Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The curious ideology of these language terms is brought into clearer focus by British and American universities, which, when seeking to appoint someone as a professor of languages, conventionally state that “native or quasi-native competence” is required in the language to be taught. What can “quasi-native” possibly mean? In practical terms it means “very, very good.” Implicitly, it means that you can be very good at French or Russian or Arabic even if it is not your birthright. But the most obvious implications of the formula are, first, that a distinction can be made between those who were “born into” the given language and those who were not; and, second, that for the purposes of high-level instruction in the language this distinction is of no consequence. But that creates a curious problem. If the latter holds, how can the former be true?

Language scholars distinguish between sentences that are grammatically and lexically “acceptable” and “unacceptable” by appealing to the intuitive judgments of “native speakers.” “Native-speaker competence” is the criterion most commonly invoked for determining what it is that the grammar of a language has to explain. Now it may seem obvious that “Jill loves Jack” is a sentence of English and that “Jill Jack loves” is not, and that a grammar of English should explain why the first is acceptable and the second is not. But to ground the boundaries of what is and is not English on the judgments of native speakers alone creates a somewhat mind-bending circularity to the whole project of writing a grammar. How do we judge in the first place whether the English spoken by some individual is “native” or not? Only by appealing to the grammar, itself established by reference to the judgments of “native speakers” themselves. Yet there is no regular way for distinguishing unambiguously between native and nonnative speakers of any tongue. Most often we don’t even use any formal tests, we just take people’s word for it. And, as a result, we often make mistakes.

That is to say, speakers of English cannot reliably ascertain whether another person speaking the language acquired it in the cradle, or at school, or by some other means. And we are even less able to separate the “natives” from the “others” when it comes to written expression. I am sometimes mistaken for French when speaking the language. But I am not a “native speaker” in the commonly accepted meaning of the word: I learned French at school, from a mild-mannered teacher called Mr. Smith. When French people exclaim with surprise, “But I thought you were French,” I still blush with pride, like the good schoolboy I was. But what such flatterers really mean is not that I speak “native French” but that they took my speech to indicate a particular nationality. Nationality is of course one of the few things that most people acquire by birth—either because of the nationality of their parents (“by right of blood,” jus sanguinis) or because of where they were born (“by right of soil,” jus soli).[35] The relatively short history of the European nation-state founded on linguistic uniformity has resulted in a fairly profound confusion of language with nationality, and of “native-speaker competence” with country of origin.

The passport you hold doesn’t have anything to do with your competence as a translator, nor does the language that you learned in your infant environment. What matters is whether you are or feel you are at home in the language into which you are translating. It doesn’t really help to call it “native,” and it helps even less to insist that you can translate only into a “mother” tongue. The paths by which speakers come to feel at home in a language are far too varied for the range of their abilities to be forced into merely two slots (“native” and “nonnative”), however broad or flexible the definitions of those slots may be.