Our guest blogger this week, Aisha Barisé, is a transdisciplinary language researcher and a PhD student specializing in language acquisition at the Department of Integrated Studies in Education (DISE) at McGill University. Her PhD research focuses on African and Black identity in relation to multi/plurilingualism in Canadian education.

The notion of a “native speaker” is a fuzzy term, that is traditionally a binary term used to describe a “mother tongue” (Skutnabb-Kangas & Phillipson, 1989) and that distinguishes an ideal speaker that acquired a language from birth relative to a non-native speaker who has acquired it as a second language (Davies, 2003, 2013). Currently this notion is undergoing criticism (e.g., Cook, 1999; Houghton & Bouchard, 2020), as it is based on purist and normative language ideologies rather reflecting discrete linguistic practices. Further, the notion hinders linguistic fluidity, by extension posing barriers to the sense of wellbeing, identity, and belonging of an individual. This notion is not a novel term, as it has implicit roots in linguistics dating back to early western linguists such as Leonard Bloomfield, for example in his (1933) notion native language where he defines it as: “the first language a human being learns to speak is his native language, he is a native speaker of this language” (p. 43). However, this notion surfaces explicitly through the work of the contemporary linguist Noam Chomsky (1965) (Davies 1991, 2003; Hackert, 2012).

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