How would you define a native speaker of English?
1 A person who speaks English as their best or first language?
2 A person who comes from a country where English is the language most widely spoken?
3 other...?
Defining a native speaker
Posted by emile · December 20, 2006 · 6 replies
6 Replies
Ho ho - a hornet's nest. An area with lots of shades of grey I think. The extremes are easy, but in the middle??? My son is definitely a native speaker of Italian, but is he also a NS of English? He's never lived in an English speaking country for more than a month, but he's been brought up speaking English, and speaks fluently, and idiomatically - but with very occasional interference errors due to Italian, and probably not exactly the same as a British kid of his age would. So ....???
3. I define NS as having fluent or near fluent command of English.
fluent or near fluent command - define that! 😲
Like Sue said, you can be a NS of more than one language.
emile
OP
I define NS as having fluent or near fluent command of English.
fluent or near fluent command - define that!
It could be defined using the IELTS or ALTE levels, but wouldn't a native speaker have perfect fluency?
I think it would be combination of 1 and 2. Even if you are really fluent in many (or more than 1) I think there would be one language that the speaker would "translate" from. For example; I can speak understand Chinese, however, I still translate it into English in my brain before/after I have heard/said anything. No matter how good someone is at a language, if they are still translating words/sentences from the language into their base language, then I will only go as far as to define them as Near Native Speaker. Harsh, I know, but that's just what i think.
emile
OP
No matter how good someone is at a language, if they are still translating words/sentences from the language into their base language, then I will only go as far as to define them as Near Native Speaker
That sounds fair to me. If you translate when you speak, you will be using English 'thought-patterns' to present Chinese sentences. In the case of Chinese, ever noticed how some students get the grammar correct but still somehow don't sound natural?
emile wrote: In the case of Chinese, ever noticed how some students get the grammar correct but still somehow don't sound natural?
YES!!!