used for government, law, and official business. In France, for example,
French is both the national and official language. This is not always the
case, however, and usage of these terms may vary considerably, especially in
multilingual nations. In Southeast Asia, for example, East Timor recognizes
Portuguese (a former colonial language) as its official language and Tetum
(a local lingua franca) as its national language. The Philippine constitu-
tion specifies Filipino (a standardized variety of Tagalog) as the national
language, both Filipino and English as official languages, and a number of
regional languages as auxiliary official languages within their regions. The
official languages of Singapore are Chinese (Mandarin), English, Malay,
and Tamil, while English is the major administrative language.
see also community language, indigenous language, majority
language, minority language, regional languagenative language n
(usually) the language which a person acquires in early childhood because
it is spoken in the family and /or it is the language of the country where he or
she is living. The native language is often the first language a child acquires
but there are exceptions. Children may, for instance, first acquire some
knowledge of another language from a nurse or an older relative and only
later on acquire a second one which they consider their native language.
Sometimes, this term is used synonymously with first language.
native speaker n
a person who learns a language as a child and continues to use it fluently as
a dominant language. Native speakers are said to use a language grammat-
ically, fluently and appropriately, to identify with a community where it is
spoken, and to have clear intuitions about what is considered grammatical
or ungrammatical in the language. One of the goals of linguistics is to
account for the intuitions the native speaker has about his/her language.
Dictionaries, reference grammars and grammatical descriptions are usually
based on the language use of the native speaker of a dominant or standard
variety. In some contexts (the teaching of some languages in some coun-
tries) it is taken as a basic assumption that the goal of learning a second or
foreign language is to approximate as closely as possible to the standards
set by native speakers; in other teaching and learning contexts, this assump-
tion is increasingly being questioned and native speakers no longer have the
privileged status they used to have.
native-speakerism n
a term coined by Adrian Holliday to describe the unjustified belief that
native-speaker teachers of English are superior to English teachers whose
native language