Emergence of the English Native Speaker : A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought

The native speaker is one of the central but at the same time most controversial concepts of modern linguistics. With regard to English, it became especially controversial with the rise of the so-called "New Englishes," where reality is much more complex than the neat distinction into native and non-native speakers would make us believe. This volume reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native speaker in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept today. A corpus of texts which includes not only the classics of the nineteenth-century linguistic literature but also numerous lesser-known articles from periodical journals of the time is investigated by means of historical discourse analysis in order to retrace the production and reproduction of this particularly important linguistic ideology.

"In sum, this book provides a new angle on a key concept, that of the English native speaker, and will provide both information and historical insight to researchers in any of the several fields where this concept has prominence and impact."
Kimberly Renée Chopin in: Linguist List 24.2731