The applied linguistics challenge
BARTH ON BOUNDARIES
Let me turn now to a very different approach to categorization: the anthropological. Frederik Barth, discussing ethnic groups and boundaries, argues that:
Socially relevant factors alone become diagnostic for membership not the overt ‘objective’ differences which are generated by other factors. It makes no difference how dissimilar members may be in their overt behavior – if they say they are A, in contrast to another cognate category B, they are willing to be treated and let their own behavior be interpreted as A’s and not as B’s; in other words, they describe their allegiance to the shared culture of A’s.
(Barth 1969: 15)
This, claims Barth, follows from what he regards as the primary criterion of ethnicity: self-ascription: ‘ethnic groups are categories of ascription and identification by the actors themselves, and thus have the characteristics of organizing interaction between peoples’ (ibid: 10).
No doubt this explains why public statements such as the following on a university notice-board are thought to be acceptable: ‘Native Speakers of English wanted for an experiment in the Speech Laboratory. £5 fee offered.’ Self-ascription then wins you £5. What Barth is saying is that social categories are defined by their boundaries, not by what they contain: ‘socially relevant features alone become diagnostic for membership, not the overt “objective” differences which are generated by other factors’ (ibid: 15). No prototype gradation here, then, no criteria to differentiate core and periphery membership. Now from a social point of view, such a challenge to our concern with the native speaker deserves close attention. After all, social membership, membership of groups is accepted, taken for granted. There are exceptions, but in general, boundaries are maintained and the assumed norms within them followed, national, gender and (less often perhaps) religious.
We take it for granted that we belong to communities within those boundaries, communities of whose members we have very little personal knowledge or contact. They are indeed, as Anderson (1991) remarked of the nation, an ‘imagined community’. Can the same be said of the native speaker? When we say we are native speakers of X what exactly do we mean, other than our acceptance of a particular community membership? As Escudero and Sharwood-Smith ruefully remark, we are quite uncertain as to what we mean: we gloss over a definition, assuming that we know that we are all talking about the same thing. When Sorace investigates her near-natives it is noticeable that the NSs she uses as her controls are all educated and what their education has provided them with is a facility in Standard English. In other words, her experiments ignore NS variation.
