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Rajendra Singh (ed.), The native speaker: Multilingual perspectives. (Language and development, 4.) New Delhi & Thousand Oaks, CA, 1998. Pp. 226. Hb $34.95.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2000

Rajend Mesthrie
Rajend Mesthrie
Affiliation:
Linguistics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa, raj@beattie.uct.ac.za
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Abstract

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What is a native speaker? This question has been taken for granted in linguistics, which has frequently taken as its starting point the monolingual community in which the native speaker is one who speaks the language “from the crib” (Singh, 40) throughout his or her life. In the idealized case, even for sociolinguistics, the native speaker has one native language which s/he speaks fluently: s/he is a rather “sedentary” person who is “uncontaminated” in significant ways by speakers of other languages (Salikoko Mufwene, 114).

Type
Book Review
Information
Language in Society , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , April 2000 , pp. 279 - 282
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press