The Emergence of the English Native Speaker A Chapter in
Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought Series:Language and Social
Processes [LSP] 4 Aims and Scope The native speaker is one of
the central but at the same time most controversial concepts of
modern linguistics. With regard to English, it became especially
controversial with the rise of the so-called "New Englishes,"
where reality is much more complex than the neat distinction
into native and non-native speakers would make us believe. This
volume reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native
speaker in the second half of the nineteenth century in order to
probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept
today. A corpus of texts which includes not only the classics of
the nineteenth-century linguistic literature but also numerous
lesser-known articles from periodical journals of the time is
investigated by means of historical discourse analysis in order
to retrace the production and reproduction of this particularly
important ling