New Speakers and the Dynamics of Late Modern Society
It seems appropriate to begin this volume by stating that the ‘new speaker’ is not a newly discovered linguistic species. New speakers have existed for as long as speakers of different languages have been in contact with each other—in other words, their presence has spanned the millennia (e.g., Lim and Ansaldo 2016; Matras 2009; Thomason 2001). Currently, there are many millions of new speakers worldwide and unsurprisingly, in light of its ubiquity, as well as the fact that becoming a new speaker is often a by-product of migration, what we refer to as the ‘new speaker phenomenon’ has been the subject of much academic research and public discourses alike. In January 2016, for example, former UK Prime Minister David Cameron declared that Muslim women must ‘improve’ their English within two and a half years of moving to the United Kingdom or face possible deportation. Thus, in extreme cases, becoming a ‘new speaker’ of English may be a matter of life and death for some of these women, depending on the circumstances in the countries which they have left. They are not alone; as the world now finds itself in the midst of a refugee crisis, it is abundantly clear that the primary forces underlying migration are war, starvation, and lack of employment. As becoming a new speaker of a particular language may make the difference between the right to remain and being deported, new speakerhood can literally be a matter of life and death.
less dramatically, in terms of academic research, a vast body of literature on new speaker issues has emanated from many interwoven branches of general linguistics: applied linguistics, sociolinguistics , language psychology, social psychology of language, ethnography of language, and linguistic anthropology, to name a few. However, the majority of this research has not used the term ‘new speaker’. Instead, researchers have tended to operationalise terms such as ‘second language’, ‘L2’, ‘learner’, ‘non-native’, or ‘non-mother tongue’ as oppositional constructs to terms such as ‘native ’, ‘mother tongue’, ‘first language’, ‘L1’, and ‘primary language’. By now, these terms are well-established, enduring emic and etic designations used to distinguish different types of speakers and different ways of using language. Despite its establishment in the various fields of linguistics, however, this binary categorisation of speakers can be problematic. As O’Rourke et al. (2015) write in the introduction to the International Journal of the Sociology of Language special issue on new speakers, these terms imply a hierarchy and a deficit model, suggesting an evaluative paradigm that privileges ‘native ’ speakers and ‘native’ speech, and marginalises ‘non-native’ speakers and their practices. In the important article, ‘Who, if anyone, is a native speaker?’, Ingrid Piller (2001, p. 117), for example, challenges the concept of the valorised native speaker by posing a number of important rhetorical questions:
When answered in the affirmative, these questions point to the various ideological assumptions people may have about language. To paraphrase Ben Rampton (1990, p. 2), much of what is assumed about ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ speech spuriously emphasises the biological ahead of the social, conflating language as an instrument for communication on the one hand with language as a symbol of social identification on the other. Linguists have long argued that there is no linguistic evidence to support the hierarchical classification of what are considered different languages or of different language varieties and styles (e.g., Trudgill 1975, p. 26). The same logic can be extended to include new speakers and their practices. Although frequently fundamental to social actors’ engagement with language and society, the concepts of the native speaker and the non-native speaker are merely socially constructed categorisations (Cook 1999, 2015; Eckert 2003), in the same way that concepts such as authenticity (Bucholtz 2003; Coupland 2003; Eckert 2003) and standard language (Coupland 2003; Coupland and Kristiansen 2011; Milroy 2001; Lippi-Green 2012) represent reified abstractions. Dichotomising speakers and ways of using language is unhelpful for linguists who seek to describe different categories of language users (Rampton 1990). As Ferguson (1983, p. vii) suggests, the mystique of the native speaker and the mother tongue should be jettisoned from the linguist’s set of myths about language (cited in Davies 2000, p. 92). In view of this, it is germane to reconsider how we conceive of language and how folk and academic conceptualisations of different types of speakers feed into broader projects that ostensibly seek to promote multilingual societies, as well as social and linguistic cohesion. The term ‘new speaker’ has thus been proposed (and accepted by many) as an alternative to the deficit model implicit in more established terms like ‘second language’, ‘L2’, ‘non-native’, and ‘learner’ (e.g., O’Rourke et al. 2015; Hornsby 2015a, b; Ortega et al. 2015, Walsh et al. 2015b).Does the native speaker’s early acquisition lead to privileged access to the language? Is the linguistic competence of native speakers somehow fundamentally different from that of non-native speakers (who have acquired the language at a later point in their lives)? Is the speech of native speakers for instance less error-prone than that of non-native speakers? Does that capacity make them the sole arbiters of correct usage…?
Defining the ‘New Speaker’
At its most basic level, the designation ‘new speaker’ refers to social actors who use and claim ownership of a language that is not, for whatever reason, typically perceived as belonging to them, or to ‘people like them’. The new speaker label has been used to describe language users with a wide range of language competences. These competences range along a continuum from emergent speakers (see García and Kleifgen 2010) or what Carty (Chap. 13, this volume) terms ‘potentials ’—that is, speakers with limited linguistic repertoires —through to expert language users (see Piller 2001; Rampton 1990) often with ‘native-like’ language proficiency. Similarly, the new speaker designation has been applied to a number of disparate contexts. An immigrant who acquires an additional language in their new environment, for instance, can be labelled a new speaker (e.g., Bermingham, Chap. 6, this volume; Duchêne et al. 2013; Márquez Reiter and Martin Rojo 2014). Likewise, individuals who have learnt a language other than the home or community language through immersion, bilingual , or subject-only educational programmes have been classified as new speakers (Walsh et al. 2015b; Dunmore, Chap. 2 this volume). Owing to the reliance of many minoritised languages on education for their sociolinguistic vitality, the literature on minoritised languages abounds with descriptions of language users who have acquired their proficiency, at least partially, as a result of schooling (e.g., Robert 2009; Hill and May 2011; Jaffe 2003; King and Leeman 2014; Ó hIfearnáin 2015; Morris 2014; Dunmore 2015; Nance 2015; Nic Fhlannchadha and Hickey 2016; Kennard, Chap. 12, this volume; O’ Rourke and Ramallo, Chap. 5, this volume; Selleck, Chap. 3, this volume).
In addition to differences in their levels of competence and circumstances of language acquisition or language learning, the motivations of new speakers can also vary (Dörnyei et al. 2015, Dörnyei and Ushioda 2011; Gardner 1982; Gardner and Lambert 1972). While instrumentality (e.g., gaining employment) is consistently an important motivating factor in acquiring the new language (Ó Riagáin 2007; Murtagh 2009; Walsh et al. 2015b), symbolic motivations also abound as individuals recognise the inte...