四级冲刺练习阅读（193）

　　Native Speakers and World English

　　Any science needs to ensure that the concepts with which it operates and the terms that are used to express those concepts are clear and precise. From time to time, as a science progresses, a spring-cleaning of its conceptual equipment and terminology may become necessary. So also in linguistics, and one term that is overdue for compulsory retirement is native as used in phrases like native language and native speaker .

　　Used in this way native must surely be one of the most misleading and confusing terms ever employed in technical or semi-technical argumentation. Two other terms, partly synonymous with it, run it a close second or third: mother tongue and first language. A persons mother tongue is not necessarily his mothers tongue; nor is not necessarily his first language always that which he learnt first, because first can mean first in importance as well as first in time and, alas, the two meanings are sometimes run together as if they were one and the same. All three terms, moreover, are surrounded by an aura of mystique and are heavily loaded with emotional connotations inimical to sober scientific investigation. However, in writings by linguists the most commonly used phrase is native language . The nativeness of native

　　The phrase has a long history. It arose in medieval times, when scholars writing in Latin would sometimes use expressions like natal idiom and lingua native. In fairness it should be pointed out that those terms made better sense in earlier times, because for centuries it was commonly believed or suspected that language was in some way biologically inherited. We know now that no human baby is born with an innate knowledge of any particular language; all normal babies learn the language of the environment. Yet the traditional use of native language continues and appears at times to convey a latent element of the earlier meaning, implying that we come into this world not in utter nakedness but trailing, each of us, the rudiments of some specific language. Many laymen and indeed some linguists distinguish between a native language and an acquired one as if they were not, both of them, post-natal acquisitions learnt from the environment.

　　But lets be fair: most reputable linguists would define native language , as Leonard Bloomfield did in his book Language, as the first language a person learns, the language of his childhood home, or words to that effect, Nevertheless, Bloomfield went on to say that a persons adult language is not necessarily the same as his native language, of which he may have forgotten all but a smattering . Bloomfield was thinking in particular of children of immigrants to America, but similar cases occur in Britain and elsewhere. Yet almost in the same breath Bloomfield defined a bilingual as one who has native-like control of two languages , and I am quite sure he did not mean to suggest that a bilingual person may only remember a smattering of his two languages which would indeed disqualify him as a bilingual.

　　This curious contradiction or confusion is a fallacy to which most linguists seem prone. They choose to indicate a high degree of proficiency in the use of a language by referring to what a so-called native speaker of that language is thought to know, well aware though they are that some adults remember little or nothing of their native language , having for one reason or another abandoned it at an early age in favour of another language. Moreover, those same ex- native speakers of one language will most often have attained a degree of proficiency in their second-learnt language which equals that of native speakers .

　　In practice we all have a fairly clear idea of what is meant by native-like control . We mean the proficiency of somebody who is fully at home in the language, is confident in his use of it and is able to make judgments about usage with which other members of the language community will normally agree. We generally expect him to be a cultured person familiar with both spoken and written usage. Such at least is the usual picture, but of course there are native speakers of substandard varieties and regional dialects as well, and this last point introduces an element of fuzziness: can an original dialect speaker be accepted as a native speaker of the standard? Another cause of fuzziness is that linguists are becoming increasingly aware nowadays that native speakers sometimes differ considerably in their judgment of what is acceptable usage. Standard languages have been found to be less monolithic than they were traditionally assumed to be.