Displacing the 'native speaker': expertise, affiliation, and inheritance M. B. H. Hampton The concepts native speaker and mother tongue are often criticized, but they continue in circulation in the absence of alternatives. This article sug- gests some. The terms language expertise, language inheritance, and lan- guage affiliation sort out some of the mystification, and they allow us to place educational questions of language ability and language loyalty along- side a broader view of society.^ The whole mystique of the native speaker and the mother tongue should probably be quietly dropped from the linguist's set of profes- sional myths about language. 2 Mystique and Braj Kachru and Charles Ferguson are not alone in this observation, and myth dissatisfaction with the terms native speaker and mother tongue is now very widespread. At the same time, these terms seem to be very resilient, and efforts to modify them just end up testifying indirectly to their power. For example, a good deal of effort is now being made to show the inde- pendent legitimacy of Englishes worldwide, but when these are described as the other tongue or nativized varieties, the English of the ethnic Anglos is still there in the background as the central reference point. There is a need for new terms and this article suggests some. The trouble with It is importantfirstof all to be clear about what the problems actually are. the native Otherwise, alterations may be simply cosmetic. In an educational con- speaker text, the idea of being the native speaker of a language and having it as your mother tongue tends to imply at least five things: 1 A particular language is inherited, either through genetic endowment or through birth into the social group stereotypically associated with it. 2 Inheriting a language means being able to speak it well. 3 People either are or are not native/mother-tongue speakers. 4 Being a native speaker involves the comprehensive grasp of a language. 5 Just as people are usually citizens of one country, people are native speakers of one mother tongue. All these connotations are now strongly contested by many people. The capacity for language itself may be genetically endowed, but particular ELT Journal Volume 4412 April 1990 © Oxford University Press 1990 97 at King's College London on May 29, 2013 http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from