About the NATIVE SPEAKERS of a Language (e.g., English)

 

Who are the “native speakers” of English?

Jean J. Lee

 

As Kachru et al. (cited in McKay & Hornberger, 1996) put it, “native speakers” can be defined as people who acquired a language as their first language from birth in a natural setting. Then who would be classified as the native speaker of English? For may years in the past, although people have broadened the associations of people and places with English (i.e., the Britain, Canada, the U.S., and Australia), they still believed that native English speakers are Anglo-Saxon, which refers to white Americans. However, since several decades ago, this type of simple distinction between native vs. non-native speakers of English has been seriously doubted. In other words, this type of association of language and its native speakers was not sufficient to explain the wide range and depth in language varieties (i.e., world Englishes). Therefore, the first step to take in viewing English as a world language would be to get over or break out of the assumption about the existing ownership of the language.

In this sense, we cannot ignore the fact that attention has been gained on the relationship between a language/ language variety and its particular functions. That is, people began to think about specific contexts or domains where English plays its different roles/ functions (i.e., the field of law, education, business, publishing, and popular culture). And furthermore, the use of English is widely ranged depending on the specific situations in different societies.

This is how Kachru et al. came up with the idea of three “concentric circles” of English uses and its users. The circle in the most inner center is called an inner circle, which refers to the countries such as the U.S., the Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand where English is used as people’s first language. The second largest circle right outside of the inner circle is called an outer circle referring to the countries such as India, Pakistan, Singapore, and South Africa. In this outer circle, people use English as the official language for education, publication, law, and governance. Lastly the largest circle which is outer-most is called an expanding circle referring to the countries such as Korea, China, Japan, and Indonesia. In the expanding circle, people use English for more specialized purposes such as business or for an academic purpose such as reading particular textbooks in school settings. However, this kind of superficial distinction or sorting creates attitudinal problems. That is, the efforts of standardization and codification have occurred exclusively in the inner circle countries, and thereby the outer as well as expanding circle countries had been half intentionally and half unintentionally made to depend on the convention and prescriptive grammars and usage of the inner circle. This notion of three concentric circles (i.e., the inner, outer, and expanding circles) can correspond to native, ESL, and EFL settings. In this way, this concept of English as a native or second/third/fourth…language imposes the sense of “being less worthy or worse than the first” upon the people living in outer and expanding circles.

Therefore, as Kachru et al. (cited in McKay & Hornberger, 1996) claimed, since language is a conveyer of power relationship or different ideology, it should be the language teachers and educators’ responsibility to re-examine the status of world Englishes and raise their own as well as the students’ consciousness as to the great variety of English users and uses throughout the world today. For example, in the ESL settings, English varieties (i.e., world Englishes) can be used as a medium through which both teachers and students learn about a variety of cultures with one another, and thereby cultivate a sense of multiculturalism. This multicultural aspect can also be emphasized through teaching and learning different types of discourse analyses according to different parts of the world where it is used. In case of EFL settings, Englishes for specific purposes (i.e., medical, business, air speak) can be re-examined in terms of its limited functions and forms.

To conclude, teachers and students from any part of the world should keep in mind that differences in English do not automatically indicate the disorder in the language.