; MacCalium 2007; McEwan-Fujita 2010; O’Rourke 2011;
Pujolar 2007; et al. 2012). The ideology of authenticity, as Woolard (2008,
p. 304) has previously highlighted, locates the value of a minority, and
indeed any language, in its relationship to a particular community. In order
to be considered authentic, she suggests that a speech variety needs to be
seen as if it were from somewhere and if social and territorial roots cannot
be established, then the variety is not valued. Therefore, who gets to be
defined as an authentic speaker in minority language contexts is often tied
up with anthropologically romantic notions around the ideal of the native
speaker whose origins can be traced to a bounded homogenous speech
community within a particular territory and set against a clear historic past.
The link between authenticity and identity can thus be used to constrain the
use of a minority language by speakers who do not fit the native speaker
criteria and who may see themselves as not sounding sufficiently “natural”
in comparison with those who are perceived as “real” speakers. In terms of
language revitalization and language planning initiatives, the apparently
privileged position of the native speaker as the authentic speaker of the
language has been found to deter newcomers to the language and sometimes
prevent them from using it altogether (O’Rourke 2011; McEwan-Fujita
2010). Relatedly, as Pujolar (2007) suggests, the lack of “nativeness”
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associated with new types of speakers can also be used to deny them access
to particular linguistic markets, and can have varying impacts on an
individual’s social and economic prospects.
There is thus a frequent pattern across minority language contexts
of contested legitimacy, authority, authenticity and ownership between
and even within new speaker and native speaker groups. In the case of one
of France’s regional minorities, new speakers of Corsian often struggle for
legitimacy in a context in which both formal and informal use of the
language is restricted and the number of native speakers is low (Jaffe 1999).
Nevertheless, such new speakers are also seen as important agents in the
creation of new spaces in which the language is being used and the produc-
tion of a new type of Corsicanness which steers away from the ideals of
localism, tradition, nationalism and linguistic purity (Jaffe in press).
The emergence of new speakers of Manx provides interesting insights into
the ways in which a language continues to survive in the absence of a native
speaker community. In contexts such as Manx, the absence of native
speaker models puts the onus on members of the Manx revitalization move-
ment to become the new linguistic role models. Their participatory role in
the networks they construct in turn allows for their positioning as language
experts and in turn for a construction of a sense of community around this.
Thus, in cases of “extreme language shift” such as is the case of Manx,
linguistic legitimacy and authenticity can no longer be linked to the
seemingly inherent characteristics of its native speakers. Instead, legitimacy
comes from those who can claim authority and construct such legitimacy
(see Ó hIfearnáin, in press).
While the claiming of authority can perhaps go uncontested in the
absence of a distinctive “other”, struggles for ownership over the minority
language can and often do arise in the context of “native” and “new
speaker” relations. In some cases, a native speaker ideology can prompt
new speakers to feel denied of the right to claim linguistic authority in the
absence of biological ties to the language through its intergeneration trans-
mission. New speakers of Basque, for example, generally accord greater
legitimacy and authenticity to native speakers (Ortega et al., in press; see
also Urla 1993, 2012). In the case of Galician, a similar downgrading
of their own way of speaking can be detected amongst new speakers of the
language. At the same time however, rural based native speakers of
Galician also undermine their own linguistic abilities and pass authority
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over to urban, middle-class, new speakers who acquired literacy in standard
Galician. In this context, new speakers are thus positioned as political
“vanguards“ for language revitalization efforts, and as agents of social
change (see O’Rourke and Ramallo 2013, in press). In Galician and other
minority language contexts, new speakers often take on such an activist
role and a commitment to resolving what they perceive as a situation of
social and political injustice for the language, positioning themselves as
types of active minorities (Moscovici 1976), in many ways resembling
stances taken by environmentalists and feminist movements. The transfer
of authority away from the native speaker is also to a degree apparent in
one of Spain’s other minority languages, Catalan. Frekko (2009) has shown
that native speakers, particularly amongst an older generation, do not
always have access to standard Catalan and can often claim less authority
over the language than new speakers can. In a classroom context of adult
learners of Catalan in Barcelona, she observed that students with greatest
ability to produce standard Catalan and to recite the grammatical and
orthographic rules were awarded most authority, independently of their real
ability to speak or interact in Catalan.
