I don’t like the term “native speaker”. After sending my Korean colleague the preface which I had edited yesterday for his client’s approval, I got an email from him asking if it was reviewed by a native speaker like X (my boss) or someone else?
Perhaps by virtue of the fact that I have a Chinese surname, he assumed that I was no “native speaker” of the language. Ok, call it oversensitivity or whatever you want, but I felt somewhat insulted and the question stung. It was, to me, a question of my competence.
People should start changing their idea of a native speaker of English being only that of a white person. These days, English is so widely used that Caucasians can no longer be considered the only native speakers around. What is a native speaker anyway? The most common view people would take is that the person is most proficient and comfortable when speaking, reading, listening, and writing in that language. Going by such a definition, I know plenty of people who are non-Caucasians and are equally proficient, if not more, in the language than the average Caucasian. Yet, many people still don’t see this group of people as native speakers of English. And I would have to say that many of those people who are gulity of thinking that way are the Asians!
I think many foreign-born Chinese, just like many Singaporeans, are caught in the same paradox. For Singaporeans, terming Chinese/Malay/Tamil as one’s mother tongue (which ever language one studies depending on one’s race) is a misnomer. The government’s definition of a mother tongue is the language which is usually spoken by one’s race and/or cultural group. To me however, your mother tongue is supposed to be a language in which you are most comfortable with, and one in which you’ve grown up speaking.
However, for many Singaporeans, myself included, we’ve been speaking English all our lives. I think, read, and speak in English. Chinese (PuTongHua) was a language that was labelled as my mother tongue by my dear government. If I really had to label a language as my mother tongue going by the government’s definition of it, it would have to be Cantonese and not Chinese since it’s the language that my paternal and maternal grandparents spoke. Chinese is, after all, really only the dialect of Beijing. But it was made the official language because Beijing is the capital of China.
But this is not to say that I do not like the Chinese language and culture. On the contrary, it’s something I want to get myself more acquainted with. It’s just that I haven’t had many opportunities to do so. I speak English at home most of the time, save for a few smattering Cantonese sentences and phrases. All the schools I went to were primarily English-speaking. My friends and I converse in English. At work, I use only English. So there hardly is any opportunity for me to make use of Chinese.
Anyhow, my main point is that people should change their mindset towards the term “native speaker” whether it pertains to English or any other language. With the world getting smaller and with people moving from one place to another all the time, the strict and past definitions (based primarily on race and country of birth) of who is and who isn’t a native speaker of a language should no longer apply.