1 Position paper: The debates oŶ "Ŷeǁ speakers" aŶd ŶoŶ-Ŷatiǀe speakers as syŵptoŵs of late modern anxieties over linguistic ownership. 1 Joan Pujolar (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) BerŶadette O’Rourke ;Heriot-Watt University) Natives, as anthropologists like to imagine them, are Ě…ě rapidly disappearing (Appadurai 1988, p.39) In this paper, we review the debates about “new speakers” of regional minority languages in Europe and discuss how they can be understood as a phenomenon that challenges the linguistic ideologies that emerged with the development of nation-states, industrial capitalism and colonization. We apply the term “new speakers” to a variety of labels used in contexts such as Wales, Ireland, the Basque Country or Brittany to people who do not learn the local language through conventional family transmission, but more typically through education, e.g. bilingual or immersion schools or adult language courses (O’Rourke et al. 2015). It is not a new phenomenon in the sense that such profiles of speakers have always existed. What is new is the fact that the numbers of new speakers have become so large that they emerge as a distinct social category in these contexts. The ways these new speakers learn and the ways they speak these minority languages is perceived as noticeably different from what made up these linguistic communities in the past. As such, their presence unsettles the inherited ideological repertoires that articulated language, identity, authenticity and national belonging in the modern period. From this viewpoint, they constitute –we argue- one more amongst the many dissonances that contemporary sociolinguistics has identified in the received notions of languages as bounded entities inscribed in communities and territories in specific ways. The leaders of the COST New Speakers network have attempted (and only partially succeeded) to query researchers in other areas such as the sociolinguistics of migration or “world Englishes” so that they explored the connections between contentions over identity, authenticity and linguistic ownership in European minority language contexts and their own material. Given the fact that new speakers are by definition “non-native” speakers in the strict sense, the label can arguably be applied to examine other issues occurring around the emergence of new profiles of speakers due to migration, the appropriation of English in former colonies and also the internationalization of English. Thus, in this paper, we review mostly research on European territorial minorities; but we also spell out how we see the potential connections with these other fields within a wider theoretical framework. The concept of “the native” becomes therefore important in this context, and it connects with wider debates on the “native” in linguistics and anthropology about the politics that inform these disciplines. Our argument is that ideologies of nationalism and colonialism help understand why the category of “native speaker” provides the basis for ideological and political tensions that emerge in different though connected ways both in minority language contexts in Europe and North-America, and in former British colonies. We look at the ways in which these tensions are played out both in relation to language policies and on how academic disciplines like sociolinguistics, applied linguistics or linguistic anthropology inform the politics of language in these contentions.