In the case of some of France’s other minority languages, such as
Occitan, linguistic tensions exist between traditionalist activists and
modernist academics about what counts as “good” Occitan. Traditionalist
activists, comprising mainly of native speakers of Occitan and therefore,
users of a more dialectal form the language, oppose the newly imposed
standard variety which for them is far removed from the everyday speech
of their community (see Costa in press). Similarly, in the case of Breton,
the source of conflict stems from demands for linguistic purity. In this
context, new speakers are often accused of not adhering to these demands
through an overly Frenchicized way of speaking Breton (see Hornsby 2008,
in press; Timm 2010, etc.). In the case of Irish there can also be struggles
over language ownership between new and native speakers of the language,
particularly in a context in which language policy initiatives in Ireland gave
it a certain market value (O’Rourke 2011). Even through new speaker
profiles far outnumber those of traditional native speakers, explicit labels
for this category of speaker are noticeably absent. We do nonetheless find
other kinds of labelling which at times are used to question the authenticity
of the non-native speaker. The seemingly neutral term gaeilgeoir (literally,
Irish speaker) tends not be used to refer to a native Irish speaker but instead
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can be used as a derogatory label to describe new speaker profiles (see
Kabel 2000; O’Rourke 2011). In numerical terms alone, although “new
speakers” of Irish can be seen to play an important role in the future of the
language, this role is sometimes undermined by discourses which idealise
the notion of the traditional native speaker. Concerns about linguistic purity
are often voiced in both academic and public discourse, with the more
hybridized forms of Irish developed amongst “new speakers” often
criticised (O’Rourke and Walsh, in press).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
While the native speaker debate has received considerable attention in the
context of English and its spread as a global language, as we have shown
in this paper, the case of new speakers of minority languages and their role
in the process of linguistic revitalization has only recently been explicitly
explored. Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, the two strands
of linguistics which have given most attention to understanding minority
language contexts and their associated processes of language shift and/or
revitalization, tended to draw on the same basic principles which have
shaped linguistic thought more generally. As such, minority languages
have tended to be conceptualized as bounded entities and as the expression
of homogenous national collectivities. Speech communities were imagined
and re-imagined through authentication and as part of this process native
speaker communities were reified and idealized as repositories of the “true”
speakers. While discussions around nativeness in the context of a majority
language such as English have been concerned with the linguistic, social
and political implications of its spread as a global language, in the case of
minority languages, the focus has been on language loss and a concern
with preventing potentially threatened languages from dying out. In
difference to the contested privileges associated with being a native speaker
of a global language, in minority language contexts, roles are reversed
and the protection of the native speaker community became the focus of
attention for language planners, revitalization movements and sociolinguists
for revival.
However, as traditional communities of minority language speakers
continue to be eroded as a consequence of increased urbanization and
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economic modernization, the emergence of new speakers in minority
language contexts has called for a rethinking of the sociolinguistics for
revival model and the focus in language revitalization projects on “saving”
the native speaker community. The emergence of new speakers of minority
languages has begun to challenge the position that a native speaker
community needs to exist in order for a language to survive. Similar to the
more long-standing debate in applied linguistics and in particular in relation
to English, problematizing nativeness and the native speaker concept in the
context of language revitalization and minority language research helps
understand the ways in which specific social groups and linguistic forms
acquire legitimacy. This in turn connects with the ways in which national
belonging and authenticity are defined and experienced and the multiple
ways that social actors construct and negotiate their sense of ownership
in relation to the language and the community of speakers to which they
wish to belong.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Research leading to this paper was made possible thanks to various funding
sources including a research Fellowship awarded to Bernadette O’Rourke
by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in the United Kingdom
for the project “New Speakers of Minority Languages and their Role in
Linguistic Revitalization” [Grant number AH/J00345X/1] and a grant provided
by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación within the Plan Nacional
de I+D+i 2008-2011 to the project “Nuevos hablantes, nuevas identidades”
(acr. NEOPHON). Ref. FFI2011-24781 in which Joan Pujolar is PI and
Bernadette O’Rourke is a co-investigator. The writing of the paper has also
benefitted from ongoing discussion on the theme of ‘new speakers’ as part of
the COST EU Action IS1306 network which is being led by the authors entitled
“New Speakers in a Multilingual Europe: Opportunities and Challenges”.
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