Language Users and Language Use

Introduction. Why do Linguists Often Study Monolinguals?

Knowing and using several languages is a norm in many societies and countries around the world, a fact which escaped the attention of linguists for a long time. Since the late 1950s, the main object of many linguistic studies has been a set of abstract rules of one language, in accordance with the assumption that all normal adult human beings have linguistic competence in their first language (e.g. Chomsky, 1959, 1965) and language is 'represented as a speaker's mental grammar, a set of abstract rules for generating sentences' (Larsen-Freeman & DeCarrico, 2010: 20). Although the concept of 'communicative competence' (Hymes, 1971) drew linguists' attention to language use in particular contexts, which opened ground for the development of sociolinguistics and pragmatics, for many decades linguistics focused on studying abstract monolingual native speaker's competence.

Chomsky's concept of language competence and performance, the observable manifestation of the underlying competence, was based on a much earlier dichotomy of langue and parole proposed by a Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1916). According to him, linguistic analysis was not supposed to focus on the use of language (parole, or speech), but rather on the underlying system of language (langue), namely on how the elements of language relate to each other synchronically. It was de Saussure's understanding of language that strongly influenced structural linguistics, philosophy and literary criticism in the first half of the 20th century. Interestingly, structuralists did not adopt the views of de Saussure's great contemporary, Baudouin de Courtenay, a Polish linguist (e.g. known for the widely-used notion of the phoneme). Baudouin de Courtenay not only distinguished between language as an abstract group of elements, and speech and its implementation by individuals, but also pioneered research on the use of multiple languages by speech communities. Sadly enough for studies of multilingualism, structural linguistics and then Chomsky's tradition followed the work of de Saussure, rather than that of Baudouin de Courtenay, excluding people who use more than language as their abstract competence was not 'pure' enough as the object of study (Chomsky, 1986).

On the other hand, to return to the sentence opening this chapter, knowing and using several languages is a norm for many people around the world. Thus this book predominantly deals with language acquisition and use by those who use more than one language. In this chapter we will first say why the concept of the 'ideal' monolingual native speaker of a language is inadequate as an object for language study. Next, we will define someone who knows, learns or uses another language or languages i.e. becomes bilingual or multilingual. Finally, we will look at multilingual speech communities and define the notion of plurilingualism.

Defining Monolingualism

It is worth understanding why the idealised native speaker is now considered an inadequate model for linguistic studies. A native speaker is traditionally defined as a person who has 'learnt language in a natural setting from childhood as a first or sole language' (Ellis, 2008: 297). This definition suffices from the linguistic point of view, however, today it is assumed that the ideal situation of knowing and using one language, i.e. being a monolingual native speaker of that language, may be true only of minority of language users. Using two, or even several languages, is natural in many regions of the world (cf. Aronin & Singleton, 2012a; Cook, 1991; Graddol, 1997; Herdina & Jessner, 2002). Thus, it does not suffice to concentrate on understanding and to explain the grammatical knowledge and the language processing of an isolated ideal native speaker. Considering multiple language abilities and changing social identities of language users, one may even question the very notion of the native-speaker and native-like proficiency (Siegel, 2003), which has become vague and fuzzy:

Today's ideal speaker lives in a heterogeneous society (stratified along increasingly globalized lines) and has to negotiate interactions with different people representing all sorts of power and solidary positions on a regular basis. What is this ideal speaker a native speaker made of, but a polyphony of codes/languages working cumulatively (and sometimes complementarily) rather than a single, first-learned code? (Mesthrie, 2010: 74)

Therefore, it is proposed that 'native speakerness' is not a simple notion. For instance, Leung et al. (1997) claim that terms such as 'native speaker' and 'non-native speaker' should be replaced with the criteria of language expertise, language inheritance and language affiliation. Earlier, Skutnabb-Kangas (1984) proposed defining language users according to the origin of their language, their language identification, their competence and the function the language performs in their lives, as summarised in Table 1.1.

Considering the criteria of defining the mother tongue as proposed above, we can see that identifying a monolingual native-speaker by his/her mother tongue poses several problems. As suggested by Kachru and Nelson (1996), if approached from the sociolinguistic perspective, a 'genetic native speaker' has to be distinguished from a 'functional native speaker' – someone who functions as a native speaker in a variety of a language. Kachru (1999, after Ellis, 2008) further argues that, for instance, an educated speaker of a non-native variety of English can achieve the same degree of functionality in the language as someone who acquired it in the natural setting. Cook (2007: 240, original emphasis) states that 'within the past decade the term native speaker has been deconstructed, partly by recognising that people are multi-dimensional; the role of a native speaker is...